Montana Torrey
Biography
Montana Torrey is an artist, researcher, and educator. Her current doctoral research explores how expanded painting and printmaking can be used as a tool to investigate the geological and the archeological imaginary via overlapping temporal and spatial scales. Through this practice-based approach, she examines the intersections of palimpsests, material traces, weather, and time.
Torrey received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Photo credit: Montana Torrey
What Color is the Cambrian Sky?
2025
41cm X 61 cm
Cambrian blue clay and pigment on acetate
This practice-based research seeks to explore the spatiotemporal materiality of geological time via painting and printmaking processes. By approaching the landscape as a temporal assemblage, I investigate the relationship between perception and material imagination through two geological phenomena: glacier striations as palimpsests and the deep time of Cambrian blue clay. In both case studies, I rely on investigative site-visits to examine how painting and printmaking can translate the external world of surfaces into an imaginative processing of material affordances. The resulting research is a reimagined surface, a mapping of the site, and a catalog of the material's temporality.
