In his show Western Charms, Dana Hart-Stone creates colorful digital paintings from found vintage photographs, each composition repeating in rhythmic glimpses of everyday American lives. Raised in Montana, Hart-Stone draws on his own childhood spent exploring abandoned homesteads. The work is inspired not only by the settlers but by the Indigenous people they displaced, particularly the geometry of gift-giving quilts and the textiles that hold collective memory. Of his work, he writes:

“My work comes from wandering the vast, history-rich countryside of Eastern Montana as a child. On those walks I found abandoned homesteads left with evidence of the pioneers who’d settled there: cracked boots, torn lace curtains, rusted barbed wire. These objects suggested hard lives, and they left me wanting to know more.

One memory from that same childhood has stayed with me even longer. After a basketball tournament in my hometown, nine Native American women walked onto the court, each carrying a folded gifting star quilt, laid open across the painted lines for everyone to see. One by one, the winning coaches were invited out to choose a quilt as a gift from the home team community. The generosity of that moment, giving away something so beautiful, stayed with me.

About 40 years later, I started collecting vintage American vernacular photography, and that same curiosity returned. I began making work from those brief clicks of the shutter, aimed at people simply going about their lives while building a nation. The circular, repeating structures in this work trace back to that basketball court. It is, by nature, about unknown America.” – Hart-Stone