Jon Lodge: Carbon Strata Opening Reception, with Jon Lodge and jazz musicians Alex Nauman and Rob Kohler
Billings
September 19, 2025
5:00 pm
Carbon Strata is the largest and most ambitious exhibition to date by renowned Billings-based artist Jon Lodge.
Reaching beyond traditional gallery spaces, Lodge utilizes the museum’s peripheral architecture: a storage closet, stairwell, elevated window portals, windows, overhangs, and outdoor environments, echoing the pervasive nature of carbon—an element essential to life and the core medium of Lodge’s artistic existence.
The materials, execution, and ideas of this exhibition are a result of fascinations he has formed over a lifetime. Born and raised in Red Lodge, Montana, Lodge explored the cavernous spaces of abandoned coal shafts that remained as quiet monuments to an industrial past. At the print shop where his father worked over a letterpress printing the Carbon County News, Lodge was exposed to the rhythm and intervals of black carbon ink transferred to paper. In addition, as a champion runner in high school, he trained along the Beartooth Highway, absorbing the topography, rock strata, and ridgelines that later became conceptual references.
More than an exhibition, Carbon Strata is a living system of forms—layered with memory, material history, and environmental presence—unfolding with the complexity and cadence of a jazz composition.
