Cover Artist: Wyoming Bred Evolution

Cover artist Mark Morgan Dunstan stretches his canvas across lands, ideas, time and space

WORDS: JOSI STEPHENS

PHOTOS: OLAUS LINN

We have so much open land in Wyoming and every parcel is different which makes it a very complicated issue.”

As a child growing up in Wyoming, Mark Morgan Dunstan was enamoured by the endless miles of the open range. Today, he still hasn’t tired of exploring the land under his feet. His world, and the art he creates, is a slow walk down an unmarked road. One that’s punctuated with detours and curiosities, all of it coming together at the end in yet another unbroken path.

He likes to find these nonlinear spaces to encounter ideas or aesthetics, “the ways that things are presented in the past or currently, where it’s not so much this linear thing or a set of steps that you can use to understand, it’s more a nebular type space,” Dunstan said. In such a space, “things are floating in contact with each other” and that leads to “surprising connections without determined outcomes.”

Dunstan’s cover art is simple and pared back from the magazine’s past covers, including his cover art for JHSM’s 2011/2012 issue. His work for this edition is likely the magazine’s most political. At its core, the piece is about public lands and how their access affects people who spend their lives in nature. He believes there is merit in both public and private lands, but that it all hinges on management. The issue is muddied, though, by a battle as old as time—man versus nature, with some recreationists front and center.

“I guess that when it comes to recreation I find that there’s this really hypocritical stance that a lot of people are embedded in,” Dunstan said. “People want to use the areas for recreation but it feels like we need to sacrifice at least a little bit of these areas for preservation. We have so much open land in Wyoming and every parcel is different which makes it a very complicated issue.”

Dustan’s upbringing, in a place with striking access to public land and the nation’s lowest population density, has informed a significant piece of his artistic output, both in content and method. Yet as an artist in a constant state of evolution and curiosity, he explores what comes, complicated or otherwise, in a particular and compelling way, all politics aside.

He has created art in some form since as long as he can remember. His schooling, first at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and then the City and Guilds of London

Art School, has given him a deep well. His current work is more multi-dimensional and structural than paint and brush, a significant departure from years past. The assemblage sculpture work of British artists Mike Nelson and Helen Marten has inspired him to “process ideas by taking things apart and putting them back together in a different plane.”

Even in its newest iteration, Dunstan’s art still addresses the mythical elements of his early influences, Leonardo da Vinci, Carlo Crivelli and the like who gave him a “really rich access point to the subconscious.” Whether you examine his body of work in its entirety or broken up, you’ll find deftness, intelligence and a finely tuned sense of humor.

Dustan approaches his artistic life with the same industriousness and curiosity that informs his relationship with this wild, open land.

See more of Dunstan’s work at markmorgon.co or follow him @mawrq

JS