Image and meaning combine in MSU Billings art professor's exhibition
Keeara Rhoades' Margins & Arm Ends multimedia exhibition, on display now through Nov. 19, with artist talk Nov. 5.
MSU BILLINGS NEWS — Working across video, installation, photography, and text, Keeara Rhoades uses art to shift expectations. Her latest multimedia exhibition, on display now through Nov. 19, captures gazes and turns heads.
Margins & Arm Ends is on display now through Nov. 19 at Northcutt Steele Gallery at Montana State University Billings. Located on the first floor of the Liberal Arts Building on the University Campus, the exhibition is free and open to the public.
An artist talk is set for Nov. 5 at 4:30 p.m. in Library Building Room 148. A reception follows from 5:30-6:30 p.m., just outside the gallery.
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Rhoades is an associate professor of new media and photography in the MSU Billings Art Department. As a multimedia artist, she explores liminal spaces within perception, transformation, and the slippage between memory, labor, and time. She grew up in Wyoming, surrounded by vast landscapes and deep histories of extraction. From that, she developed an early fascination with remnants and artifacts—what is preserved, what is lost, and what is endlessly repeated in new forms.
Those memories and experiences led Rhoades to choose a multimedia approach to her exhibition. She engages in recursive processes of image-making that shift or interrupt expectations held within timelines and blind-field paradigms, merging visual constructs with lyrical prose that interrogate the ways we record, remember, and reinvent ourselves through seeing and anonymity.
Her practice frequently incorporates collaboration, binding together acts of invention and intervention—highlighting the instability of authorship and the combined agency of shared and constructed memory. Rhoades’ work has been exhibited in spaces that embrace the intersection of image, language, and theory, inviting viewers into an uncanny sensorium where time and perception intertwine, shifting objective subjects with subjective objects in a state of transformation or disguise.
As an educator, Rhoades says her teaching practice, like her art, is a "continuous act of excavation—digging and sifting to identify creativity and meaning at our core and then build again with recognition of form at its origin."
The Northcutt Steele Gallery is located on the first floor of the Liberal Arts Building. The gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., or by appointment.
