Using over 5,000 painstakingly-cut illustrations from English dictionaries, Dove has created artwork that will bridge MAM’s galleries and dominate the second floor of the museum. The installation, titled Birthweight, incorporates Dove’s signature aesthetic language: light translucency, extensive use of multiples, photography, and an ability to highlight the architectural features of the gallery space. 

Elizabeth Dove: Birthweight is unified through Dove’s approach to materials under the rubric of printmaker, and her consistent approach to the physical space. The dominating concepts of weight and time, the paradox of chaos and structure, our perpetual search for meaning, and the patient digestion of enormous quantities of information are also carefully considered and presented to the viewer. Dove, a Missoula artist and University of Montana Professor of Art, describes her work as “…an effort to answer my questions about the process of time; the possibility for something eternal; and the interplay of transience and permanence.”