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Maggy Rozycki Hiltner with her piece, "Ossuary," at Radius Gallery.

Maggy Rozycki Hiltner, "Perennial," overdyed found quilt, found embroidery, linen, cotton, hand-stitched embroidery, hand-stitched applique.

Maggy Rozycki Hiltner, "Memorial Wreath: Xs," hand-stitched cotton, linen, found embroidery.

Shalene Valenzuela shows some of her slipcast techniques at her studio recently.

Shalene Valenzuela, "Shaking Things Up: Coming Up Roses," slipcast earthenware and porcelain.

“Trespasses” pairs two Montana artists with seemingly unrelated mediums — ceramicist Shalene Valenzuela of Missoula and embroidery artist Maggy Rozycki Hiltner of Red Lodge.

The imagery and the way they work with them, though, play well together, and they’ve exhibited before this show at the Radius Gallery. Valenzuela said in both cases you can look at it from afar and have one quick interpretation, but you should “always look deeper” to see what’s really happening.

Hiltner thinks of herself like an arranger. She salvages quilts and textiles from thrift stores (or wherever she can find them) and stitches pieces together in fabric collages where the line between originals and salvaged blur.

Her mother and her grandmothers all did handwork, so it’s a “very natural language” for her. She buys as much as she can for her raw materials, as a way of preserving it.

“I’m always trying to pick it up and just save it. It’s going to rot away in a drawer somewhere, or it just totally devalues thousands of hours of handwork that nobody wants anymore,” she said.

There’s an element of subversion at work, too. Elements such as flowers or figures are thrown into new scenarios she’s devised. (She describes herself as “the most chipper morbid person you’ll ever meet.”)

Like many artists, COVID-19 shifted the context of her art, including one central feature.

“The skeleton has been my character for a long time,” she said. “But when the pandemic hit, it became less this general musing on the state of mortality than the imminent threat of mortality.”

They still work the way she originally intended, though. They’re a “universal human character,” without gender or race and give the viewer “the wink of mortality.”

Several large quilts (57 by 57 inches) are the canvas for stretching out. In “Perennial,” four mirrored white linen skeletons are in an unusual pose in a flower bed, with butterflies swirling about. They’re either slumping over, or rising, depending on how you want to view it. The background quilt was once colorful, but Hiltner dyed it black.

In “Ossuary,” she’s arranged a pile of skulls on another black quilt that has “this ghost” of its former colors, she said. The title refers to bone houses used to store human remains, sometimes after graveyards became overcrowded. She researched them and was particularly fond of one in Europe where a family had painted the skulls with floral patterns.

Not all is death, exclusively. Some of the pieces address the language around romance. “There’s always this death-speak” that’s intense yet morbid. She stitched flower arrangements with cursive text like “so long as we both shall live,” “until death do us part,” and “goodbye.”

Funerary wreaths are a new form — one speckled with red Xs and skulls, another with a message, “Better luck next time.” (It’s called “Memorial Wreath: Reincarnation.”)

“Thinking about death just makes life more precious, you know — and more interesting, more brightly colored. Because you don’t know. There’s not many things you can’t find the answer to,” she said.

Shalene Valenzuela, "Suck It Up: Ears Are Burning," slipcast porcelain, luster, silver leaf, hardware.

Valenzuela, the executive director of the Clay Studio of Missoula since 2012, works with slip-casting. It’s a mold-making process using liquid clay that allows her to make “trompe l’oeil” objects — wall-mounted landline telephones, paint buckets, toasters (with toast), milkshake blenders, milk cartons, film cameras, and plates that look like the real thing.

She likes how the viewer makes “these pleasant discoveries where you’re like ‘Wow, that’s made out of clay,’ ” she said. That ties right into her imagery, too. “Not everything is initially how it seems from afar.” She’s cultivated a welcoming hand-illustrated style that covers the entire object and comments on it, as though they were wrapped in magazine advertisements from long ago.

A California native, she was trained in drawing and painting when she began taking ceramics, in an era that had punk rock and sculptural clay movements happening simultaneously.

The imagery initially came from a lifelong interest in old photographs and memorabilia of her mother’s that she found fascinating. Eventually that branched outward and she began to question some iconography of 1950s and ’60s advertising, which depicted the all-American woman.

“We’re still all battling these issues of idealizing people, creating these divisions, placing one ideal over another,” she said.

The women in her art have evolved into deliberate “cookie-cutter figures” that she can drop into various narratives that require a second look.

The show includes one of her most ambitious slip-cast creations — a vintage Compact-brand vacuum cleaner complete with hose and faux-metal extension arm. She said objects like these require basically taking an object apart and molding and casting individual parts. This one required seven molds. The only parts of the sculpture that aren’t clay are a few screws holding it together.

It’s probably among “the most elaborate” because of the amount of elements, but she said somewhat “simpler” looking pieces might require three molds, such as the telephones.

The wall-mounted phones are a new object, which somewhat “changed how I approached the surface” since the viewer sees it at different angles.

The paint cans are new as well, each paired with a “trompe l’oeil” brush with faux-wood grain on the handles and fake bristles dipped in paint. One, subtitled “Bleach, the Magical Cure-All,” features two women, one brandishing a bottle and another looking on somewhat authoritatively but ominously.

Another new series are the “Influencer: Instamatic” cameras, modeled on old Kodak instant film cameras, that say “follow me” where the flash should be. She’s not particularly a fan of social media — a sometimes useful but nevertheless “artificially constructed reality,” which ties it to the old advertisements she originally began working with.

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Maggy Rozycki Hiltner with her piece, "Ossuary," at Radius Gallery.

Maggy Rozycki Hiltner, "Perennial," overdyed found quilt, found embroidery, linen, cotton, hand-stitched embroidery, hand-stitched applique.

Maggy Rozycki Hiltner, "Memorial Wreath: Xs," hand-stitched cotton, linen, found embroidery.

Shalene Valenzuela, "Suck It Up: Ears Are Burning," slipcast porcelain, luster, silver leaf, hardware.

Shalene Valenzuela shows some of her slipcast techniques at her studio recently.

Shalene Valenzuela, "Shaking Things Up: Coming Up Roses," slipcast earthenware and porcelain.

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