“Memory has always been a place that I return to as an artist,” she said. “I think that there’s something particularly compelling and poignant about that cinematic quality of childhood memories. And for me they reside in my mind like a film strip, and I feel like I’m always going back to that buffet of those experiences.”

Her newest art exhibition here in her hometown finds the Portland, Oregon-based artist directly addressing a personal subject: her father.

Earlier in her career, she created photos that played out like a stylized period-piece film, with models in costumes on scenic locations that have been exhibited at the Missoula Art Museum as well as galleries in major cities. Some pictures were based on memories of growing up on a farm in the Orchard Homes area in a large Catholic family of 10 kids. She’s conjured that look and atmosphere in her commercial or editorial projects for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Portland Monthly and more, with subjects like Maya Rudolph and Sleater-Kinney.

This new exhibition, which includes photographs, audio recordings and even installation elements, such as a giant re-creation of the family dinner table, is titled “Rad Dad and the Family Tree.”

It’s on view through March in the Gallery of Visual Arts at the University of Montana, Andres’ alma mater, where she studied painting and drawing before transitioning into film and then photography.

Now 85, her father, Terry Andres, was a creative inspiration in many senses. He gave her that first camera when she was young. For several years, he also had a wood-carving hobby that inspired her.

“Being young and watching a parent be so passionately, feverishly in that zone” showed her that being an artist wasn’t a lofty ambition, she said.

It’s a feeling “where time stands still and you can’t feel your body, you’re just so present. You’re so fully immersed in the creative process.”

A devout Catholic, Terry also made that time for his art while raising a family with 10 children on a small farm in the Orchard Homes neighborhood. Holly’s the youngest, and the oldest siblings have 14 years on her.

She gets a lot of questions about having a large family (that, and what it was like to grow up in Montana).

“It’s the only life I’ve ever known,” she said. “There was never really a dull moment.”

During the pandemic, she reconnected with Terry, first online and then after vaccines, during trips to visit.

“I found myself FaceTiming more and more with my dad, and that’s when we discovered that he was having some symptoms that would later be diagnosed as Lewy body dementia,” she said.

The title of the show is a reference to a novelty hat her sister bought for Terry that says “Rad Dad” in funky lettering. As travel became more difficult for him, she liked to make sure he wore it, since it brings out empathy in people, she said.

The show includes portraits and candid moments of Terry along with an installation: a re-creation of the family dining room table at two times the normal scale, allusions to his work as a carpet-layer, and a tree on the old family property. She recorded oral histories with her siblings recalling stories from family lore.

Spending time with her father as he’s aged has been a unique experience for Holly. When she was 21, the family lost her mother, Irene, to Lou Gehrig’s disease. 

“If my Mom was the heart of our family, my Dad’s definitely the backbone. And so he is keeping our family together. Everybody’s just really invested.”

Photographing a parent

When the pandemic struck, Holly’s travel schedule went quiet, as it did for many editorial photographers. When it was safe to travel, she came over to Dixon and would shoot pictures of him, something she hadn’t done before.

“I just found him to be really natural in front of the camera,” she said. She found him to be a fascinating portrait subject with a dense beard that she jokingly compared to a Norwegian Santa’s.

Personal shots on a phone eventually led to ones with a full camera as he went about his day, since “he’s a real active guy. He’s always doing things,” she said.

In one portrait, he’s seen setting down a large chainsaw carving at the base of the stairs. It’s a humorous cowboy figure with ears big enough to match his gallon hat and a cigarette perched on his lips. Family photos line the walls above a crucifix.

In one shot at the table, his callused laborer’s hands dwarf a little cob of corn that’s obscuring his face.

In a particularly moody image at night, she caught his silhouette in a tiny sliver of light in the lone lit window of the house, as dense blue and black shroud the roof and tree line.

On a clear winter day, you can see him in the distance walking the property with the snow-covered Bison Range in the background.

Shot in profile, he’s hunched over an accordion, another of his creative outlets, on which he could learn songs by ear.

Two of the pictures show the orchard at his Dixon house, which required extensive apple clean-up to avoid attracting bears. In one picture, the fruit rests in a dense layer with a spot of light giving it an air of spiritual allusion.

“The light was really magical in that area,” she said. He’s not in the image, a purposeful omission, but she chose ones where he seems present.

In another, Terry sits on the ground resting his head on his hand, taking a break.

In the long hallway that separates the two main spaces in the GVA, Holly carpeted the linoleum with a patchwork of vintage swatches in the peculiar palette of previous decades’ tastes: mustard yellow, rusty orange, mossy and lichen green. It’s an homage to Terry’s trade — he worked as a carpet-layer for decades, and the subtle cross formation is a reference to his faith.

She found a slide of a picture he took — a nicely sized morel mushroom — on one of the family’s outings. After a short stint trying his hand at photography, he gave her his Minolta 35mm, her first camera.

A family tree (and dinner table)

When Holly had a show at the GVA locked in, she began to think of it as a chance to work outside her normal frame, to “gift herself an art exhibition” after some major projects. Cathryn Mallory, the gallery director and one of her former professors, said they were able to make most of her ideas happen.

Enlisting help, she struck out into installation, with massive pieces in the roomy galleries that re-create childhood scenes, taking up more space than would be feasible in a commercial gallery.

Working with a carpenter in Portland, she had the family dinner table and an accompanying chair re-created at double the size, so that an average-height adult might be able to set their chin on it on the vintage patterned cloth. It also simulates how large it would all appear to her when she was 4, around the time that you start forming memories. An oversized milk carton, complete with a “missing child” graphic on the back. A giant bowl of spaghetti and half-finished plates populate the table.

After dinner, Terry would start carving right at the table. She’s arranged a pile of wood shavings on the floor “tile,” which matches the pattern they had in their kitchen.

In one of the galleries, Holly decided to pay homage to an evergreen tree from the farm’s front yard. Jason Clark, a studio technician and instructor in the art school, and his son helped her build a “tree” around one of the gallery pillars.

Terry would go out in the woods to gather cottonwood planks — strips of bark from dead trees — and then hang them from string on this pine, like “an unintentional piece of Earth art or a roadside attraction,” she said. “People were always asking about this tree.”

It wasn’t until she recorded oral histories with her siblings that she learned it was kind of part of his carving process.

“He could walk around really methodically and try to re-create that same experience of solitude that exists in the natural world,” she said. Then, he’d “see” a potential design in one of the planks.

In the gallery, she’s decorated the tree just like he had, only this time it’s with his finished carvings — the subjects are Western and of their time, such as cowboys and Indians or animals, such as a ferret, likely based on one they had as a family pet. You can see the progression in his skills — for a time, he would sell them at markets.

Telling stories

The family vehicle was a large Chevrolet Suburban that still rests on Terry’s property.

In the gallery, in front of oversized family photographs, they’ve arranged the SUV’s three rows of seats so people can sit down and listen to audio recordings of the siblings, tag-teaming their recollections of family stories.

One involves a trip up Rock Creek in the Suburban to gather antlers in early spring. They hit an impassable amount of snow. As Terry turned the vehicle around, the vehicle’s muffler got pressed into a snowbank and shifted upward into the frame. Carbon monoxide began filling the cabin, and one child got ill, and they began driving back to town, not knowing why.

What happens next is a “nail-biter,” Holly said, but Terry saved everybody.

At the opening last week, one person said the show reminded them of a memoir. A few others said that it started to churn up their own family memories. Like a movie, maybe a period family drama, these massively detailed portraits of Terry (so large you can see Holly’s silhouette in his irises), felt universal by being incredibly specific.

Her brother, Tom Andres, helped her install the carpet in the entryway and asked her what she was feeling after. She felt like she was trying to make sense of her career, like something she couldn’t not do. While getting details finalized, she noticed how many people helped out.

“I guess it just reminded me that art matters. People care about art. People want to be close to creativity. People want to be a part of it. and I guess that’s also why I did it. What else are you gonna do with your life?”