Full Steam Ahead: Laura Sharp Wilson at House Gallery

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Administrator

“Lost” (1990), the earliest work included in Laura Sharp Wilson’s retrospective of 25 paintings and small, mixed-media sculptures, clearly shows the artist’s roots in textile design. One can easily imagine this layered pattern as a four-part silkscreen, printed on fabric rather than painted in oil on canvas, for use as wall covering, upholstery, or even sewn into a dress. But something isn’t quite right. First, there’s the overall acid green cast. Then the repeated, vertical silhouettes of trees appear not in a landscape, but floating, roots and all, free of soil or leaves, interwoven with flowing horizontal lines that suggest water. Coming further forward, closest to the surface, float shapes resembling bare branches, their ends like antlers. Paradoxically, the closest shapes come off as cut-outs that slice all the way through from front to background, while the water-like horizontals weave through, first behind and then before the trees. Such natural elements often serve purely ornamental roles, but nothing here is mere decoration. Subjects and their treatments convey an ominous feeling, and their three-dimensional weave stitches nature together, recalling that mortality is the thing that unifies life and gives it meaning. ‘Lost‘ is an ambiguous term here, referring either to death or to the experience of disconnecting from that which provides our bearings and orients us in the world: an experience that is emotionally evoked by what at first seemed an abstract pattern.

Lost, 1990, by Laura Sharp Wilson

It would be wrong to give the impression that Wilson’s art is as dark as that suggests. Viewing mortality as the thing that gives life definition is very different from presenting death as the great destroyer that blasts all meaning and purpose. In fact, as she gradually uncovers her essential subject and invents a metaphorical language capable of conveying its complexity, Wilson’s images unleash her playfulness. “Bound Carly” (1996), nude but for her restraints, raises the question whether the author of ‘You’re So Vain’ had looked in a mirror before leveling her criticism. Or, seen another way, perhaps it suggests that trapped in the bonds of her character, attached to her surroundings by the web of her ambition (songs, soundtracks, children’s books, concerts, not to mention marriage and children), she may have been happiest when the demands on her were greatest. There are no sharp moral judgments imposed here. A scalpel might cut through these vast tangles the way Philip the Great’s sword undid the Gordian Knot, but to do so would be to cheat reality the way the Macedonian cheated at the famous test. Unlike popular philosophers and TV pundits, Wilson isn’t trying to find the shortest distance between a pet cause and an alleged effect. She wants to capture the whole, complicated warp and weft of what’s really going down. And history—recent history in particular—is on her side.

Two Doors, 2010, by Laura Sharp Wilson, showing the development of her textile theme and the elaboration of an illusionary third dimension

Consider the ‘Net. Most of us are struggling to keep up with a host of changes in how our lives are organized: networks and networking, hyperlinks, social media where there used to be society here and media there. Instead of words on a page, many of today’s digital natives prefer pictures. It could all seem unprecedented, were it not for the Incas, who when they weren’t busy working on their calendars sent messages to each other in the form of brightly colored string tied in coded knots, knitted sculptural images, and wove pictures from yarn. Then there were the Maya, whose pictographic language was finally penetrated by linguistic scientists when they realized that the images that stood for sounds could be manipulated like any other pictures, so that a face could have a big nose or a small nose and still call to mind the same idea. Meanwhile, physicists may finally be closing in on one great, universal mystery: how is it possible, in a universe where nothing can travel faster than light, for gravity to attract everything everywhere to everything else instantaneously. When they get it, don’t be surprised if space resembles the elaborate webs that connect and hold in place Wilson’s patterned universe of interconnected patterns.

This detail from Worry Bead Necklace For Decoration Only displays two contrasting ways Wilson renders pattern and depth. ON the left, the bead is a simple silhouette displaying a flat pattern; on the right, the bead appears round and the pattern wraps around it.

All this suggests a distinction between the richly patterned, colorful beads and beings that populate these constellations of connection and the bonds-made-visible that fill the space between them. Not so: beads on a string or patterned objects caught in knotted nets may suggest objects and forces, but in the perceiving mind, in the world of thought, forces are just as much objects and objects are equally forceful. Laura Sharp Wilson renders visible a world we ordinarily only feel, and obviously has a good time doing so. For the rest of the month, the matching pleasure unraveling her colorful, playful maps of the things unseen, but not unknown, will be on tap at House Gallery.

On the Sea On the Land (2010) by Laura Sharp Wilson. Here purely decorative elements coexist with illusionistic renderings of actual objects.

Seventeen artists in three galleries

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Administrator

Gallery group shows recall double bills at the movies: if the contrast between artists contributes to a better understanding of each other’s works, or resonances enrich a common sense of purpose, the group show serves artists and audience alike. For the arts writer, though, they present a challenge. Right now, for some reason, group shows abound, and with five or more artists in one place, what the jargon of our times calls ‘triage’ assumes undue influence.

Reminiscing: the invitation for February samples all seven artists in Phillips Gallery's exhibition

At the Phillips Gallery, Reminiscing channels the presence of seven successful Utah artists who have passed from the scene, leaving significant bodies of work as their legacies. Lee Deffebach, Irwin Greenberg, Waldo Midgley, Moishe Smith, Doug Snow, Harry Taylor, and Francis Zimbeaux may no longer be household names, but a couple of rooms lined with their works stand as a ringing challenge to today’s artists, as well as a useful barrier against complacency in community standards. For me, Irwin Greenberg came as a complete revelation, and I anticipate spending many pleasurable-if-futile hours alternately pondering and marveling at how his brush was able to seamlessly render both precise architectural detail and smoky urban atmosphere at the same time.

At Art Access, five women fill two rooms with enough variety to put paid to any idea that women’s art must be less universal than men’s. In the back room, Amber DeBirk’s fused glass boldly makes the case for art that doesn’t just preach environmental responsibility, but practices what it preaches. Too many artists act as though their holy mission to talk the talk somehow exempts them from also walking the walk. Eleanor Scholz’s genius for transposing everyday objects into characters is matched by the courage with which she treats her prescription for antidepressants to the same transformation. In Cihuatl, Mujer, Woman in the front room, Ruby Chacon, Veronica Perez, and Maritza Torres romp with energy and humor through what in earlier hands might have been only the grievances of women. Torres makes brilliant use of those familiar, cardboard-framed red and green 3–D glasses and contrasting colors of paint; instead of feeding left- and right-side perspective to the appropriate eye, she feeds light and dark, causing her images to vibrate rapidly as the brain tries to decide which eye to trust. The result is not unlike the cognitive dissonance we live with in a world where all things are polarized by politics.

Sue Cotter: Casa Artesanias. Above, exterior. Below, opened to show interior.

Through March, Rio Gallery’s Redux demonstrates the kind of results obtainable through public funding of arts on a tiny scale, relative to what we spend on other social priorities. Gary Barton, Jane Catlin, James Charles, Sue Cotter, and Madison Smith each received sufficient funding to allow a brief, precious period of work that didn’t have to pay for itself. All report, and display, positive results. For example, Jane Catlin’s large, colorful, and experimental drawings on both sides of mylar sheets replace the spatial illusion produced by doing this on glass with a softly focused view of nature that feels optically lively and more true to how we actually see, rather than to the freezing influence of the camera.

Sue Cotter’s enchanting bas-reliefs address our current dissatisfaction with the continuing predominance of artistic and literary conventions we no longer trust, exploiting the non-fictional genres of assemblage and memoir in their place. Some model the exteriors of specific examples of indigenous Mexican architecture, which astute viewers can open to reveal an interior tableau in which tiny, meticulously arranged objects gathered during the artist’s travels symbolically recount her experiences, both specifically to her and as universals. Within these dollhouse-like treasure troves, the resemblance of tiny, richly symbolic objects to toys combines with their serious presentation—like the somber way children so often play—to create a universal feeling.

Sue Cotter: Diego Mi Amor takes its name from a painting by Frida Kahlo. Inside, Cotter conjures the passion of the painter for her husband and fellow artist.

Other kinds of hoards appear in other works. Testament of Beauty brings together a variety of specialized languages: sheet music, relief maps, samples lined up for comparison. Like many of Cotter’s pieces, it not only invokes books (journals, guides, directories, encyclopedias), but incorporates one made by the artist, which hangs on a chain from a hook and can be held and opened by the viewer. Others are tucked away for safekeeping here and there. On a nearby pedestal, our current absorption in the quarrel over paper vs. digital books gains perspective from a series of ‘rock books,’ including one in which various personal treasures are filed away in a jar with a string through the lid for safe keeping—like the irreplaceable medieval codices that were chained to a reading desk. One senses that it takes time for these replica worlds to unfold and be discovered, just as it took time to live the life they attempt to recapture. In a less literal way, that could be said of every one one of these seventeen artists.

Sue Cotter's Testament of Beauty includes this tiny, hand-made book of maps.

Philip Glass Turns 75

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Administrator

From his early days, Glass toured the world, performing in galleries and alternative spaces with the Philip Glass Ensemble

Throughout history, success has often been linked in the popular imagination with unfair choices: Alexander the Great had to choose a brief life and undying fame or a long life in unending obscurity. Talented women have usually had to choose between art and family. In our era, the choice has been money or respect. Damien Hirst has made more money that any artist ever before, but critics enjoy suggesting that he’ll need it to compensate for history’s amnesia. Perhaps no one has been treated more unfairly than Philip Glass, who turns 75 today. In spite of greater success by any practical measure than any of his contemporaries, Glass appears most often as a footnote in his fellow composer’s stories.

Philip Glass is one of a handful of remarkable composers who were born within a few short years of each other. Among the best known is Lamont Young, who was featured last week on a program broadcast on Classical 89, the BYU radio station. Young is Yin to Glass’s Yang: a composer almost no one has heard of, who has never made money on his music, but whose name is spoken in hushed or ecstatic terms by the few who know him. His insight, that most music spends its time dwelling on what has gone before, or anticipating what is to come, instead of truly inhabiting the sounds of the present moment, owes more than a little to the ‘Be Here Now’ ethos of the 60s. It’s also often cited as the cord that binds together the closest thing America has had to a major musical movement. Their music is often called Minimalism, after the contemporary New York-based plastic art movement, though absolutely no one likes or approves of the name. Glass studied at Julliard and in Paris with Natalie Boulanger, but he developed his ‘minimalist’ chops in India, where he crafted a rhythmically-based, repetitive structure that gradually shifts from chord to chord. Terry Riley also studied in India, with Pandid Pran Nath, which is kind of like having played sessions for Sun Studios with Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl, and Johnny. But the relationship that proves the point is that between Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

While supporting himself with a day job installing dishwashers, Glass became friends with the plainter Chuck Close, who painted the original of this portrait.

When their music was happening but not yet known, these musicians formed their own groups to perform their works, pressing into service electronic organs and other rock instruments. In those days, Steve Reich played in the Philip Glass ensemble. Since then, Glass has written operas that sometimes run five or six hours and are fought over by major world opera companies. He’s written movie scores and collaborated with front rank poets, science fiction novelists, World Music figures, and Rock icons like the Grateful Dead. Steve Reich has written a piece for 18 drummers, another for six pianos, and one for a single voice on a tape loop. Guess which one gets the critics’ respect?

Kevin Dooley's photo of a Chuck Close portrait of Philip Glass gives a hint of how the composer's 'pixillated' music relates to Close's own groundbreaking style.

A few years ago, I spoke to flutist Ransom Wilson on the occasion of his performing a piece he commissioned from Steve Reich. While thanking him for adding to the world’s store of whatever one calls this stuff, I told him I thought it was the music of our time. He agreed, and then he added, ‘About damn time, too.’ With Glass, all these idiosyncratic, wonderful composers are passing through their 70s together. Music is a field where long creative lives are possible. The question remains, though: is it their creative lives that are going to waste, or ours as their audience? Anyone who has a capacity to hear new sounds and music that plays by different rules, new rules, should take time in honor of Philip Glass’s birthday to listen to some of his, and his fellow composers, music. Music you don’t care for won’t actually hurt you; music that would get inside and tell you who you are, if only you heard it, is a gift you can give yourself every day.

(This post originally appeared in the blog of the on-line arts magazine, 15 Bytes, to mark Glass’s birthday on January 31)

Uncivil Discourse

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Administrator

'1957-J No. 2 by Clyfford Still. Photo credit Peter Harholdt & the Clyfford Still Museum

I want to say this right up front: I love Clyfford Still.

It’s silly to talk about who is the best artist or who is likely to be appreciated in years to come. We don’t even know if art history has a future, let alone any of its paragons. The digital age has proven democratic to a fault, promoting the idea that anyone can make art in a spare moment. Good work is increasingly buried under prolific incompetence. And there are plenty of examples of cultures throwing out their histories to suit new tastes. The Buddhas of Bamiyan are a spectacular example, but what about all the Classical Greek and Roman masterpieces that were scraped off their parchment during the Dark Ages so the lambskin could be re-used to record visions of the hell that awaits after death for those who disagree with the author’s image of God?

Still, it seems reasonable to say that, as the various American painters from the amazingly creative years that followed World War II are reassessed over time, the one whose reputation is most likely to rise is Clyfford Still. First off, Still was notoriously difficult to do business with. Few collectors could satisfy his rigorous and specific demands for how his work should be shown, which included a specific color of paint on the wall and natural light, responsive to weather and time of day, rather than artificial light. Still stopped exhibiting in 1951, and more than 90% of his paintings were never shown in public. When he died in 1980 he specified that his entire body of work be kept and shown together—an impossible request. It’s hard to imagine how, as his prickly personality becomes less relevant, the glory of his work won’t charm the audience he declined to accommodate.

It’s taken 30 years, but Still’s vision of his artistic monument is finally being realized in Denver, where a new museum has been built specifically for the purpose. Details of the museum, including its $29 million price tag, are available on line, including a PBS article currently at:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2011/11/in-denver-a-new-home-for-clyfford-still.html

I hope that readers will avail themselves of the Google search engine’s Images button to search out some of the few Still paintings that have already entered the public domain, and that the new museum will devote some of its energy and endowment to sharing this largely–hidden treasure. Still’s distinctive style, with heavy layers of bright pigment troweled into cloud-like shapes that seem to float before an open background, presents arguably the most fundamental visual information in the history of painting. Like any good abstract painting, it looks easy until one tries it. In fact, whether it’s the dynamic balance of the forms on the surface, the illusion of deep space into which the viewer’s perceptive mechanism insists on moving, or the deep cognitive, emotional, or ‘spiritual’ response evoked, Still’s art exemplifies all the virtues of post-war painting in one place.

It will come as no surprise, then, that given my admiration for his accomplishment, I am dumbfounded by the vandalism that was inflicted on one of the Denver museum’s signature pieces. I won’t repeat the name, because I’m always rankled by the way the press forces us to memorize the names and stories of assassins and vandals, as if our culture can’t wait to substitute the killer’s name for that of his target. Suffice it to say that a woman physically assaulted 1957-J No. 2 (PH401), throwing herself at the painting, poking and hitting its surface. Lest there be any ambiguity about her motivation, she then attempted to urinate on it. Fortunately, modern toilet training makes such traditional expressions difficult. (Readers of Civil War and WWI literature often note how often its characters are seen to soil themselves . . . a problem modern life has focused on eliminating.)

Evidently, whatever we think about the deterioration of civility in public discourse, we can assume we haven’t hit bottom yet. While rubbing her bottom on a $30 million painting (yes, the one work is valued at more than the 28,000 square-foot museum cost to build) probably calls this one vandal’s mental health into question, it’s only different in flamboyance, but not futility, from what happens every day on uncounted web pages. To take one example, a discussion on a news page of the Los Angeles car fires brought forth dozens of would-be pundits, each of whom made the same comment: that the police must be pretty stupid to suspect arson when anyone could see that dozens of fires didn’t start themselves. One individual wrote to point out that the police are prevented from drawing casual conclusions about crimes they haven’t yet investigated, but felt it necessary to equate that principled stand with cowardice in the face of ‘political correctness.‘

One of the things art shows us is that actions have consequences. The fabric of Clyfford Still’s life, the choices he made, resulted in works that stand in testimony to his existence even as they confirm for us that our subjective experience has roots in a larger, objective reality. But cognitive science tells us that the part of our brains that deals with consequences is the last to develop, usually somewhere in ones twenties. By then, most Americans have sloughed off traditional influences and turned to commercial media for guidance. Our country has become the biggest unscientific experiment ever, testing whether complacent consumers can also be good citizens. Most of our cultural product is ephemeral, with each year’s must-have material goods proving themselves disposable in time for next year’s replacements. It’s enough to drive anyone crazy, and maybe that accounts in part for the urge to destroy the thing that stands there, year after year, as content to be contemplated as it once was to be ignored. What the consumer can’t wear, or check off a list of ‘1000 Paintings You Should See Before You Die,‘ or eat and defecate, he must find some other way to dismiss from memory in order to move on to the next empty mental calorie.

This is the (other) place . . .

Posted on November 12, 2011 by Administrator

In some ways, selling art is like a business. The proprietors are called ‘curators,’ but still must believe in the merchandise in order to convince customers to set aside some other, often more practical need and trade limited resources for an object of intangible value and sometimes fleeting desire. As with any business, a gallery director can’t consider only her own wishes and tastes. Selling art requires a sixth sense: a finger on the pulse of some community willing to metaphorically—and sometimes literally—skip a meal in exchange for nourishment of another kind. In other ways, though, gallery owners are more like their ideal customer than like ordinary merchants. Like their best patrons, truly canny art dealers sacrifice practical considerations, trusting in their personal enthusiasm and in unfashionable motives like idealism. Yet the rewards for standing by principles aren’t necessarily limited to good feelings. An isolated store or gallery may defy bad economic times and survive to become a mecca for the discerning. In rare cases, a handful of stubborn visionaries may transform a neighborhood. The strip of small stores along Broadway—the east side of Third Avenue South in downtown Salt Lake—that continue to survive in the face of urban renewal are a splendid example of what makes a neighborhood work.

The corner of 3rd South (Broadway) and 2nd East. At the right, Ken Sanders Rare Books. At left, Frosty Darling, Kayo Gallery, and Stolen and Escaped

Judging by the crowds, the heart of this community for some years now has been the corner of Broadway and Second East. On one side, Ken Sanders Rare Books keeps alive a style of bookstore that used to line 4th Avenue in New York and the neighborhood around City Hall in San Francisco, but which succumbed in most US cities to mindless urban renewal and even dumber tax laws. Around the corner, crowds of people too young to remember Ed Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and B. Traven mill around on the sidewalks in front of, or browse avidly within, Frosty Darling and Kayo Gallery. Here the literary feel runs closer to Dave Eggers, Viggo Mortensen, and McSweeney’s: in other words, the generation of culture distillers inspired by those Sanders specializes in, who like their Beat ancestors, are more likely to be found in literary quarterlies than mainstream weeklies.

Grant Fuhst's 'Robots and Gargoyles' — 'Robbie' and 'Ralph' Click to follow them home.

There are currently three separate entities behind a single pair of entrance doors. At the east, closest to the intersection, is Kayo Gallery, which moved here in February of 2007. Kayo’s founder, Kenny Riches, was a painter in his own right and eventually sold the gallery in order to pursue his art full time. Since buying the business, Shilo Jackson has been responsible for finding the artists and mounting, publicizing, and shipping all the art for at least one, and often two contrasting-yet-related shows every month, all while handling the myriad business details. The current show not only typifies what makes the gallery a draw for young culturati (including the film crew that was shooting either a commercial or an imaginative video on the sidewalk the last time I called) but demonstrates how Jackson likes to use the long room by showing contrasting art on opposite walls. Grant Furst’s assemblages, ‘Robots and Gargoyles,’ are visions of tomorrow built of familiar, sometimes recognizable parts scavenged from yesterday’s technology, while David Laub, using a technique like Ed Bateman’s, builds photo-like pictures from drawing to fully painted images on a computer. Both artists invoke an imaginary future while infusing—or confusing—it with real elements from the past. Furst uses obsolete technology to assemble his visions, while Laub’s future bears an unsettling resemblance to the horror-drams of early sci-fi movies. Bemused laughter at these aestheticized versions of camp nightmares could lead in a couple of directions. On the one hand, they might gain power from subversive resonance with the nightmares such images generated in our more vulnerable young selves. On the other, if we ponder what parts of utopian visions have generally tended to come true, we realize it is rarely the ones we prefer: instead of connecting us, the computer gave us identity theft. While bringing the world to us for free, the Internet surreptitiously sells our attention to the highest bidder.

'Poachers' and 'Amok' exemplify David Laub's B&W mock-photographic Days of Future Past

Jackson is also an artist in her own right, currently profiled in Utah’s on-line arts magazine, but for now seems to be managing both vocations. There’s probably a new chorus for the old anthem, ‘I’m a Woman,’ in there, but part of the secret of her success may be her close working relationship with fellow artist Gentry Blackburn, who owns and operates Frosty Darling, the art boutique in the space that mirrors Kayo’s. One way to understand what Blackburn does is to think about the homes of artists you’ve visited, or perhaps seen in the pages of Architectural Digest (If you’re reading The Post, this could be your home). Few artists restrict their creativity to formal artworks—thoughtful images that make serious philosophical claims. They also pick up odd bits of stuff that triggers the same sensibility, usually in a more light-hearted way, and modify or combine those into engaging ornaments or ornamented utilitarian objects that they then display around their studio or home: epiphanies of chance, or surprise revelations. Gentry Blackburn makes those sorts of small-but-eloquent objects deliberately. She also buys such incidental works of art from about 30 other artists and arranges them for sale alongside conventionally-distributed merchandise that appeals to the same quirky aesthetic. The total effect is like walking into a Woolworth’s on another planet: all the goods are arrayed in familiar ways or displayed on conventional fixtures, yet on closer inspection, instead of finding goods that were made in China without imagination, hoping to pass for the genuine articles that filled our stores before giant discount stores landed here and replaced our products with zombies that fall just short of passing for real, at Frosty Darling the shelves are full of original things made with imagination that you will want to take home even if you don’t fully know what they are meant to replace. They aren’t meant to replace anything: they are entirely themselves.

Frosty Darling was already there when Kayo moved in next door, and Blackburn had plans to turn the buildings basement, accessible via a stairway taking up a portion of her valuable floor space, into a rehearsal space or a massage parlor. Seems a tattoo parlor would have been thematically preferable, but it may be no one wanted the legal hassles likely to follow. What Blackburn really needed, given the architecturally-enforced commercial intimacy of the three spaces, was a business that fit with theirs, and one eventually turned up when a third artist with entrepreneurial chops, Amanda Hurtado, took over the space and opened Stolen and Escaped, a somewhat informal gallery now well into its second year. With a dozen associated artists on tap, Stolen and Escaped has carved out a niche built around the great demotic aesthetic of our time: what we might call ‘the art of the age of communication.’

If you’re thinking computers, cell phone photos, and video, you’re right, but that’s only the high-tech end. It starts with something as simple as collage: with a basic response to the plethora of illustration and our common inundation under a universal sea of images. When Leonardo da Vinci painted Mona Lisa, optically credible images were rare and precious; today, not only are they commonplace, but in much of daily life have taken the place of the real: we see more things in pictures than we ever see for real. As art, then, collage can take a range of approaches limited only by the artist’s intention and imagination. Liberty Blake showed what might be called classical collages at Stolen and Escaped—that is, if ‘classical’ didn’t seem a bit of a stretch in describing an art form invented just a century ago. Her torn and assembled pieces of colored paper, like all pure abstractions, could be felt intuitively, without cognition, like moods, evocative events, times of day: the sorts of things that come to us more bodily that mentally. On another end of the spectrum, Myranda Blair’s ‘. . . and this is goodbye’ collaged images of contents with real, association-laden containers. Her watercolor paintings of flora and fauna, inserted into canning jars, evoked recurring experiences of curiosity and exploration, but also dealt with the gamut of emotion from fear of the natural world to exaltation at its wonders.

Another dimension was staked out between ‘Timbre,’ last month’s show by Cara Despain, and ‘Autogenus Automatus,’ hanging as I write this. The former revised the concept of mixed media in the light of such recent, breakthrough concepts as Action and Artifact. The artist was present in the gallery, operating equipment and interacting with the audience. Her nervous intensity energized the presentation, which was built around a short video that hinted at dreams, fugue states, nightmares, and visions. Lining the walls on either side of the projection space were dioramas built from the film’s props or extending its images, leaving viewers to intuit not only their own cinematic meaning, but walking around the theatrical space after the film disappeared, credible narrative connections between the various parts of the time-space collage.

Other Stolen and Escaped exhibits showcased Reclaimed Sentiment, photographer Tj Nelson, and Travis Bone’s ‘mano y mono’ prints. Each of these very different artists has found ways of bringing source material into art alongside its representation. Shilo Jackson properly chose not to show her paintings in her own gallery upstairs, but accepted the opportunity to bring her work into this larger, sympathetic context. Her trompe-l’oeil paintings clearly belong here. After all, she could show the originals of her topological accidents—snippets of printed paper, postcards, paper ephemera, notes to herself, all found pinned to cork boards or fabric-covered panels—as collages directly in the tradition founded by Picasso and Braque. By choosing to paint them instead, she answers their teasing assault on painting.

Pinned to fabric, birch plywood, and cork: 'Off With His Head,' 'Drink Me,' & 'This Is No Pipe Dream' each reveal something about how images connect in the mind of artist and gallery director Shilo Jackson.

On the occasion of her first exhibiting them, I referred to these ensembles as ‘archives.’ In a sense, building this collection is like putting together the file, or ‘morgue,’ that an artist sometimes assembles in boxes or on bookshelves, sometimes entirely in her mind. By displaying them, essentially making them visible in various iterations, she presents a kind of X-ray of what (and who) inspires her. Connections made on these small canvases parallel more subtle links in a world of ideas. Thus she builds a palace of art which is only visible in these few places, like the projections into our space of higher dimensional worlds that physicists talk about. Something similar happens in her extreme illusionism, which has been a legitimate goal of the painter’s craft at least since the Renaissance. Instead of their goals, however, she invokes the distinctly American take on trompe l’oeil: the twist that turns ‘trompe’ (to trick, to fool) into ‘trump’—to outrank. We are used to thinking that our eyes see through natural appearances to reality. Images like the ones shown here remind us that encoding visual information is more difficult and a rarer skill than decoding it. Our nervous systems learn to see in the world what we want, which is often also what the objects of our gaze want us to see. What’s really there is another matter.
(More about Stolen and Escaped can be found at http://stolenandescaped.wordpress.com/

‘Transported’ at the Rio: Utah ’11

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Administrator

Dave Borba's 'Flight of the Wounded Bird' lifts the spirits

A state can do a lot to promote itself: it can advertise its scenic grandeur, its pleasant climate, its vigorous industry. Legislatures can designate all manner of natural and manufactured items as virtues: a state bird, a state flower, a significant crop. One thing a state cannot do, however, is restrict use of its name. There is a tiny art center in central Utah that often sees the artists who show there, plus their friends and families, outnumber the audience that attends its exhibits, yet which annually throws an ‘All-Utah’ art exhibition, to which a dozen or so artists, from the thousands who make their livings and their art here, send examples of their work. No matter that they are few and self-selected; the gallery is still entitled to call theirs a Utah-wide exhibition. In fact many—if not most—galleries hold such extravaganzas, and so long as anyone from anywhere in Utah is allowed to submit work for consideration, that gallery has the right to invoke the entire state’s art enterprise in their promotions.

Folk wisdom dictates that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. In spite of their geographical pretensions, some ‘state-wide’ art exhibitions manage to spotlight local talent, or to showcase idiosyncratic artists worth seeing in spite of their distance from ‘the mainstream.’ And then there is the occasional profusion in which one estimable work after another offers surprises new to even a dedicated enthusiast. The chance of finding an overlooked aesthetic pleasure may be the one reason why even those who carry their own internal catalogs should still at least stroll through invitationals. One of these actually carries the state’s official imprimatur: the Utah Division of Arts and Museums Statewide Annual Exhibition. This year’s model, Utah ’11, has gathered exemplary painting and sculpture for display at the Rio Gallery until November 23rd. Rather than overwhelm with an encyclopedic catalog of competence, it distills some indispensable art from artists who have emerged in recent years.

Two kinds of immersion: Evan Terry's 'Cloudland' brings the usually static landscape to life, while Nathan Florence's canvas is literally 'Embracing Sarah'

It’s absurd to claim that one work of art among 65 works by 45 artists stands out as the best. Neither can I point to one that is my favorite. When confronted, different works strike very different emotional chords. Some of the artists were subjects of reviews or profiles that I wrote for a small, online publication. Others I have known personally. One was once my boss, another my student. The saving grace may be that more often than not, when I stand before a work for the first time, none of that matters. Either I connect with the object or I don’t. It doesn’t matter who made it, any more than it ultimately matters if the child who either annoys or impresses me is the offspring of a friend. When choosing a book I make this recommendation: open it to page one and start reading. If at the end of the page, you want to turn to the next one, go on. If not, put it down. Something similar works here. When approaching a work, ignore the card next to it for a moment. If after contemplating the object you feel a desire to get to know it better, read the card. If not, move on. Sure, you might miss something that your friends consider important, but fear not: they’ll eventually let you know.

David Estes 'Lilly'

If not my favorite, at least the piece in Utah ’11 that evoked my deepest emotional response was Erin D. Coleman-Cruz’s ‘Seepage,’ a well-worn wooden cabinet containing an array of preserve jars, each with a hand-embroidered calico cover. Most are nearly empty, containing only what appears to be a residue of salt crystals. Eventually, the viewer may notice one that is still full . . . of salty water just beginning to evaporate (seep?) through the cloth. The evidence suggests that this is a private space here thrown open, and notes of privation, suppression, poverty of opportunity, and unuttered suffering seep from it. Arthur Bacon’s ‘State Gun’ also uses a found piece of furniture, an occasional table with an open drawer that arguably reveals less about the owner than the gun safe resting atop it. That this is one of the more enigmatic, perhaps reticent works in the show makes it paradoxically more profound.

For some years now, I’ve been arguing that representational painting is making a comeback beyond Utah, where of course it never lost its appeal. That a juror from Los Angeles chose so many paintings of identifiable subjects might prove my point. Joan C. Crowther’s ‘Morning Mist’ and Heather Fuller’s ‘Utah Lake’ both make the point that the experience of a particular place in a timeless moment is infinitely repeatable. Crowther’s is the more optically correct copy, while Fuller’s brush vies with her careful observation to produce a visual balance between seeing and painting. From there a progression of levels of realism could be constructed, with Tamara Lindsay’s ‘Old Schoolhouse’ and ‘Study in Folds’ arguing the case for academic re-presentation. Nathan S. Florence is another painter who calls attention to the artificiality of image making, doing so playfully by painting on printed fabrics in a way that forces us to see the print pattern as simultaneously the background and the foreground of his figures. The eye-candy figures in ‘Embracing Sarah’ and ‘Perfect Circle’ pop out in flawlessly rendered perspective, only to become ‘captured’ within the medium that supports them. Zachary Proctor’s ‘The Artist in His Studio’ and Qi Peng’s ‘Dannielle Tegeder Near a Window’ both confront viewers with subjects whose challenging gazes cover deliberately disorienting pictorial features. Proctor’s use of scale requires resolution, while Qi Peng (two separate artists who collaborate in violation of one of art’s most sacred shibboleths) breaks a fundamental rule of portraiture. Yet we recognize their mistakes as deliberate choices.

Brian Jensen's 'Misinformation' could replace Delicate Arch. Behind it, part of Ron Richmond's 'Robe (No.4) is visible

Current events and social commentary make a stronger showing here than is often the case in a state with something of an isolationist bent. George Mark England’s engaging fantasy landscapes, ‘Asia’ and ‘Pioneer Trail,’ harness the illustrator’s convention of a bird’s-eye view with no vanishing point perspective and cartoonishly rendered subjects to the task of conveying large amounts of hearsay and innuendo with humor and insight. Or they may be the perfect expression of ‘Post-Modernism’—the ‘next big thing’ that turned out to be dead on arrival—in the way they seem to show everything even while proving that no conclusions of value can be drawn. They started out enchanting works, and as he continues to produce them they get better and more fun to engage with. Nathan E. Perry also has talent to burn, and it will be interesting to see what, after he gets through sending an entire encyclopedia of visual data through the shredder, he finally decides to reveal with his combination of uncanny optics and insistence on truth.

Meanwhile, those who like their art to make a point, if not always an unambiguous one, will find some subtle and some not-so subtle choices. Lenka Konopasek’s oil-drilling rigs on fire proved her prescience with the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, a turn of events that saw governments trip over themselves to hide the damage and promote a rapid return to business as usual in what may be the most irresponsible industry in human history. Nancy Steele Makasci’s ‘The Final Days on Earth Book’ looks at first glance like a found art assemblage, but reveals itself on closer examination to be more evocative than literal. Adam Ned Larsen’s ‘Sparky Meter,’ one of a trio of coffins he built to memorialize three uncles that fell victim to modern technology, presents his unique idea of a book without pages, made from found materials that he meticulously crafts into objects of cinematic realism. David Estes ‘Secular Saint’ display either the miracle or the horror of modern medicine—or maybe he means to connect the two by showing the reality often hidden behind the headlines. And speaking of reality, students of art history may recognize the model for Eric Benroth’s searing indictment of poverty, modern American style: ‘Frugal Meal,’ if nothing else, proves how little has really changed in the hundred and twenty-six years since van Gogh painted ‘The Potato Eaters.’

Michelle Condrat's two images engage in a way some would resist calling dialog: 'No, no . . . It's Fine, Everything is Fine' on the left, 'Obviously' on the right

The sculpture here tends towards the formally bold and expressive. Heidi Moller Somsen likes to combine ceramic and vegetal materials in her figures, like the one she showed last year in Bountiful that seemed to be vomiting dried vines. In ‘The Salve and the Scion,’ a lost arm is replaced by a tree’s branch, while in ‘Pleaching’—the title refers to a method of weaving several plants into a fence—the branch that connects two figures gives additional dimension to the joining of arms as a gesture of solidarity. Brian L. Jensen displays both the plastic power and the surface versatility of clay in his sensuous ‘Bottle Form,’ while ‘Misinformation’ presents a vast demonstration of the social derailment of truth in a single, sweeping arc. Dave Borba’s ‘Flight of the Wounded Bird’ is likewise a parable, albeit with a more positive moral. Don’t overlook the crank at its base.

Jared Lindsay Clark calls it a 'Kitsch Painting' This one is 'Mice, and looking behind the colorfully patterned front (right) will show why (around the side at left)

There are also signs of what might be progress—if art ever really advances instead of just going around like a perpetual motion machine. Last year Al Denyers showed a series of black-on-black drawings that used the reflective quality of graphite to strip away context and present the inexorable flow of fluids as an aesthetic event in itself. Were they rivers in the jungle, or capillaries in the brain? Here black graphite is replaced by gold oil paint, and the titles’ reference to ‘Barents’ makes the connection between gold, oil, and the color black explicit. As Russia, Norway, the US, and any number of other countries turn their eyes to the north sea’s mineral wealth, ironically free of ice due to global warming, expect her images to come to seem as prescient as Konopasek’s.

Heidi Somsen: 'Pleaching'

Having made it this far, there are still delights to behold, like Heather Teran’s ruined architectural memento, ‘Strawberry Days,’ Erin Westenskow Berrett’s ‘Chemistry’—three monumentally presented spark plugs that stand in testimony to the American Century—and Jason Jones ‘Alpine Vision,’ which delivers exactly what it promises. Several paintings display what appears to be a cartoon sensibility, while others explore the use of abstraction to defy the specifics of the given world and the words used to describe it. Something needs to be left for you, the reader, to discover on your own.

Erin Westenskow Barrett: 'Chemistry'

‘Good Fortune’ — Art Access in the Year of the Rabbit

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Administrator

There are no universal rules for making art. Just when it looks like one method always works, and another inevitably leads to failure, some contrarian comes along who gets results no one else thought possible. One of the characteristics of visionaries is they succeed with approaches no one else thought to try. Once upon a time the Pope told Michelangelo to paint twelve apostles on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, only to have the artist decide to paint God Creating The Universe instead. Whether that proves it’s pointless to tell artists what to do, or whether it proves it’s a good idea, depends on where you stand on the inner workings of cause and effect. Those who believe in unscientific principles like luck, or practice esoteric sciences like Chinese Astrology, may feel that it doesn’t so much matter what rules apply as when to apply them. You open the cookie and you find your fortune.

During the eighteen years Ruth Lubbers ran Art Access, the organization developed a reputation for being inclusive. It wasn’t just their assumption that anyone could make worthwhile art if given the wherewithal. There was a genuine resistance to saying ‘no’ up front: to second-guessing the creative process and assuming a new idea couldn’t produce valid art. This was a matter of knowing the difference between taking a chance and giving someone else a chance, and it made Art Access one of the few authentically progressive places to see art. I assumed the staff reorganization that followed Ruth Lubbers’ retirement last month wouldn’t change that, and judging from the first exhibition under the supervision of the new Executive Director, Sheryl Gillilan, there will be no retreat from the commitment to providing a supportive environment for the creativity it exists to nourish. This isn’t to say that the first special project—in house they were calling it ‘Sheryl’s Cotillion’—wasn’t challenging to those invited to participate, or for that matter to the public that was invited to come view the results. Nor do the results necessarily display uniform success. But there is nothing here that doesn’t deserve, or won’t find, an enthusiastic audience.

For those who haven’t been to the gallery lately, ‘Good Fortune’ is what might be called a high-concept show. The artists were invited to participate, but unlike the usual call for recent work, such as the one that produced the ‘Utah ’11‘ exhibit across the street at the Rio Gallery, this invitation stipulated that the work to be shown would have to be specially made for this show. The process began with another invitation, to a dinner party last spring, at which each guest was allowed to choose a fortune cookie containing a phrase that would provide a suggested theme and become the title of his or her project. As it that weren’t specific enough, an overall concept would locate the entire event in time, by permanently associating it with the fourth year of the ancient, twelve-year Chinese Zodiac: the Year of the Hare. While a scrupulous critic might ask just how those who can’t tell a hare from a rabbit can hope to profit from the influence of either, the gallery’s point had more to do with the promise, borrowed from an agricultural society, of a bountiful return from seeds planted with care.

Mark Robison: 'No One Can Walk Backwards Into the Future'

So where usually we might be looking at works by fifteen artists working in isolation, brought together by some curatorial whim or insight, these particular artists and their works cannot reasonably be viewed without regard to something exceptional they all have in common. How their possible shortcomings might indict the process they underwent, or how much their successes owe to sticking with or to overcoming the limits of the task, are part of a larger question: one we don’t have enough evidence to answer. Take, for instance, two artists whose success really isn’t open to argument: Mark Robison and Blue Critchfield. In ‘No One Can Walk Backwards Into the Future,’ Robison displays the advantages of his experience as an illustrator. It’s not just that he knows how to evaluate and stay focused on a text. He also realized that he could use the temporal element in his fortune to advantage. Since 2011 opens the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, his reference to that four-year period collapses past, present, and future time into an instant just waiting to open up in the mind. It’s like a pop-up book waiting for the page to be turned. His anachronistic painting of Abraham Lincoln as a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat includes a hint of the irony that accompanied his eventual victory: the rabbit is John Wilkes Booth, who in turn pulls Lincoln’s watch out of the President’s pocket to reveal the hour of the coming assassination. Presenting all this in a bright, borderline surrealistic style of painting, replete with a hint of surprise on one facial expression and of malice on the other, gives a fresh, potentially illuminating spin to what has come down to us today as a lugubrious moment that punctuated a national ordeal.

Blue Critchfield: 'You Will Meet Yourself Coming and See Yourself Going'

Blue Critchfield’s ‘You Will Meet Yourself Coming and See Yourself Going,‘ also showcases the artist’s pictorial skills, but harnesses them to very different ends. Where Robison turns a trauma into an accessible lesson, Critchfield turns an uncomfortable predicament into an exploration of individual awareness. The entire surface of his large painting appears to have been built up of fragile layers of chalk. This surface has been abraded, deeply scratched in places, the wear doing double duty by convincingly suggesting age and use, but also revealing underlying, currently-concealed layers of color. In the center, the presumed ‘you’ of the title stands, rooted in the ground midway up his thighs, wearing only white briefs, with his eyes closed and his face relaxed as if in sleep. Given that he stands rooted in what appears to be a front lawn in a suburban neighborhood, while cars and kids on bicycles pass a few feet away, we may choose to assume he is dreaming. Yet there is nothing either apprehensive or embarrassed about how he looks. Furthermore, the abrading and even gouging of the surface is most noticeable on his torso, making his skin seem transparent and revealing an inner, unknown,vital structure, as though in dreams we encounter another way of seeing ourselves. Critchfield knows better than to use art to make pronouncements; his paintings clearly mean something, but are often enigmatic, like codes with misplaced keys. This one is a bravura performance by an artist who asks questions about the isolation of consciousness and the possibility of connecting.

Critchfield ignored the rabbit option, as did Ed Bateman in ‘You Will Be Attracted To Your Opposite.’ Bateman builds his images in a computer to look like photographs, and often to work like rebus puzzles. The solution to this one has something to say about the counter-intuitive workings of human attraction, partly concealed and partly revealed in the word play implicit in his visual game. Here, light and dark interact, while elsewhere it’s light versus heavy. What one potential suitor considers irresistibly attractive may totally escape another.

In fact, most of the artists evidently felt that one task was enough of a burden and they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, carry two. About half left the rabbit out, while of those who included the rabbit motif, it could be argued that Jean Kotuda Irwin’s ‘Do Not Judge A Book By Its Cover,’ by placing the rabbit on its cover, casts doubt on its relevance to the history the artist’s book recollects. Another perennial favorite, the ever-sharp Marcee Blackerby, pretty much ignores her assigned text: ‘In Your Next Life You Will Come Back As A Work Of Art’—perhaps thinking it’s already come true—and instead delivers an epitaph for a once-pervasive cultural posture and the values it incorporated. The logo appearing on the ‘Remains of a Playboy’ may belong more to Lewis Carroll than to Hugh Hefner, but the wit transcends place and time.

Any conclusions we might draw at this point about the future of Art Access would be premature. Or arrogant. On the other hand, drawing conclusion about the future value of art is truly a fool’s errand. Suffice it to say that any show that offers one work each by over a dozen artists is likely to offer something for everyone. Those who can are certainly encouraged to visit Art Access before November 11th and form a personal impression to take the place of the ones presented here, or find some gem among the works I’ve left out.

Make that a monthly visit. And you may want to bring your checkbook.

Taking the waters in Park City: two painters at the Julie Nester Gallery

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Administrator

It’s a cliche that most of us take for granted: light is the medium that enables us to see. In the dark we must grope; with light we can touch a thing, so to speak, from a distance. But light doesn’t always permit sight; in fact, often light prevents us from seeing. Take glare, for example. When the source of light is at a certain angle to the eye, glare near an object can effectively render it invisible. Or dapple, the glinting of light reflected off moving water that dazzles eye and mind. And speaking of water, what about when air bubbles or particles cause water to fill with light, until seeing through it becomes impossible? One way of thinking about Thea Schrack’s paintings, currently at the Julie Nester Gallery in Park City, is that in them she shows how light can simultaneously reveal the world and prevent seeing it clearly.

'Time Rushing By III' Encaustic photograph by Thea Schrack. Click to see more of her work.

Schrack works primarily as a photographer, evidently producing commercial images in addition to regular exhibitions and special projects, such as capturing how the Czech Republic looked just after the expulsion of the Communist regime. Yet while recording all those surfaces, she may have become dissatisfied with the deceptive way the camera depicts the three-dimensional reality of light, leading her to cover certain photos with encaustic medium, usually a mixture of wax and resin. The prints she treats in this way are large enough to permit viewing them from across the room, at which point they look as their thumbnail copies do here: like conventional, albeit expertly produced pictures of bodies of water. But viewing at a distance is only one option. Most audiences will come up close, and it’s at arm’s length that they begin to show the reality from which we routinely build our notions, as opposed to our actual experiences, of the world around us.

Of course Schrack begins with photographs she has taken deliberately. In the current series, numbered iterations sharing the title ‘Time Rushing By,’ those photographs are all of streams or rivers bordered by trees and lush shrubbery, yet framed to include only moving water, with the presence of foliage outside the frame implied by reflections and shadows on its surface. The translucence of the wax layer, filled with light, reduces the contrast between what lies under the water’s surface, what’s on the surface, and what is reflected from above, so that they can easily become confused. Nor was that information invariably unambiguous to begin with: rather, interaction of moving water with light streaming through presumed openings on the invisible far shore conspire to produce an extravagance of visual information. Lacking cues or patterns with which to generalize the image, we become lost in pure sensation. Only by backing away can we reduce the sheer quantity of detail and begin to superimpose the patterns that normally allow us to ‘see‘ predictable objects. Faced with this challenge in the wild, we might squint to achieve a similar effect.

Of course Thea Schrack’s point isn’t just to teach a lesson in vision. She also wants her audience to see the places she’s photographed—the streams and their courses—more for what they really are: wild places we misjudge when we assume we know them. And she wants to remind us that while rushing water may be a workable allegory of passing time, time is also passing for the river, and for all the environment. Scientists are now all but convinced that water used to flow on Mars, the red desert planet. The events in Schrack’s encaustic photographs—virtually all of them—are rare, perhaps unique in the universe, and so may be the self-aware consciousness that allows us to stop, witness, and contemplate them.

Also on view at Julie Nester Gallery are paintings by Robert Denevan, whose approach contrasts strongly with Schrack’s. Where Schrack’s bodies of water are, at bottom, photographs of real places that we gaze into to see something timeless, Denevan’s horizontal bands of textured color represent no actual thing, but encourage us to find in them suggestions of certain places: specifically, evocations of the littoral—the zone of the planet’s surface where tidal waters border on solid ground, creating a realm that belongs permanently to neither. Before these panoramas we feel we are hovering over water, looking toward a shore that, instead of a dramatic upthrust of enduring rock, looks flat and seems on the verge of disappearing under the relentless erosion of the tides. Estuaries and deltas come to mind, as do marshes and mats of vegetation that sometimes form entire living islands. Either way, it’s important to keep in mind that these are ‘concrete’ images: ones we create in our minds, based on visual hints assembled from astute color applications, rather than abstracted from an actual scene.

'Lakes Panoramic' -- mixed-media on steel by Robin Denevan. Click to see additional works

At this point, it is worthwhile reviewing one of the themes of The Post. Ongoing studies of human vision points to the conclusion that little of what we encounter actually looks like what we believe we see. The sights that form in our minds are at best a compromise between what actually lies before our eyes at a given moment and what we have already experienced, and therefore expect to encounter again. In reality, the process of seeing is almost always far more complex even than that. In the case of landscapes like these, the eye encounters as least three horizontal bands that together cover the range of normal materials: a gas, a solid, and a liquid. Our brains project the sky onto an imaginary dome, envision the land as a receding plane, and give the water both surface and depth. These operations become so habitual that we do them even when the cues are really just horizontal bands of color. Doing this is physiologically pleasant enough that we do it even when we don’t have to. Then, depending on the circumstances, either we credit ourselves with accurate perception or vivid imagination. In reality, neither can be an isolated case of one or the other: perceiving requires imagination and imagining depends of a lifetime’s actual experience. Denevan’s achievement is to make his cues so convincing that we credit him for our share of the work as well as his.

A close-up shows Denevan's paint attaching to the surface as it seems to break apart

Normally, a painter’s technique only matters at the level where it makes an expressive difference. Singer Sargent scrubs paint across a figure in a way that seems haphazard up close, but seen from eight feet away exactly captures the look of light reflected off silk. It’s of some interest in itself, but becomes important in contrast to the drops of white paint that Vermeer uses to suggest how reflections look when they come from a light source behind the subject, rather than behind the viewer. Vermeer’s placing of his subjects between the light source and his easel parallels Schrack’s camera technique, of course, while Denevan images, which have no source in the real world, also have neither explicit nor implicit light sources. Instead, his landscapes glow with what we take for the diffuse light of early morning or late afternoon.

Of course I don’t read minds, and my assertion that Denevan starts with how paint behaves, rather than a specific landscape he wants to depict, is a conclusion based on the look of the finished paintings. A local arts writer recently compared the look of these paintings to the effect of paint-remover on bands of paint. What he actually wrote was that the texture of Denevan’s paint resembles the way paint breaks up during chemical dissolution. Yet while giving a good mental picture of something hard to see except in person, this description suggests a painting process that is almost certainly the reverse of how they are actually made. Modern high performance paints often come in parts that must be accurately mixed during application in order to perform as intended. It appears that Denevan has experimented with alternatives to the rigorous, ‘correct’ application of such paints, bringing them to a far more demanding point where they are on the verge of failing while producing effects far more interesting from his point of view. By capturing paint as its components solidity for the first time, Denevan captures the look of paint decomposing—just as his images suggest the rotating interaction of earth’s elements in the ceaseless erosion and deposition of land by water, setting up the contrast that gives both their meanings to us.

Such processes demands from an artist more skill and more daring than traditional tools and materials, but the luminous and evocative results cannot reasonably be achieved by any more cautious or conventional approach. Long before there was an ‘avant-garde,’ the best artists were always on the edge of what we collectively can do to turn materials into visions. Whether it’s adding a layer of wax to a photograph or deliberately pushing paint to the limits of performance, artists seek new means in order to capture new experiences. The Julie Nester Gallery features such cutting-edge and experimental techniques.

Irony Stalks Finch Lane

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Administrator

While walking through all three galleries at Finch Lane, I was amused by imagining someone who doesn’t really care for art following the same path. At first, he encounters the drawings of Kristina Lenzi: abstract works in graphite and pale colors on large, unmounted sheets of paper pinned loosely to the wall. Consisting of shapes connected by lines, these ambiguous diagrams occasionally rise to the level of simple illusion, like shading a circle into a sphere, but so far as meaning goes, for the most part they appear as opaque as the paper they are drawn on. He flees to the next room . . . AH! Here is something he gets: straight photographs showing faces close up, a row of houses, and a couple of full length figures. But relief quickly turns to horror when he reads the titles, which insist on things not visible in the pictures, or to events that took place long before the shutter snapped. Confused as to how two identical photos can show two contrary things, neither of which appears to be visible anyway, he flees down the stairs to the safe and familiar: realistic landscapes painted of well-known places in Utah, along with conventional scenes of European gardens. At last, familiar ground. But wait! These aren’t conventional paintings after all. What looks from even a few feet away like a mountain in the desert falls apart as he approaches it, until all that is left is a series of resolutely flat brush strokes, each clearly intent on some preemptive task that has nothing to do with looking like a mountain. What looked like the safest place to hole up and feel safe in the knowledge that art hasn’t completely forsaken the real world as he knows it turns out to be the most misleading, cruelest blow of all.

The folks at Finch Lane have a knack for staging two or three shows simultaneously that, in spite of being booked months in advance, often before the work is even begun, turn out to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The current show, including the drawings of Kristina Lenzi, the photos of Levi Jackson, and paintings by Susette Billedeaux Gertsch, not only display interlocking, basic skills, but suggest a kind of narrative story about the state of art. We may be coming, after all, to the end of an era in which artists were encouraged to discard traditional notions of craft and skill in favor of flash and attitude. Now that seemingly everyone is quoting Malcolm Gladwell’s estimate that competence requires 10,000 hours of practice, the basics of art—drawing, design, composition, mark making—have all gained new respectability. Meanwhile, with a lifetime’s viewing of videos being uploaded to the web every day, things no one would sit through in a theater being staged in galleries, and the indispensable art fair having gone the way of the sub-prime mortgage bundle, it’s once again possible to talk about substance instead of sensation.

Kristina Lenzi's 'Five Circles' (left, with a detail right) develops around the tension between the effort by the X to impose static order (or cancel the drawing) and irresistible energy moving down and to the right. (click to go to her website)

Kristina Lenzi’s eloquent drawings point up one of the biggest misunderstandings we all share, not just about art but about ourselves. We are so used to listening to the voices in our heads that we forget that words are not how we think. I used to ask my students if they believed they were aware of everything that went on in their heads, and it was possible to sort the observant from the reactive by how they replied. After all, we don’t understand even such basic things as how we see or how we remember, and usually all we know about how we think is the conclusions we come up with, seemingly out of thin air. Neuroscientists who study our brain processes tend to support the hypothesis that our thinking doesn’t start out with language, but is much closer in operation to the doodles and sketches we make on a piece of paper while listening to someone else talk. This may be why, as I often reminded my students, we all remember better if we doodle while we listen. Kristina Lenzi’s drawings explore this phenomenon alongside the even more mysterious matters of aesthetics: how those marks, lines, arrows, and shapes can be arranged to appeal to us as vividly as words do when arranged into stylish phrases. Nor is it insignificant that Lenzi regards her process of drawing as crucial to the results she actually gets. She began to draw like this as part of a performance, in which she and an audience paralleled the more conventional dialogue between hand and eye: maker and observer. Ordinarily an artist internalizes the technique and responses of a mentor-artist, but Lenzi, like a improv actor who learns to anticipate the response of an audience, gradually learned to bring her own experiences into alignment with an absent public. Thus a drawing that begins with her thinking about the economy becomes less vague and more grounded as her thoughts turn to examples from her personal finances.

The irony here is that such spontaneous marks as she makes, and the relations that come into being between them, are more immediately accessible to viewers than the more elaborate and artificial allegories most artists attempt to forge between specific instances and larger truths. As the years go by, what an artwork meant to ‘say’ to its audience becomes harder and harder to decode, but its non-verbal qualities become more visible. That’s the place in time and their own history where Kristina Lenzi’s drawings begin. An attempt to intuit just how a row of spheres of descending size, their labels crossed out but connected by 3-D arrows, diagram the relationship of macro- to micro-economic questions is likely to leave a viewer frustrated. But the flow of the eye’s attention over the surface, switching from lines being lines to lines being the borders of shapes, and from color as space to color as presence, turns these optical obstacle courses into exquisitely laid out playgrounds for the mind.

Levi Jackson's three self-portraits purport to show very different mental states as he thinks about loving (left), kissing (center), and serving (right). (Click on image to visit his website)

If Lenzi’s abstract drawings are paradoxically friendly and accessible works, Levi Jackson’s straight photographs are just paradoxical. Taken alone, each is a conventional snapshot of something we see every day, like photos most of us have taken ourselves. But the attached title identifies the photo’s actual subject as something not apparent in it—something arguably impossible to photograph. Nor can one of them really be ‘taken alone,’ since Jackson usually displays several together, and in the groups into which he assembles them the already overworked brain of the viewer strains to reconcile the conflict between two already dubious facts. Probably the only way to do so is to laugh, as my companion did immediately and often.

Early in the history of filmmaking, the Russian master Sergei Eisenstein experimented by intercutting closeups of the face of an actor with shots of a money, food, and a baby. Those to whom he showed the result marveled at how eloquently the man’s face conveyed his response to each subject he gazed on. Only Eisenstein knew that the same clip of the actor was shown three times, and the expression on his face was projected there by what the viewer knew—or thought she knew—about his subjective state. Levi Jackson zooms in with Eisenstein’s behavioral lens, not to cast further doubt on the face as a page wherein we can read feelings, thoughts, and intentions. Rather, he appears to question whether those fleeting states are any more real to the subject they inhabit than they are to the observer. No one today is so credulous as to credit the next person with perfect self-knowledge; rather, it’s fashionable to suspect, if not outright assume, that witnesses often perceive someone’s motives more clearly than that someone does (one of Jackson’s titles is ‘There’s nobody here named somebody’). Yet when Jackson shows a series of houses labeled, ‘Photographs of the homes of people I’ve offended,’ the only objective fact, if there is even one present, might be that the assembler of the five photos truly believes he offended their occupants. Thus Jackson raises one vital, timely question: if we are to assume that the narrator of a story is part of the fiction and not actually the person writing, how can we assume that the reality presented by a visual artist is always the confession of the artist? In other words, since we can’t know the objective facts of the trio ‘Thinking about loving,’ Thinking about kissing,’ and ‘Thinking about serving’—three very different photographs that happen to be coincidentally identical in form—isn’t it true, however we may resent the fact, however we may suspect it, that the only thing we can truly know about them is that they accurately represent the intention of their source? The great German novelist W.G. Sebald built his novels on just this sort of evidence: not what happened, or what might motivate a witness to disseminate, but what the testimony said. We can’t know if it’s true or why he may have said it, but we can accept it as his testimony without bringing our veracity into question. The titles on Levi Jackson’s photographs, a few verbal sounds determined to harness vast amounts of visual information, remind us that our infinite mansions of knowledge are built by inference on a finite bunch of obdurate, opaque, ultimately inaccessible facts.

Slab-like brushloads of color lie flat on the surface of Susanne Gertsch's 'Snow Canyon IV' (left), while a more intimate feeling develops in the space between the U-shaped, yellow foreground and the arcing, earth-toned background of 'Pont Couvert et Jardins' (right), painted at Thanksgiving Point. (Click on image to visit her webpage)

Susette Billedeaux Gertsch’s landscape paintings draw on two separate projects, each motivated in part by her location at the time they were painted. Initially they look as accessible as an enthusiast of this perennial favorite genre could want, but anyone seeking the realistic detail they beckon with at a distance will be let down on closer approach. On the other hand, those whose curiosity about the variety of remaining ways to put an individual artist’s stamp on an overworked project may be pleased to find her real interests lie elsewhere: in foregrounding the difference between the painter’s intention and the viewer’s response, or shifting the emphasis from the result to the process.

As is the case with Kristina Lenzi, it would take pages of text to explain Gertsch’s thinking about her art, and interested readers are encouraged to explore both artists’ websites. Whether anyone will—or should—do so is another question. For her part, Gertsch was able to sum up her reasoning in a line meant to justify it that she includes in her statement. She quotes another painter, Robert Henri, who believed that each mark an artist makes carries the totality of her existence into the work. It may not be necessary to decipher all the personal or specific influences that make a given mark bold or timid, rash or thoughtful, but her presence in the work is important to her as she paints and to us as we take in the result. The notion that awareness of the artist is at least as important as awareness of the subject is still novel to Utah landscapes, but it’s hardly new to art. It’s the essence of, for instance, brush painting in ink on rice paper as a form of Zen meditation.

Susette Gertsch provides some help for those who wish to begin the process of adapting to this more intimate model of art making and viewing. She tells us that some of the paintings at Finch Lane are part of a project she undertook to retrain herself to be more spontaneous—kind of like what happened to J M W Turner the night he took his watercolor sketchbook and went out to paint the burning of the Houses of Parliament. By committing to making 300 paintings in a year, rather than, say, one a day, Gertsch forced herself to do far more than paint as efficiently as Turner learned to do. She had to become in reality the artist she was in her mind . . . or, become in her working mind the artist she was in her dreams. She had to commit to being the subject of her project, including reorganizing her entire life around the need to schedule and plan trips to places to paint, which is arguably the reverse of what the other works shown here required. Those she painted while visiting Europe, and as anyone who has travelled knows, what one does while living on the road is different from leaving home for a few hours of painting, closer in fact to finding ways to fill time over which one feels one has too little control. In any event, the Utah landscapes are different from the paintings of Europe . . . different in ways that don’t always show in photographs but are very apparent in person. Delving into the difference between them can only teach us so much about what it means to be Susette Gertsch and to wield her brush, but such an exercise in deliberation might reveal far more about what it means to us to contemplate the result.

These three artists will be on display at the Finch Lane Gallery until November 18. Find the gallery at http://www.slcgov.com/arts/pages/artbarn2.htm

Redrock Landscapes: Cori Redstone at Charley Hafen Gallery

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Administrator

The recent public airing of the unsettling story that Vincent van Gogh may have been murdered by a pair of teenaged punks unleashed speculation about what may have happened on that day 120 years ago, but beyond that to what one of the world’s best-known artists might have done had he lived beyond his brief 37 years, of which he was able to spend less than ten painting. For instance, might the restless painter have journeyed to the Americas, as so many painters did in those years? How could the man who used his brush to analyze the complex landscapes of southern France—so alive with color, contrast, and life—not have been moved to a similar effort when confronted by the earth’s skeleton, laid bare in the desert landscape of the Great Southwest?

We’ll never know, of course. But the question isn’t a bad starting point for viewing the Redrock Landscapes of Cori Redstone. Redstone has been a fixture on the Utah scene since 2003, during which time she has explored not only the subject matter and techniques of art making, but her capacity as an activist to influence events beyond her studio and the gallery. The depth of her interest in, and commitment to, public affairs, in particular environmental issues, parallels her evident desire to pierce the surface of appearances in her art and explore the connection between how things look and how they behave. A comment frequently heard among more aware members of the local audience is that she is still searching for a mature style, but careful examination of her archive proves otherwise. The visible differences between her treatment of her various subjects—trees and flowers, human figures, urban neighborhoods, and now the desert landscape—are consistent over time and more accurately seen as related to what she finds worth noticing about each.

How Redstone’s aesthetic interests build on those of the Post-Impressionists first became apparent about four years ago, in a series of botanical paintings—garden flowers and trees—that (to use a current idiom) ‘channeled,’ rather than copied, the look of of van Gogh. It’s an odd, rarely noted fact that where the Post-Impressionists are concerned, popular appreciation directly contradicts historical influence. Picasso and his peers worshipped Cezanne’s method of building likenesses from basic forms, while Gauguin’s emotional color cues liberated the Fauves and Expressionists. Seurat had so little impact on his fellow painters that today there isn’t a single major work of his in France, while fans flock to Chicago to stand before what they like to call ‘Sunday in the Park With George.’ And while by any meaningful measure, from name recognition to prices paid at auction, Van Gogh is the most successful painter ever, few artists have tried to further the research his death interrupted.

'Plain Near Auvers,' Vincent van Gogh, 1890. Click to compare 'Castel Vallery Group' by Cori Redstone

All this history is just to prepare us to appreciate Cori Redstone’s redrock landscapes: a series of paintings of familiar—one can with some justification say too familiar—scenes around the desert of eastern and southern Utah. Comparing her ‘Castle Valley Group’ with van Gogh’s ‘Plain Near Auvers with Rain Clouds’ reveals some remarkable similarities despite their very different subjects. Both artists painted from a high vantage point, from land that falls away before our view, creating a false horizon near us, beyond which the land, when it reappears, is distant. The effect is disorienting, producing an uncanny feeling that defamiliarizes something we have learned to see so well we don’t really look at it any more. Confusion and emotion give way in the middle to something safe and familiar. The landscape is benign if we keep it at arm’s length. Then there are the skies, roiling clouds before an ornamental screen. Despite the viewer’s conviction that this painting actually ‘looks like’ the place it claims to represent, in reality neither painting actually duplicates the appearance of the place, or of anything for that matter. Each represents only what it is: the dots, dashes, and squiggles of paint that, like the individual firings of our neurons in response to light, must still be combined in our true organ of sight—not our eye, but our brain—so that we can see. Gauguin was content with parallel brushstrokes that blend together into color fields, but van Gogh and Redstone give us fluid, occasionally agitated lines of variegated color related to what we know about the structure of their subjects: the stubby lines of crops or the flowing, rain-eroded rocks of the desert.

There are multiple examples of this process at Charley Hafen Gallery, which thanks to Hafen and his curator, Arrahwanna Thomsen, is quickly emerging as one of the best places in town to get an intimate view of work that would quickly lose its virtue in some of the larger galleries. Redstone is also known for less exotic (if no less telling) landscapes, like her view of the Capitol or the various neighborhood markets she’s captured. Particularly worth pursuing are her views of the environmental movement, including the stunning ‘Grand Palace of Consumerism,’ which brings her Gauguin-inspired sense of bold color together with the Japanese sensibility so essential to late 19th (AND late 20th) century art to produce a literally brilliant caution against the sensory manipulations of Late Capitalism. For those who have had enough of hair-splitting landscapes by artists desperate to find ever more subtle ways to distinguish their craggy mesa from the previous one, or who just want to cleanse their visual palates in order to once again taste the nuances, this painter is highly recommended.

Cori Redstone will be at Charley Hafen until November 14th.