Connie Borup, “Looking Deeper,” oil, 40 x 30 in.
All over the world, the story of art begins with Nature: for example, through images of living creatures painted on exposed rock faces. Later, when we moved indoors, art brought the natural world along, to complete a dwelling’s interior space. Artists can preserve the ephemeral, as Connie Borup shows us in “Looking Deeper.” In this intimate landscape, viewers look across a small body of water to a grass and leaf-strewn embankment. Further down, closer to the viewer’s viewpoint, the water’s surface reflects the underside of the bank as well as the sky. At the bottom, looking down into the water lets us see stones collected on its bottom. Come back to that spot another day and the water level may have dropped, leaving only mud and dying grass. The seasons have their cycles, but Borup lets us preserve this perfect moment that may, or may never come again.
And then, from the same spot in the gallery, there’s the view into the east room, where space is suffused with a perpetually rosy dawn, brought to life by Hadley Hampton’s luminous “Refresh,” depicting an Aspen grove captured at the exact moment when pink and magenta trees perfectly complement the surrounding green. Placed in the corner that best captures the north light that enters Phillips Gallery in summer, it fills the space with what appears to be a tangible body of warm light.
These artists, and the dozen or so more whose works celebrate Our Fragile Ecosystem, focus our attention on our environmental niche, which the combination of global warming and overuse of the water supply is rapidly making untenable for the plants and animals that have adapted to living here. But in order to truly take the measure of what is threatened with loss, these artists have chosen to contemplate what was, and what remains.
Hadley Rampton, “Refresh,” oil, 40 x 60 in.
Jean Arnold, “Still Standing,” acrylic, 16 x 26 in.
Jean Arnold’s art has always been about orienting herself on Earth, whether the view be from a seat on a bus or a panorama of Salt Lake’s urban environs. Now, in some of her most eloquent vistas, she emphasizes just how a fire damages the forest and how living things restore themselves. In “Still Standing,” some trees are gone, their charred remains returning to the soil; some are burned but appear to be healing; and the vibrant green undergrowth delights the eye and carries the message that change is inevitable.
Maureen O’Hara Ure paints like a Pre-Raphaelite artist for the Modern Age. She sets each creature she limns in its own ideal light, while the space around them conveys a rhythm like the motion of wind and waves. Every element participates in and is partaken by living things, a narrative the artist doubles so that they tell their stories even as they also represent her own, autobiographical presence.
Like Greta Thunberg, Jim Frazer understands that today’s marginal weather is not “the new normal.” Rather, each day is like one tread of a staircase, seeming just as stable as the floor where it all began, but leading inevitably to a further climb. Tomorrow’s weather will be to todays’ climate as today is to years past. Frazer’s photographs not only show this rash movement towards an uncertain future, but lend a sharp edge to daylight, the visible part of the solar energy that warms us. In Ron Brown’s aerial photograph of the Spiral Jetty, meanwhile, we see not the increasingly common image of pools of water arcing among rock circles, but the desiccated, blasted floor of a newly born desert.
Jim Frazer, “Beyond II,” print, 16 1/4 x 21 1/4 in.
Gini Pringle, “Que Diablos Esta Pasando,” photograph, 12 x 18 in.
Art often speaks to us as nature speaks to wild things. In Trent Alvey’s abstract image, “GSL: Tar Seep,” a black oval on a photograph of the land’s surface, with spirals coming off it like pinwheels, draws us in, much like the prints of Richard Serra do. Just so, the oil puddles it resembles, shiny and reflective of their surroundings, draw owls, sea gulls, and many of the migratory birds that pause at the Great Salt Lake, only to be captured by the tar, and so meet a premature and grotesque end to a flight their species have undertaken, indeed depended on, for millennia.
Liberty Blake, “From the Shadows – Wishing You Were Here,” collage, 30 x 24 in.
In Our Fragile Ecosystem, each artist brings personal feelings and significance to the subject. One path that differs from the rest belongs to Liberty Blake, whose collages are born out of environmental encounters, often through hikes and bicycle ventures, which become shared property through the medium of discarded and obsolete paper materials she finds and collects. Though they usually contain some pictorial reference, her contributions here also refer to sentiments found in the lyrics printed on paper rolls that program player pianos. These obsolete precursors of the computers that have had such a problematic impact on us further scramble human emotions with a conflict between how we read and how the music scrolls, which Blake then mixes along with the layout of her shapes and colors. In “From the shadows-wishing you were here,” the dark foreground coincides with the presumed location of the speaker, while the smoky sky in the distance is blocked by a chattering impediment, through which a bit of a home may be visible. Against the traditional view—”this is a wonderful spot that I wish you could share with me”—she might offer the alternative that so long as we have each other, in here may soon be better.
Among the species that appear threatened by environmental changes, we may soon have to list art venues. Against that seeming threat, Phillips Gallery is one of the few that continues to showcase local talent and familiar names like these.
Our Fragile Ecosystem, Phillips Gallery, Salt Lake City, through Aug. 10
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
