Lenka Konopasek, “Suspense”

A statewide exhibition brings an opportunity to show work to an audience that may not be reachable otherwise, but the work should accurately represent the artist’s materials, style, and subject matter, not create expectations that additional explorations of the artist’s body of work will not fulfill.

Or should it? Some artists use the statewide as an opportunity to introduce new work, or work that hasn’t been seen widely, to an audience that may already know them for something else. Gazing over the 60 works in the 48th Statewide Annual at Bountiful Davis Art Center, juror Joseph Ostraff says that given the high quality of submissions to be expected in Utah, the 328 works offered to BCAC could easily have yielded a second 60, and several more after that. His criteria for those he ultimately chose, however, were two. While encountering each piece, he read the artists’ statements, seeking what he calls, in his own statement, “the relationship between intention and outcomes.” In the clearest examples, he posted the statement beneath the title card. His other criterion was more personal: “I chose the works that fit within my wheelhouse.” In other words, the works that his own interests and expertise assured him would merit an audience’s attention.

One example of an artist who has recently taken a new direction is Lenka Konopasek. Well-known and highly respected for generally large depictions of intersecting natural and human-caused disasters, and for even larger, biomorphic, often unsettling black paper sculptures, her new work features relatively small, non-objective objects that represent intimate feelings and internal states. “Not knowing when these pieces would be able to be displayed they became my companions, mirroring with their awkward forms my anxiety and isolation,” she writes of them. “Suspense,” an ambiguous, gold-flecked, green form surrounded by an elaborate nimbus of silver wires with hallucinatory black junctures, fulfills her description of how they came to be so well as to demonstrate the validity of Ostraff’s jurying process.

Still from Christopher Lynn’s “A Visitor Arrived at the Museum Today”

Another artist who measures up is Christopher Lynn, whose two entries aspire to do difficult things with challenging media, and succeed. The sound installation, “Berlin Wall (Peal),” invokes an historical place where a politically-motivated, ecological incursion took place. It does this in the form of a stack of ashlar-like portable speakers (cf. “Wall of Sound”) that plays the maddening noise of pealing church bells, a sound created to drive out devils. Meanwhile, the video “A Visitor Arrived at the Museum Today” carries forward the work begun by Banksy with his film “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” collaging snippets of video from recognizable art museums around the world to form an ironically accurate (and very funny) overview of the collision between the traditional showcase and the modern audience. Reading Lynn’s statement, it’s astonishing how accurately it heralds his eventual artworks, ending by evoking a desire to see what he does next.

Nancy Andruk Olson, “Bedouin Tea”

If there is a theme to this year’s BDAC Statewide, it might very well be an inquiry into the responsibility artist feel they have to themselves, to their audience, and to society in general. But that said, it doesn’t mean the selected works will be experimental, let alone daunting or avant-garde. Rather, many subjects and treatments will be familiar ones, and often only the statement will reveal exactly what motivates the artist. Nancy Andruk Olson’s “Bedouin Tea” presents what she describes as “an idyllic version of life”—indeed, a thatch-roofed veranda spread with Persian carpets, on which the tea service waits, with a nearby tree seemingly straight out of a Van Gogh landscape. Only in her statement does she reveal that she has deliberately omitted “the challenges in life,” though a neutral observer might see the deliberate omission as a form of artistic license.

In fact, if this exhibition is anything to go by, subversion in art today is really a choice for viewers to make, or not. Cindy Roberts’ “Flowered House” is quite charming, but maybe not quite as inviting as it seems, with its windows peering like the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg over a fence-like garden. And despite its title, Margaret Abramshe’s “Army of Compassion” places Emma Lazarus’s “New Colossus” alongside a discussion of “xen-o-pho-bi-a.”

Nor will every work benefit from an accompanying statement. In “A True Artist,”Rebecca P. Johnson delivers an object lesson in perspective while leaving no daylight between her subject’s reverie and the conviction she expresses in so many words. Since taking the art off the wall to turn it over is frowned upon, viewers can choose between transposing Johnson’s painted banner in their mind’s eye, or younger ones may think to take a snapshot and then invert their phones.

Art people are sometimes spoken of as those for whom verbal language, per se, is always a “second language,” their first being imagery. Joseph Ostraff, whose teaching and attendance at widely divergent conferences give him practice with talking about art, has taken the Statewide Annual, in part, as an opportunity to foreground some of the ways artists actually do talk about what they do. These are just a few of the insights and secrets he has made available alongside the artwork they discuss.

Statewide Annual, Bountiful Davis Art Center, Bountiful, through July 27

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.