During the opening reception, 7-9 pm, choreographers Ashley Anderson, Shayla Bott, Angela Banchero-Kelleher and Joni Tuttle will present new projects designed for the space. The performances are part of Provo Sites, a concert series that rotates venues in Utah Valley.

In partnership with Ashley Anderson from loveDANCEmore, Kori Wakamatsu and Kate Monson are trying to shift the choreographic landscape of the Utah Valley. The three women, all choreographers, have regularly dealt with the reality that Utah has many thriving university dance programs and a few historic companies but that professional opportunities were lacking, particularly in Utah Valley.

Tired of performing in the same formats, they came up with Provo Sites. Their first concert, last November, took place in the Provo 4th Ward. If the audience (who watched the concert in the 30 degree building) was any indication, the community was hungry to see new work. They are following up this inaugural performance with the Work To Do concert in the Lieds Gallery of the museum. Performances will take place at 7:15 and 8:15 pm.

If you like what you see you’re in luck because there are talks to extend the series this summer to the Orem Community Gardens and other venues in downtown Provo.

Work To Do opens at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art Friday, May 17, 7-9 pm and continues through September 2013. 

Mondo Utah, the inaugural Utah Biennial that opened at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art last week, is all about Utah’s traditional parallel types, says museum Senior Curator of Exhibitions Aaron Moulton — the distinctive genres like landscape or outsider art that interact to form the state’s cultural puzzle. This intersection of genres can create new hybrids, adding to the diversity of contemporary Utah’s artistic landscape. One prominent Utah artist doing just this is the inventive J. Kirk Richards, whose work is a hybrid of intersections, bringing together classical, modern and contemporary influences.

In his wall installation “Untitled (Cristo Series),” part of a micro exhibit from the collection of the LDS church that resides within the larger biennial, the artist employs portraits that cross traditional representations of traditional subject matter with acute degrees of reductive minimalist abstraction.  The installation is not simply a pastiche of scores of paintings, but rather a mélange of over 160 surprising portraits that even in their simplicity are recognizable as representing Jesus Christ. These are hung magnificently in wall collage format — only the larger have frames — and make the very best use of space with very little negative space within the mass assemblage.

Curator Laura Hurtado, Global Art Acquisitions Specialist for the LDS Church, suggested the wall installation to Richards, referring him to the Fabiola installation by conceptual artist Francis Alys. In his piece, Alys displayed a collection of paintings by amateur artists that reproduced Jean-Jacques Henner’s popular 19^th-century painting of a 4^th century female Christian saint — St. Fabiola. The result is a mass of similar paintings, executed in slightly differing styles and media but showing the same red-mantled model facing left.  The resulting installation of over 300 paintings, which was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008, has a generalizing effect on the subject, inuring the audience to the identity of the saint, turning her into objectified ornamentation, without the kind of divinity generally imparted to the sanctity and individuality of the saint herself.

The opposite is true of Richards’ installation.  Surprising is the abstracted and minimalistic reductive approach to each of the pieces, allowing Richards to create 160 clearly distinct images of the most reproduced figure in western art, each one different in essence from the next. On one is a sketchy head of hair and beard with coarse remnants of a penetrating eye. Another is a more articulated image, where the features can just be made out reductively and abstractly so.  A third is an image that is simply hair, beard and cloak, with a shadow that seems sublimely knowing with features barely perceptible.  By reducing features, Richards exposes a sensory sublimity perceptible in each image and the special, unique personal and profound spiritual quality of each.  All 160 portraits are abstractly diminished, abstractly distinct and abstractly sublime.  They each rely on pure essence of feeling and mood revealed by casual, slight, and effortless and emotionally intensive strokes of the brush to captivate the sensitive viewer with the subtlest nuances of Richards’ aesthetic expression.

The spiritual devotional image of Christ is one essential art subject of the Utah establishment, an establishment that has been reluctant to embrace modernist forms like abstraction. Richards’ stylistic hybrid imbues this tradition with fresh blood, and fits it nicely into the surrounding biennial’s critical methodology of intersection that give life to new forms.

The show runs through June 14th and was juried by the well know painter Stephen Quiller

Stephen Quiller is an internationally known painter who works primarily in water media, monotypes, and intaglio printmaking.  His is best known for his innovative approach to water media painting:  watercolor, gouache, acrylic, casein and their combinations, and for his use of color.  He has written six books.

His research and development of a color wheel for painters –the “Quiller Wheel”: – is now used by thousands of painters throughout the world.  In addition, he has developed twelve instructional DVSD’s produced by Crystal Productions, as well as two DVD’s produced by the Richeson Company in 2004.

P.S.   Make your hotel/camping reservations ASAP.  Other places to look for lodging are vrbo.com  or homeaway.com.

Adults – make sure to treat yourself to a creative vacation, with classes like Encaustics, Painting, Drawing, Ceramics, Silver Jewelry Making, Mosaics and Sculptural Welding!

We have put together an impressive line up of classes with local, regional and nationally known artists and instructors! Don’t forget members always receive 10% off of classes and the Studio 6 Art Supply Store.

We also have an exciting line up of FREE exhibitions, which are open 7 days a week. We look forward to seeing you at the 44th Park City Kimball Arts Festival which will be held on August 2, 3 & 4th – ART STARTS HERE!

Click Here for more information on summer classes

Utah Arts & Museums presents “Tin” – an exhibit that represents a cross section of a decade at Brigham Young University’s Art Department from the early nineties into the early 21^st Century. The 40+ artists in this exhibit graduated about decade ago and since those crucial formative years, the students have become professionals.

The exhibit runs from May 10th to June 14th, and there will be a reception during Gallery Stroll on May 17th, from 6-9pm

Saint Joseph and the Dragon (Shield of Faith) by Ai Childress

Casey Smith

Untitled by Todd Chilton

“Every artist in this show shares in common sets of influences at an influential time in their development – the time and place that seems to be the location for artists to develop in this country at this time – college” says curator and artist Jared Clark. “During the years apart each has accrued his and her own mixture of influences and decisions beyond the shared experience of art school.”

Clark explains that committing to one genre or medium as an art student is a thing of the past. Art schools increasingly mirror this change with new department names like New Genres and adjectives such as Interdisciplinary. “However,” says Clark, “It can be argued the artists in this show were on the threshold of this paradigm shift in their formative years and felt both the pressure to commit to a way of working (and, therefore, to an identity) and the contrasting new freedom blossoming to shed labels and expectations.”

As the metaphoric metal representing ten year anniversaries, “Tin” describes a reunion of these artists’ work ten to twenty years after their time at school. Because it is a theme of artists who shared a general age group it can also be seen as a cross section of artists shifting from generation X to generation Y. Anytime a group of work is shown, the acts of comparing and contrasting are inevitable. In this case those comparisons may lead to identifying similar influences from the artists’ developmental stages while the contrasts may reveal where artists have further honed or left those influences behind.

Emma is played by Anne Cullimore Decker, known around these parts as the “grand dame of Salt Lake City Theatre.” And if you’re a regular reader of our Daily Bytes and a follower of our projects, you’ll recognize her as one of Utah’s 15 Most Influential Artists. And why shouldn’t she be. She’s been a stage and screen actress for over six decades. In the words of her nominator, Jason Bowcutt, “As an actor, Anne has performed on nearly every stage in Utah. Anne brings passion, intelligence, and fearlessness to her work and has touched many people with her talent. She has crossed many boundaries as an actor working in musicals, classics, modern dance, symphony and opera.”

The play can be seen as a comedy or as a serious study of real women. But you should grab a ticket and decide for yourself. Will you see stereotypes in these characters? Will they remind you of real and righteous women you know? Or will you see that perhaps they are more real when they’re at their least righteous?

The Righteous and Very Real Housewives of Utah County is at the Post Theater at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City, May 16 – 26. It opens Thursday, May 16, 2013 with a preview on Wednesday, May 15. You can get tickets now by clicking HERE.

The concert is a multi-arts event incorporating dance, video, music, spoken word, theater, magic, humor, and more.  It uses a variety of very creative and effective devices to convey the ephemeral quality of life.  One of the most striking is the use of two levels of “shadow boxes” in which performers appear, then disappear.  These are covered with a transparent screen onto which video can be projected, allowing a mixture of live and video performances.

The choreography, by Beal, who also dances and serves as a guide to the many layers of activity, is excellent, and evokes the wide variety of religions and cultures whose views on death form the backbone of the event.  The dancers are refreshingly diverse, with a variety of ethnicities, body types and ages represented.  Of particular note are a stunning solo by Chien-Ying Wang, and the ensemble, all dressed in white, performing a longer, more complex final piece.

The video is a bit predictable, with scenes of stars, galaxies, and someone swimming towards the light.  However, the videos of ordinary people talking about what they believe will happen after death are at times humorous and at times deeply moving.

While humor can be helpful at breaking the ice, communicating things indirectly, and lightening a topic some people find distressing, it is at times distracting.  The show would also benefit from some newer humor instead of tired old jokes we’ve all read online too many times.

The soundscape, by Jon Scoville, is effective and provides subtle openings into the topics using a variety of motifs including the voices of children and babies, thunder, and even subway noises to represent the underworld.  Unfortunately, it sometimes drowned out the voices of the actors.

The performance, which runs about an hour and 45 minutes could use some tightening and a slightly faster pace.

Despite these quibbles, HereAfterHere is an effective, thoughtful, well-conceived, extremely creative look at an unusual topic that is rarely discussed in the arts.  And Beal, through her words and choreography, invites us to explore death and what may follow with open hearts and open minds.

Tandy Beal’s HereAfterHere was presented at the University of Utah’s Marriott Center for Dance, May 9-11.

Friday, May 17-Monday, June 17 2013
Opening reception for the artist: Friday, May 24th, from 6:00 to 11:00 pm
Opening Gallery Stroll reception for the artist: Friday, May 17th,
from 6:00 to 11:00 pm

SLC Photo Collective is pleased to present conceptual photographs from
the series Geography Lessons 4.2 by Albert Fallick-Wang. This is his
first exhibition with the gallery.

Forsaking the camera, Fallick-Wang, in this rather provocative series,
uses Google Street View and Google Earth applications on the iPad to
create environmental documentary photographs that re-frames the nature
of photography using cutting-edge technology on a computer. By
“selecting” a view using a screenshot program and Photoshop in a
similar way that photographer takes a photo, the artist questions the
orthodox methodology of how ordinary people perceives his or her
everyday milieu and the way that street or aerial photography is
executed.
Themes within Fallick-Wang’s “street” photographs include his being
drawn to lonely figures within an expansive urban or rural landscape
typically amongst dwarfing architecture, offbeat visual elements such
as a gigantic soccer ball within the middle of a yard, and off-kilter
composition that keeps the viewers’ eyes locked within a tension
between figure and ground. The existentialist tenor of these
photographs emphasize the depersonalized lack of boundary between
personal and private spaces. Also Fallick-Wang presents the viewer
with photography as a form of corporate surveillance as he shows how
much information Google has been able to collect about humanity.
Despite this tone, the artist maintains his quirky eye for eccentric
phenomena and visual puns that occur on the sidewalks or fields.

Fallick-Wang’s fascination with the personal side of aerial
photography reaches into a radical form of photographic abstraction.
By zooming into the maximum closest viewpoint of selected or curated
architectural buildings within Google Earth, the photographer has
selected various locations that include the personal locales such as
the home of his biological parents to the impersonal locales such as
Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad where he was purportedly
killed in a secret operation by the United States government. These
heavily pixelated buildings depict the blurring of memory, whether it
be the artist’s own images or the historical images of a national
collective.

Despite the radical methodologies within Geography Lesson 4.2, this
series of inkjet prints becomes a hybrid of diverse photographic
traditions including the landscape or urbanscape photographs of the
New Topographics movement, the deadpan scientific series of building
photographs of the Bechers, the technologically manipulated work of
Thomas Ruff, the humorous appropriations of Richard Prince, and the
Google Street View-influenced street photographs of Jon Rafman and
Doug Rickard. Fallick-Wang extends this hybrid to look at not only the
sociological and cultural context of street or aerial photography but
also the epistemology of photographs executed by filtering out the
artist’s own bias from an overload of visual information gathered by
surveillance technology.

Albert Fallick-Wang was born in Queens, New York in 1976 and received
his masters degree at Yale University. He is a conceptual painter,
photographer, and new media/video artist.

Fallick-Wang has been exhibited in various places including New
Capital; Gray Wall Gallery; The Livingroom; Aqua Art Miami Art
Fair/MyArtspace.com, Central Booking; Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery; envoy
enterprises; the Projects Gallery; The Lab at Belmar; modern8 Gallery;
James Cohan Gallery/NURTUREart; Claire Oliver Gallery/NURTUREart;
Metro Pictures/Visual AIDS; Art Raw Gallery; and Anna Kustera. His
work is featured in Culturehall and The Drawing Center’s Viewing
Program.

Fallick-Wang lives and works in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Press Inquiries
SLC Photo Collective
200 South 561 West
Salt Lake City UT 84101
Contact: Maomi Blackburn
E. maomiblackburn@gmail.com
T. 801.364.0104

For all other information please contact the gallery at
dave@slcphotocollective.org or at 801.364.0104.

Maximilian Werner will read from and sign copies of his memoir Gravity Hill at the King’s English Bookshop
1511 S. 1500 E.
Salt Lake City
Friday May 10, 2013, 7 pm.
Maximilian Werner’s memoir Gravity Hill contains stories nested inside other stories. In its framing tale, we meet Max about five years ago, a young professional and husband to Kim. Together they have two children: a three-year old boy named Wilder and Greer, an eleven-month old baby girl. Since the requisites for having children are merely biological, most parents find their preparation woefully inadequate, and our author is not exceptional in this. He struggles to find skills and worries about his responsibilities. Set within this universal story are his memories, flashbacks to the years of his emergence from his own childhood, learning to explore the world around him and master the life skills it requires. While the stories within Gravity Hill—about Max’s miss-matched parents, influential siblings, and companions of both sexes who draw him into the world in different ways—fill most of the book, many in his audience want to learn more about what came next. It’s been five years since Maximilian Werner wrote the moving scene that opens Gravity Hill, and in anticipation of its publication we sat down with him in hopes of answering some of their questions.

15B: Gravity Hill eloquently dramatizes a young father’s anxiety for his children’s safety now, and their eventual welfare after he is gone from their lives. Readers have asked how that apprehensive parent, whose concerns feel so universal and inescapable, manages to come by the confidence to send them forth into a daunting world to find lives of their own. Other than the one suggested by the way your book ends, do you have any answers you can share, or might there be a sequel to Gravity Hill where your story will continue?

MW: How do I find the confidence to send them forth?  The short answer is that I have no choice: life lives, after all.  Over the last few years, I’ve learned to get out of the way: my way, my kids’ way, the universe’s way.  Just let it unfold, you know, and quit worrying so much about the what ifs.  I know it’s a luxury, this ability to be in one’s own life and at the same time watch it go by, but it’s what I’ve got for now.  At some point, tomorrow is going to be different.

I’d be missing a crucial part of the answer if I did not also mention my wife, Kim.  She gives my kids confidence, and by doing so she gives me confidence.  She’s done an amazing job.  She’s given my children everything, but giving comes at cost, and that is especially true in cases where we give all.  My book is about this cost as much as anything.

15B: Your mother, whom we meet in Gravity Hill, is still a major figure in your life. In fact, she edited several of your books. She’s very proud of you, even if some of the material in your memoir pushes her boundaries. We’re curious about your father, who is a remote-but-intriguing figure in your story. In fact, even when young Max is staying with him, it is his community, rather than the old man himself, who makes a vivid impression. Can you talk about him now? Have you come to know him better? Do you even want to?

MW: Mothers and fathers are tricky things.  I’m no different and my parents are no different: They did the best they could with what they had.  Do I think things could have been better, or that my parents could have made better decisions? Probably.  But better relative to what?  Their own parents?  Not likely.  And I also question the wisdom of lamenting what might have been, which is the same thing as lamenting what one thinks should have been, which, in the end, has nothing to do with it.  Or if it does, it is only to the extent that one would prefer the ideal.  But the ideal is unattainable, so I like to think about what is and about what has been on their own terms. If I do that, if I am unclouded and I see things clearly, I’m confident I’ll have a good chance of being a better parent, not than my parents were, but than I might have otherwise been.

I know my parents fairly well.  Lately the question for me has been what do I do with that knowledge?  What does it mean?  Depends on where we’re coming from, doesn’t?  When we were kids, my father always told us that blood was stronger than anything.  But I don’t tell that to my own kids because I don’t think it’s true.  We go through phases in life, and sometimes those phases are people, including our own family members.  Although I will say that in general fathers tend to be more distant than mothers.  When it comes to carrying a pregnancy to term, and to giving birth, men are clearly ignorant.  Would anyone argue that?  If not, then why should it be so surprising if in general men are more remote from their offspring?  Fathers and mothers are both parents, but their experiences of parenthood are night and day much of the time.  Both can be constructive forces in a child’s life, depending on how broadly one defines “constructive.”  The concept of family is fascinating, but only because it doesn’t really resemble societal depictions of it, or at least it doesn’t for me.

15B: Gravity Hill opens on a tense scene in which we quickly meet you, your wife, and your children. Have any of them expressed concern for their privacy, as so many artists’ families have done? How do you answer such questions, theirs or your own? And do you think you may write more about this part of your life in the future?

MW: When I was writing the book, I didn’t think about how the book would affect the other people who are mentioned in it.  I wasn’t in that space.  I wasn’t thinking about other people.  I was thinking about me and about the trouble I was in with my life.  I was thinking about how to get out of that trouble, and I guess part of how I did that was by telling other people’s stories, which were also my stories in a sense.  It’s also true that I hadn’t heard from most of the people in the book for many years (even my wife felt remote), and when that much time passes, people aren’t people so much as they are memories of people, or ideas of them, and memories and ideas are not flesh and blood, and they do not have feelings.  Memories and ideas are fallible and malleable and mine, so I did with them as I pleased.  It was very selfish of me, and maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but then I’ve already shared my feelings about talk of what should be.

15B: Some readers are fascinated by the glimpse you give of a place other than Utah. At perhaps the most socially alert, sensitive time in anyone’s life—his teenage years—Max is dropped, without a lot of guidance or supervision, onto New York’s Fire Island, where his dad enjoys a bohemian lifestyle. Are there reasons—technical, personal, whatever—why you limit this part of your story, or can you (will you) say more about it?

MW: The reason is practical: I wrote what I remembered, and although what I remember is fragmented, it is precisely that fragmentation that makes the scene so memorable, at least to me.  The whole book is a collection of such fragments, which are like shards of a broken mirror: they are partly reflective (you can’t see your whole body in them), they are sharp, and they can cut.

My father wrote an as-of-yet unpublished book of fiction about his time on the island, so at some point some of that material may find its way into one of my books (my father gave me his permission), but other than that I have no plans to write any more about the island.

Read the full review of Gravity Hill by Geoff Wichert here.