Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts

In Her Circle: Nine Artists Reimagining Connection and Creativity

A vibrant collage-style artwork depicting a town square with layered textures, whimsical architecture, and playful elements like string lights and flowers.

Cheryl Walden, “Town Square in Spring”

One of the things that women are generally better at than men is building a community. Get men together and many compete for status, want to be at the top of whatever they make. Women are more likely to seek connection and bond over their experiences than try to fix them. Both depend on relationships, but they utilize them in very different ways. An example of how this generalization plays out in practice is In Her Circle, an exhibition in the Plaza Level Gallery, downstairs at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center.

There are nine artists in this show, with space held for a tenth if she can make it. (A good example of how the world might work if women were more in charge.) The title makes reference to one of the artists who alone knew all the others, who, in fact, first connected them. Not naming her outright preserves a sense of group cohesion, perhaps, though any status bestowed by knowing her identity is equally available to all.

A painting showing a circular view of a beach landscape, as seen through the interior of a dark, textured tunnel.

Camille Wheatley, “See to Sea”

In inverted alphabetical order then, let’s begin with architect Camille Wheatley. We may forget that while architects are necessarily engineers (though not always good ones—Frank Lloyd Wright’s best-known building is falling, not just the water that runs through it) they are first and foremost artists. Wheatley, who achieved the feat of starting her own firm in order that her art serve her life and not the other way ‘round, seems to have taken her suggestion from the use of “circle” in the title. Four of her five photographs feature circular objects, each of which brings its otherwise remote environment into focus. The fifth breaks the mold while honoring the theme: its parabolic curve—a staple of Modern architecture—is a section of a nearly round window. Most have witty titles: a glass recycling port with a crescent shadow is “Glass Moon;” a length of pipe framing a view of surf and sand is “See to Sea;” and a parking lot mirror with an anticipatory arrow is Lots to Come.”

Cheryl Walden’s verisimilitude, evident in her landscape “Emerald Waters” and her onion-domed “St. Petersburg Church,” allows her to do something special with mixed media. In “Town Square in Spring,” she almost-seamlessly collages printed matter like package labels into a hand-drawn and painted cityscape, on the one hand recalling the artists’ stickers that made street art accessible to anyone, even as she notes how tourism turns whole cities into commodities.

Circles lend more than just structure here. Christina Stanley’s “Women at the Well,” a “bird’s-eye view” of hens surrounding the center of their world—their feed container—connects a host of emotional associations that hold from one species to another. Something similar happens when a loaf of bread is seen to naturally take the form of a “round.”

Susan Riedley asserts that history is contained in biography and that, at bedrock, both are female. Artistic creativity, represented by “Chemtrails Over Lana Del Ray,” is a metaphor drawn from the real deal, conception, and her ultrasound-double-portrait, “Anticipating Her,” bookends her sequential portraits of women, containing as it does a view of the fetus not just held, but created in the implied body of the mother.

Those who write about it sometimes wish to buttonhole art as a form of philosophy, though it’s not clear how many working artists would agree. One who might is Yvonne Krause: why else credit the geological subject matter of her visual homilies as “Provided by God?” Where many of her colleagues choose to take the long vista, the panorama of rock edifices and landscapes, she comes in close to study the endless variety detailed in stone. Knowing the difference between a sketch and something completed, she bids us consider that orders of magnitude are all equally valid in the eyes of their creators.

Long before certain artists began to buy fewer manufactured art supplies and sought them, instead, in industrial sources and second-hand shops, quiltmakers were salvaging their raw materials from bolt ends and worn out clothing. Rebecca Klundt credits her grandmother—whom she calls her muse—with inspiring her to assemble piles of scrap wood into monochromatic images, functionally similar to preparatory drawings, which she then paints with as many solid shades of acrylic as she needs. She chose the arch, one of the richest human symbols, to play the part of the circle surrounding the nearest thing to a universal human drawing—the door, complete with knob, that apparently all children naturally value and invoke in their drawings. Worth noting is the absence of knobs, or even doors, in her “Neighborhood,” a place all too often of other people’s castles, though she went to a lot of trouble to provide open windows through which the neighbors may share.

Krysta Dimick mixes two media together, neither of which is subordinate to the other. The sculptural part of “Endangered–Preserved” is both delicate and tensile, while the painting updates Mondrian and de Stijl and stands alone in “Taberelli.” In both 2- and 3-D, her material and subject matter are the same—space, as befits an artist who primarily thinks like an architect and has gone so far as to teach the subject at the U of U. Her online observations (https://canvasrebel.com/meet-krysta-dimick/) about the usefulness to a builder of wide-ranging knowledge and experience could apply to all makers, and in fact to all persons in general.

A mixed-media artwork with geometric shapes, depicting an abstract architectural scene in shades of blue, yellow, and gray, with bold lines and overlapping forms.

Linnie Brown, “Remnants”

There are many things that can trigger memories. Sounds and scents are often the most powerful. Linnie Brown is a painter and has chosen specific places that connect with her past as she recalls it. The resulting images, with their layering and frequent insubstantiality, brilliantly capture the way our minds attempt to creatively reassemble those places from too few shopworn mental fragments. What she achieves is near-universality: who doesn’t remember a parking lot, a school, a nostalgic episode that shifts in the telling like a dream? Does the memory of events or a name trigger some ghostly image of a locale, or does the mention of the where bring up the who and the what? The “architecture of the ordinary” brings us back, again and again, to the extraordinary.

A painting depicting a man seated on a rolling office chair in a studio space. He has a contemplative expression, wearing a white shirt and blue jeans, with art pieces displayed on the walls behind him.

Pamela Beach, “Cooperation with God”

Pamela Beach took a decade and a half off from art making so her children would have the attention they deserve without having to compete with the responsibility she feels to paint accurately and truthfully. They’re older now and she’s back, striving to see enough, deeply enough to feed her art. She’s also helping her colleagues to see as much as she does. While she admits to having no SPP, no Standard Painting Procedure, her depictions of the people she has come to know tend to feature three elements, an approach that places her among the pantheon of painters here or anywhere. First, each is a perceptive portrait: one that captures not just the subject’s appearance, but what she has made the effort to learn about that person. Second, its a figure study: one with a manner of dress and posture equally revealing. Anyone who has been to Brian Kershisnik’s studio will know he paints on his feet, but when he turns his attention to a guest, he sits down in that familiar chair. And third, she surrounds the subject with a symbolic backstory. In the case of “While I Was Dying,” that means about 30 pages of text, hand-lettered with her brush, from which hints can be extracted ranging from the subject’s characteristic mode of speech to her reading material: for instance, the deep dive Robert Persig made into Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I don’t know whose circle this is, though I may have made my suspicions clear enough. It’s a privilege to even attempt to write about nine extraordinary artists from such a personal perspective, and I hope readers will take it from here and reach their own conclusions.

 

In Her Circle, Utah Cultural Celebration Center, West Valley City, through June 6

3 replies »

  1. Great job as usual, Geoff. We appreciate your drawing attention to the artists in our galleries at UCCC.

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