On the second floor of Modern West, Jim Jacobs’ “Conversation” stands between Xi Zhang’s “Sixpence” and Beatrice Mandelman’s “Red and Blue.”

Even though some galleries report selling more art online than in person, exhibitions remain important to artists, patrons, and dealers. The opportunities offered most artists are still either the one- or two-person version, where artists can exhibit in depth, or the group show, where they typically have one work among somewhere between ten and several hundred others.

At Modern West, Shalee Cooper has transitioned over the last few years to managing the gallery as owner Diane Stewart stepped back from daily involvement. Among the innovations Cooper has introduced is a group show that foregrounds one artist within the context of many. For example, the current assemblage, Reflection, celebrates the gallery’s tenth anniversary and looks back over some of the diversity of its showings, including approximately 50 individual works by just under 30 artists, the numbers varying over the run due to other gallery commitments. Most of these individuals are represented by one or two works, while scattered among them are at least seven works by Jim Jacobs, who also appears in a one-person show on the gallery’s website. While the layout is meant to establish a high level of quality shared by all the gallery’s artists, there is a subtle intention to distinguish Jacobs: not that he is “better” than the others, but that he is, perhaps, the most advanced artist currently living and working in Utah.

Here are a couple of examples that recommend this judgment. One of the things he does is to make visible a physical fact explicated in a lecture by Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983). Fuller would conjure up an overhand knot using his hands in air, then to demonstrate that it is not an object but a pattern where the rope interferes with itself, he would imagine tying a handkerchief to one end of the rope, then working the knot along the materials until it was no longer in the rope, but a knot in the cloth. Still the same knot, but totally different substance.

Jacobs demonstrates this ability of a design or pattern to exist outside materials while incorporating them freely by grafting together distinct pieces of wood, nearly obscuring their identities and making them seem like parts collaborating in a unified vision. He’s been known to graft a manufactured piece, such as a chair, to a raw portion of a tree, making the transformation seem a natural, even a reversible event. “Ouroboros” is a modern Greek word meaning “swallowing its own tail,” which symbolizes wholeness or infinity—two rather serious concepts. But in Jacobs’ “Ouroboros,” the wild end of a long, wooden snake is gripped by its head, which has been meticulously carved into something witty: a spring-operated clothes hanger.

Detail of Jim Jacobs’ “Ouroboros” at Modern West.

 

Jim Jacbos, “Woof Moo”

As he does all this, Jacobs brilliantly differentiates animals from plants: the two major families of living things. Animals take our design from our DNA, which determines how our bones form into a skeleton, which is then draped by organs that are functionally identical from one individual to the next. All the members of a given animal species are broadly identical, predesigned, differing only in detail. But Jacobs knows that each plant must not only fabricate itself, as animals do, but also design itself. The shape of the plant will be determined by the interaction of its self-fabricating power and the environmental niche in which it finds itself. A tree growing on a hillside will be much thicker on the downhill side, and if the earth beneath it proves unstable, it will transform further as it grows. The shapes available to it as it strives to grow up towards the source of light, while putting its roots down into the soil, are infinite.

This leads to what are arguably Jacobs’ most cognitively intriguing sculptures, wherein he utilizes classic woodworking techniques, such as were used to build ships and airplanes, to fabricate a range of evocative objects. Sometimes the skeleton of a branch that can exist only in the mind of the beholder emerges from a section still covered with bark, like a building that is finished on one end but only rough framed at the other. Sometimes the result is like a diagram in space: in “Unskinned” they suggest vessels at the bottom and flames above. In “Woof Moo” a weathered branch emerges from the wall like a sconce, projects a skeleton with bud-like twigs, then gradually becomes more like a diagram as it curves through space and becomes elemental as it droops and fades away.

Shalee Cooper was not the first nor the only person to find something in these works of art that is compelling beyond their craftsmanship, which is remarkable in itself, but an effect they produce that it wouldn’t be out of line to call magical or other-worldly, even as they partake of essential qualities of nature. Consider “Conversation,” a work that may take its name from its resemblance to a bench a couple might share while they converse, either audibly or silently. One end of “Conversation” is an orderly assemblage of precisely cut and joined strips of wood, a horizontal piece of furniture supported by two vertical legs. But as the component strips run along the bench, they separate from each other, lose their perfectly straight form, and begin to curl wildly, until at the other end there is complete disorganization: chaos, however, that allows the piece to stand up with the combined support of all the escaping curls. It could be said that from one end to the other it resembles a conversation, which often begins with a coherent topic, only to devolve into a wilderness of creative observations and dizzy non-sequiturs.

It might be easy to place an adequate artist among mediocre works of art and make that one look good. But these are some of Modern West’s best, and for an unconventional visual thinker like Jim Jacobs to hold his own, let alone look this good among them is further confirmation of his status as one of Utah’s standout creative voices. Good art opens in the mind, and very good art opens the mind in which it comes to dwell. All the parts are here and now.

Jim Jacobs, “Slip”

Reflection, Modern West Fine Art, Salt Lake City, though Dec. 21.

All images by the author.

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.