The Springville Museum of Art’s Spring Salon is the largest annual exhibition of work by Utah artists in the state. More than 1000 works are entered for consideration each year. From these, the museum manages to hang several hundred on their ground floor galleries. The Salon is too large, too heterogeneous a show to try to make sense of as an exhibition. So, taking inspiration from something Bob Olpin wrote for us years ago, we invited our writers to choose a few pieces that struck them, for whatever reason, and write about them. No need for introductions, transitions or conclusions, we told them.
Jason Lanegan, “Relic and Icon of a Rural Life,” 2023, mixed media
Jason Lanegan’s “Relic and Icon of a Rural Life” unites a found toolbox with an icon: a model barn made on the scale of the small churches often held by saints in their portraits, here fabricated from building materials and covered with plans and patterns. Inside the box lies a baling hook, a handheld extension of the worker’s arms and fingers, restored to the environment in which it spent its working life. Lanegan’s reliquaries express his faith that his life and its milestones are as valid, and more entertaining, than those of long gone figures whose names few recall.
Emily Hawkins, “Dancing Dress,” 2023, monotype on paper, 30×22 in., Award of Merit.
By inking her daughter’s “Dancing Dress” and running it through a printing press, Emily Hawkins extracts something from its prosaic material existence and immortalizes that essence in another form. Lacking all but the visual dimension, with no texture, weight, scent, sound, or any of the many triggers to memory that the original might possess, it can no more be worn than a blueprint of a home can be entered, except by the mind. Instead, it retains a talismanic power to evoke and liberate something that exceeds the specifics of one garment, and speaks to the rituals that add up to a life.
Alison Neville, “Enewetak Atoll,” oil on board, Award of Merit
Most portrait artists work from the assumption that if appearance can be shown in the right way, the viewer might perceive psychological or spiritual qualities in the sitter. An alternative, that the accoutrements of the subject can reveal much more, is a minority approach that took off in the last century. Pamela Beach, whose portrait figures made on that principle were featured at the Bountiful Davis Art Center in 2022 shows one of those portraits here: “Sticks and Stones,” but goes even further in “Enewetak Atoll,” her portrait of artists Alison Neville. She surrounds the artist, also a member of BDAC’s staff, with mushrooms, one of her frequent subjects that contrast nuclear power, a uniquely modern threat to life, with the vital work mushrooms do in restoring dead matter to life. By showing her as well with her hands in her pockets, Beach may say something more, about the limits of art to bring about change in the real world.
Santiago Michalek, “It’s Time—10 Years Gone,” oil on linen, Second Place Award
Anyone familiar with Santiago Michalek’s twin passions — for finding and restoring, and then painting — vintage Volkswagens, may puzzle over the implications of his statement that a decade ago, he faced the choice of a lifetime, presumably between his two great loves. The 25-year old Ansel Adams, assessing dual careers as a concert pianist and a photographer, told himself, “A man cannot serve two muses.” Yet in “It’s Time—10 Years Gone” Michalek proves he can still make his super-realistic inquiries into every aspect of the “lives” of these inanimate objects. Yet how practical is that choice? Did he quit working on cars? Did that become his job and art a hobby? Artists are not required to answer the questions they raise, while an essential pleasure of art is the flights of wonder and fancy they send us on.
Shari Darley Griffiths, “The Bath,” oil on panel, Honorable Mention
Far too many children are treated like accessories to their parents’ lives, so that they may even come to believe it. Still, there are moments when they forget their roles and the pilot, the adult concealed in the child’s body, emerges and looks around. Then, as Shari Darley Griffiths reveals in her portrait of Helen in “The Bath,” we may gain a glimpse into their own, personal segments of our collaborative, mortal journey. We may call these “un-self conscious” moments, but it’s us, not our children, who lose ourselves in them.
99th Annual Spring Salon, Springville Museum of Art, Springville, through July 8.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
