Artist Profile: Salt Lake City
Shilo Jackson Tricks the Eye
A new body of visual trickery at Stolen & Escaped Gallery
by Sue Martin | photos by Simon Blundell
What do Salvador Dali, Alice in Wonderland, the Mona Lisa, and fortunes from cookies have in common? For one thing, they are among the ephemera collected by Shilo Jackson to be used in various combinations someday in a painting. That day is here as Jackson finishes some 30 new works for her Autogenous Automatous exhibit opening October 21 at Stolen and Escaped Gallery, below Frosty Darling, on Broadway.
Exhibition Review: Park City
Is and Is Not
Robin Denevan at Julie Nester Gallery
by Shawn Rossiter
In his Treatise on Painting Leonardo daVinci suggests looking at stains on walls (as well as ashes from a fire, clouds, mud) for inspiration. In them, he says, you'll find fantastical scenes, landscapes, and faces with strange expressions. One can imagine Robin Denevan being inspired by a similar experience for his current body of work. Look at his paintings now at Julie Nester Gallery and you can imagine his inspiration coming from paint stripper applied to an old door ormoulding: as the caustic material causes the old stain to curdle the artist discovers a possibility for painting. But rather than raging battle scenes, Denevan sees the calm though exhilirating landscapes of the place where land and water meet sky.
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Exhibition Review: West Valley
Building Bridges of Understanding
Andrew Kosorok at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center
by Ehren Clark
Andrew Kosorok is an extraordinarily gifted artist and teacher whose passion and talent with glass and design, and his zeal for authentic personal spiritual enlightenment and truth, are essentially linked and manifest in all of his artwork. Kosorok's current display of work at West Valley's Cultural Celebration Center, 99 Most Beautiful Names: A Sculptural Presentation of the Names of God is open only until the 11th of this month, and shouldn't be missed; if you do, however, you'll have 81 more opportunities to see his glass sculptures as with each new creation in the series of 99 pieces comes a new show in a new city. Each of the glass sculptures, frequently multi-layered and enhanced by found and manufactured objects, explore one of the 99 names for God in the Islamic tradition. The current 18 sculptures, exquisitely rendered by a master in full control of his craft, explore the most erudite nuances of Islam, but also consider the connectivity and unity of the related Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity, as well as other more obscure minor religious cultures. Kosorok's sophisticated manipulation of iconography demonstrates that there is much more that unites us than separates us and there is indeed a universal reality which we are all a part of.
As I spoke with Kosorok he poignantly expressed the unity that he finds in these distinctive world religions by paraphrasing from the Qur’an: “God made everybody different to speak different languages, of different tribes and different colors, specifically so we could learn to get along better by dealing with our differences but he also reminded us that we all came from the same parents, Adam and Eve.” The essence of spiritual individuality that finds a fundamental and essential unity among divers ancient religions is a thread which weaves its way through all of Kosorok’s sculptures and makes them not only exquisite works of wondrous beauty but objects of the most profound meaning and substance. It seems that in their utmost complexity, nothing is arbitrary, no choice is made without deliberation to articulate a precise spiritual message relevant to the name of God indicated. Kosorok uses a kaleidoscope of symbols of separate faiths within a single sculpture to convey a spiritual message, which furthers the essential idea of universal reality and truth. His artwork is a labor in progress that is a dedication to this.
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