A Danish convert who came to Utah in 1857, Christensen was a farmer and housepainter who became one of Utah’s earliest artists. In 1878 he began touring his Mormon Panorama, a series of 23 large paintings depicting early church history, stitched together to form a 175-foot panorama that Christensen toured in communities across Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho, accompanied by an oral presentation. He based his paintings on early records and the recollections of first-generation Mormons who had witnessed the events. The panorama became a rallying cry to the younger generation (of which Christensen was a part) to remember where they came from, to expect and embrace persecution, and to hold true to the faith for which — as the LDS hymn has it — “martyrs had perished.”

Twenty-two of the panels are currently on exhibit at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art (the whereabouts of the first of the 23, depicting Joseph Smith’s First Vision, is unknown). Mormon Panorama is a selective history, concentrating more on the Mormons as a persecuted people than as a peculiar religion. The first extant panel shows Joseph Smith receiving the gold plates from the angel Moroni, a seminal and sacred event in Mormon history, and another shows “Joseph Smith Preaching to the Indians.” For the most part, however, the panels depict the violence the Mormons encountered as they went from one community to the next along what was then America’s western frontier. In a scene from the church’s infancy, Joseph Smith is seen under a moonlit sky being carried by an angry mob to be tarred and feathered while fellow church leader Sidney Rigdon lies wounded on the ground. The next panel shows women, children and old men being forced out of their homes in Missouri. Other scenes of violence include the massacre at Haun’s Mill, where a Missouri militia fired into a blacksmith shop full of Mormon men, and the “Battle of Crooked Creek,” a skirmish between Mormon and Missouri militias during the 1838 Mormon War. These scenes are frequently paired with images of exodus, where large, orderly groups of Mormons cross broad rivers and frozen ground in search of a new home.

One of these violent scenes stands out among the others in that the violence occurs not to the Mormons, but to their enemies. In “Mobbers on the Missouri River” a group of almost a dozen people is seen floundering on a boat beneath a fiery sky. In the incident which has since disappeared from Mormon folklore, a group of Jackson County residents were returning from a confrontation with the early Saints when the ferry capsized, drowning the three ferrymen and two of the passengers. Mormons at the time saw the tragedy as divine retribution and Christensen used artistic license to change what was a calm moonlit night into a stormy tempest delivered by the angry hand of God.

Another scene that has disappeared from common Mormon folklore is the one Christensen depicts outside the Carthage Jail, shortly after Joseph and Hyrum Smith were killed. After being shot from within and from without the jail, Joseph has fallen two stories to the ground where his body is surrounded by the angry mob. One mob member stands by the body, knife in hand, about to cut off the head of the fallen prophet, when a celestial beam of light stops him.

Christensen’s Mormon history is full of bloody persecution as well as divine intervention. In another scene, Mormons camped along the banks of the Mississippi who have recently fled Nauvoo capture flocks of quail for food in a biblical scene of divine deliverance and aid.

Two scenes of the Mormons crossing the Plains are relatively undramatic and the panorama ends with a view of a wagon train descending Emigration Canyon to enter the Salt Lake Valley. The message is clear: this is our history, this is what brought us here. Do not forget or neglect it. If you are persecuted now you are part of a sacred history, for as the caption to Christensen’s view of the interior of Carthage Jail says, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”

Christensen’s style is what we would call “folk” or “naïve,” though he was trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. It is an odd mix of academic sophistication and frontier simplicity. His handling of figures can be clumsy, his understanding of perspective spotty, but at the same time many of these panels are built on complicated compositions. His painting of “The Battle of Crooked Creek” appears oddly off-kilter, as the Mormon militia appears in the left hand of the picture, firing even further to the left onto the encampment of Missouri militia. This is balanced in part by a large copse of trees on the right, the shift in form meant to direct your gaze to the lone figure in the center of the painting — David Patten, one of the first Mormon apostles and leader of the militia, who died in the battle. It is an intriguing compositional solution that might have been more effective if the figure of the dying martyr, his eyes raised to heaven, were handled with more finesse.

Christensen’s skills with the landscape are equally mixed. His trees may be formulaic, but he captures the light of winter with a subtle eye. And just when some of the broader, panoramic scenes of Mormon encampments call to mind Brueghel’s peasant scenes, you’ll notice one of Christensen’s odd pictorial solutions — like the mass of soldiers in the Nauvoo Legion stacked together like thin pieces of paper, or when Christensen tries to squeeze a number of men into the doorway of Liberty Jail and they become apparitions rather than flesh and blood.

Whatever you may think of Christensen’s method, you’re unlikely to miss his message: his good guys are valiant martyrs and the bad guys villainous traitors. In “Arrest of Mormon Leaders,” Smith and others giving themselves up to avoid further violence stand erect and well-dressed while the arresting mob is depicted as ragged and unruly; and Colonel George Hinkle, a Mormon who had organized the parlay and was considered a traitor by many of his co-religionists, is seen dressed in a vest of bright yellow, the color of Judas in Western art.

Though Christensen’s panels were not church-sponsored they might as well have been. They are the 19th-century equivalent of the films the LDS Church now produces and screens on Temple Square (and, when possible, your local theater). They are promotional rather than historical. The role of incendiary speeches by Mormon leaders that helped fuel the Missouri conflict, the complicated familial motives behind the tarring and feathering of Smith and Rigdon, the secret practice of polygamy and destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor that led to Carthage and the Battle of Nauvoo — Christensen is unlikely to have been aware of these factors and even less likely to have included them if he had been.  

In the wake of the gay marriage debate, Mormons — along with other Christian groups — have talked increasingly about threats to their religious liberty (including in a recent talk in the church’s semi-annual General Conference). If to outsiders — and some insiders — this preemptive persecution complex seems an overreaction to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, C.C.A. Christensen’s Mormon Panorama may lend some insight: it reminds us, yes, that the Mormon Church was born in controversy and persecution, but more importantly it helps us understand that the purposeful (if selective) remembrance of that persecution has been a long-standing tradition within the culture to strengthen group identity and cohesion.

Moving Pictures: C.C.A. Christensen's Mormon Panorama is at the BYU Museum of Art in Provo through October 3.

Exhibition Review: Salt Lake City
When Images Fail and Succeed
Mary Sinner's Mementos at A Gallery
by Geoff Wichert

In the century and a half since photography rose up to challenge painting as an image source, artists have invented countless strategies for incorporating photos into their working methods. Some use snapshots to replace the traditional sketch book. Others primarily paint things they could never see in person, either because they are remote, rare, no longer exist, or never did. Some painters mimic artifacts of photography: blurring or stopping motion or shattering a subject. At one extreme, the actual photo can be collaged onto a canvas. At the other, far more subtle extreme, the camera can help capture the subjective qualities of personal vision that entrap individual consciousness within so many separate bodies. This is the approach Mary Sinner takes in Memento, more than 30 large and small panels, including some studies of larger works, on view at A Gallery through Sept.11.

Twentieth-century theoreticians, from Saussure down to Sontag, have had much to say about how photographs work, but the content—both of their theories and of the photographs themselves—depend on completely external systems like language and memory. Separation from such texts impoverishes photographs, and the misplaced snapshots collected by Mary Sinner and used as models for her art have lost their identities, probably irreplaceable. Instead of writing an essay in a speculative effort to introduce each of them, she sets herself the task of re-presenting each one in its own, visual language, seeking to turn each into an icon, with all the generic specificity that may achieve. By stripping them of inexplicable, misleading detail, she focuses on the one question she might be able to answer: Why did someone take this picture? A treasured car, a hotel associated with a vacation or a road trip, a trophy, even a favorite toy assume universal significance without quite completely surrendering their individual identities. The final question—how such treasured mementos can come to be lost—remains an unspoken drama, at least elevated in meaning if not answered, because unanswerable.

Apparently, Mary Sinner is never content to explore just one direction at a time in her art. When 15 Bytes looked in on her exhibit at Art Access in 2012, she was seen juxtaposing intricate interior scenes, collages built from vintage magazine illustrations, against brush-painted figures of costumed and posed models rendered in flat blocks of primarily undifferentiated color, sometimes nothing more than a silhouette, alternating with areas of arbitrary texture that rarely modeled space. In Memento, she alternates panels surfaced in form-following brushwork with those over which she’s poured a clear resin that leaves them as smooth as glass. This finish, which cannot be seen, let alone appreciated in photos of the works, lends them sharp focus and a crystalline luminosity, the former a paradox given her general disregard for surface detail. It’s not that she lacks verisimilitude; standing before scrubbed-in backgrounds are passages that pop so vividly into space that they can leave a viewer breathless. But clearly, there is much she does not know, feels she must not be seen pretending knowledge of, about what appears in these lost and found images. To paint the faces, for example, as sharply as they no doubt appear in their photos would be to imply she knows their identities in ways she does not. In “August 1975,” such a faceless couple, dressed in hats and bathing suits, stands before a swimming pool, into which their shadows disappear like drowning voyagers. The water, which in the background reflects the building behind them, opens beneath them in the foreground like a chasm, the yawning threat of which belies the cheerful grins that are all that can be seen of their faces. A few body parts—his chest and knees, her leg and upper arm—penetrate the generic data enough to create a psychic, rather an emotional sense of presence sufficient for a feeling of empathy. We know this couple’s experience; we have posed for this picture.

Several quite large triptychs call on all of Sinner’s gifts. “Somewhere in Heaven,” which stands 7 feet tall and 9 long, mixes all her media in a bleak landscape, littered with collaged trash and centered on a brown two-door model and a dog who poses patiently beside it. Exploiting the actual three dimensions made available by the resin glazing, she floats suggestive shapes of plaid fabric over wallpaper in the background, pencils in details that hover between suggestions and gestures, and inserts a photograph in the wind wing that harkens all the way back to Raphael, if not to Giotto. She omits the glaze from “Station Wagon Blur,” but blends the background instead, capturing the panning photographers ability to freeze the moving car while blurring the background. Returning to the resin surface in “Red Ride in the Hood” and “Ford Grille,” glitter floating in the glaze says sun-struck stucco but suggests something more akin to dreams, and perhaps their shortcomings.

If working from these photographs had done nothing more for Sinner than to direct her attention in a direction it might not otherwise have gone and to provide her with subjects that manifestly predate her arrival on the scene, that would be enough. But on the basis of the evidence, they have done something more: something important. By engaging her in a visual dialogue in which tropes in one medium, like soft focus in a photo, are matched with techniques native to paint, rather than just mimicked in oil, and native techniques like drawing and collage replace their analogues in silver emulsion and chemical dyes, she enriches the understanding of both techniques and calls attention to the degree to which images try and fail, or try and succeed in replacing human vision, which in its own way is already a compromise with the world out there, but which is also, for well over a million years, our primary entry point to reality.

Memento, paintings by Mary Sinner, A Gallery, 1321 S. 2100 East, Salt Lake City, through 9/11. Hours: Mon-Sat 10 a.m-6 p.m. Information: 801-583-4800. You can see more of the artist's work at her website: http://marysinner.blogspot.com/