Reliquary for a Host of Broken Hymns by Frank McEntire

Frank McEntire is the rare courageous artist for whose aesthetic mill everything is grist. He overlooks nothing, even the clouds of language, abstract words, that trail his artwork until they eventually burn off under the heat of gallery lights. Left behind are exquisite objects originally encountered as discards. McEntire transforms this raw material, its former meaning dissipated like vapor, into talismans: reinvigorated vessels filled by, and with, his faith. And his faith is uncompromising, encompassing the recognition that we humans spend too much time living by symbols, arguing over symbols, fighting on what we think is behalf of symbols, and not nearly enough time in touch with the transcendental facts these symbols set out to represent.

reliQueries, the title of his upcoming show at Nox Contemporary, is an example of Frank McEntire’s hunger to refashion whatever he finds, not just lending it a new purpose, but refurbishing it, using his skill to bring out the craftsmanship that went into its original construction. Reliquaries are sturdy, albeit precious vessels that derive a transient value from the rich materials and skill employed in their making, but acquire their lasting value from their originally mundane, carnal contents: a fragment of skeleton, a scrap of textile, something left behind. In his assemblages, McEntire seeks to find and set forth the limit of exchange between sacred value and secular price. In an overwhelmingly materialistic age, when the street corner preacher is as likely as a broker to advocate material goals, when investment and accumulation are considered equivalent to prayer, Frank McEntire challenges us to distinguish price from value.

To do this requires courage because no object, least of all one of veneration, ever entirely loses its power over holder and beholder alike. In an age of insecurity, no one is allowed to disrespect anything that someone, somewhere, once respected. We decline to throw out the bath for fear of accidentally discarding the baby, and so our world of discourse has gradually filled up with bathwater. Abraham Lincoln said, “As our situation is new, so we must think anew and act anew, and then we shall save our nation.” But it often seems we cannot do anything anew, so crowded is our public space with mental furniture we cannot use, but lack the clear judgment and decisiveness to move aside and stride past.

The service that McEntire performs is to burn away the excesses of piousness, especially where they cross the line into material expression that lend themselves to misunderstanding, that tend to stick around beyond their useful life, in order to let the real experience emerge. His works function on two levels simultaneously, at once representing objects on which reverence can be focused, and at the same time calling the attention of the reverent to the transfer. “Be aware that this memento is not the experience it memorializes, any more than a photograph of a loved one is what one loves.” At their best, the mechanism by which Frank McEntire’s art accomplishes this double duty, connects this double awareness, is laughter.

reli*QUERIES, an exhibition of new work by Frank McEntire opens at Nox Contemporary in Salt Lake on June 17. A reception for a second installation of the exhibit will happen Friday, July 15. Through August 6. To view more of McEntire’s work visit www.frankmcentire.com.

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.