“Realities” by Nolan Flynn and Patrick Durka

Utah artists and their audiences are no strangers to the salvage of discarded objects possessing the power to suggest rich associations between these things and new ideas. Nor do we lack experience with assemblage, the bringing together of unrelated bits and pieces to stimulate the cerebral and aesthetic powers of our minds and bodies. Artists who haunt sources of used and weathered goods fill our galleries and imaginations with objects brought together in ways that generate new identities and implications for them, which in turn enkindle new universes of possibilities.

That acknowledged, we can now appreciate how the curators at UMOCA have located nearly two dozen artists capable of doing the same thing not only with the connections possessed by antiques, but with shiny new objects that have yet to develop the patina of age or awareness of their potential implications. In Something From Everything, currently filling the main gallery, 19 solo artists and one pair have brought forth single objects, suites, and installations that transform newly-produced and essentially raw materials into metaphors that connect everyday existences with concepts no one previously knew they embraced.

Lars Call, “Trapped”

Consider, for instance, Lars Call’s “Trapped.” Each visible side of this furniture-sized wooden cube is covered by 78 armed mousetraps, a seemingly orderly array that has the potential to unleash violence measured only by the imagination. The precision of its layout recalls a popular demonstration of nuclear power stimulated in the 1950s by the invention of the atom bomb, in which each trap was outfitted with two ping-pong balls. That similarly neat, methodical formation was then engaged by a single ball that was tossed in and set off the rapidly accelerating chaos of a fission reaction. For Call, this box represents the conformity to social norms that a culture imposes on its members, in particular with regards to unique gender characteristics. For him, the misleading appearance of normality in such an ostensibly orderly arrangement is like the power of the bent springs that wait to come down destructively on any creature that falls out of compliance with it.

It’s probably time for the arts to admit that such specific interpretations are optional for the viewer. While the mechanisms connected with the gallery make it possible for any artist who so wishes to broadcast specific meanings for their work—just as during the Reformation they could indicate their identification as Catholic or Protestant—the same freedom that allows an individual such as Lars Call to reject imprisonment in what is increasingly seen as an arbitrary division of human nature means his audience will take what they wish from his expression.

The found objects utilized by Marissa Albrecht in “Placed Accordingly,” the installation next to “Trapped,” are suited to an even wider variety of uses, yet her placement of these cardboard boxes, packing materials, and highway markers conspires to depict a similarly crushing fact of conformity. Imagine following the path between, and regulated by, the reflective markers from one box to the next. At each box, a deceptive choice of places to rest is found, after which the viewer may imagine moving along to the next station on the path. Maybe the boxes are successive levels of education, or perhaps they are jobs, or levels of skill. Whatever it is, the illusion is generated, and we may decide to believe that choice follows choice in life, when in reality most of the choices are made in advance by the system that we occupy. The song says “from cradle to grave,” but omits to mention how, no matter how appealing the stops in between are made to appear, it doesn’t change the true nature of any part of it.

Marissa Albrecht, “Placed Accordingly”

Max Palmer, “Ensemble”

By no means are all the works in Something from Everything so predetermined. Many in fact engage the senses rather than the mind in the results they draw from exploring their material sources. No one who’s ever enjoyed assembling a pre-punched wooden model of a dinosaur or similar puzzle should struggle to appreciate Ephraim Puusemp’s birch sculptures, which constitute his adult response to the child-scaled models he previously built with his son. Or there’s Clark Derbes, who completes the promise of “everything” in the show’s title by taking fallen trees through a series of transformations summed up by his genre title, “sculptures of paintings of sculptures,” transforming them into objects with the visual challenges and playfulness of M.C. Escher prints.

Some works, like Max Palmer’s, use materials like concrete and steel bolts to seemingly invoke the built world in all its variety and duration, lending it patterns and a grandeur that may be lost in generic examples. Others use textiles that evoke the fragility of persons in the face of such materials. One particularly plangent piece, Leonardo Drew’s “Number 264,” uses fragments of wood, paint, and cotton fibers to bring to mind the history of human aspirations: the desire to make a world more like a hospitable home for us. Here we return to some of the places we started: with the interaction of our human will and a material world that often seems to have its own inimical intentions.

Works by Clark Debes

All images courtesy of 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.