Our lives are fraught with the constant tension of our relationship to technology. Some days, when there are urgent calls to be made, it’s a blessing to have your cell phone nearby. Other times the phone invades moments where silence is critical to getting work done. Today you can be more connected than ever before to the world around us, but at times you just need time to unplug and remove yourself from the instant messages, the email, the television, and all the technology that permeates life.

The newly formed University of Utah Sculpture Club has tackled this theme in its show A Priori, currently up at the Gittins Gallery on the University of Utah campus. As one piece implies, as a society we dove headfirst into this virtual world with the type of abandon a child gives to throwing themselves into a ball crawl. The work’s uncomfortable location in a ceiling corner, however, suggests this enthusiasm may have been misplaced.

In A Priori there are no titles for the works and no artist names. The sculptures stand alone and, as the press release explains, “the resulting exhibition thus embodies a single image as assigned by the prescribed exhibition theme and becomes a monument to the circumreferential understanding of our day-to-day bombardment of virtual recurrence.”

A Priori is Latin for “knowledge to come before” or “from the earlier.” Before technology, we constructed works from natural materials. Several of the pieces in the show are made from wood and metal, which offers an intriguing juxtaposition to the pieces that do not differentiate people from their technology. In one piece in particular, a person made of wire sits meditatively on top of what appears to be a stack of computer towers —  suggesting, it seems, just how inseparable we have become from our technology.

Two pieces in the exhibit appear to be exploring how our consumer habits in a virtual age create waste. In one, a full-length evening gown is made entirely of folded bows created from the pages of a glossy magazine. The second piece is a dress made of paper and a pile of shoeboxes, surrounded by shredded paper. As we consume through online shopping and read about fashion trends in a Kindle edition of Vogue, what are the consequences? And how do we move further away from the natural world and more into the virtual world by making these choices? A set of hands emerges from the wall and pulls on a rope that’s about to split. That could very well be the tenuous connection we still have to the natural world.

A Priori is an exploration of what it means to live in the twenty-first century. It is a critical reminder that we constantly share space with technology. Cloud drives hover in the ether over our heads and organize our lives. If the power goes out and Internet access is suddenly unavailable, people and businesses can’t function. It’s easy to accept the influence of technology on our daily lives. But it’s equally significant to remember the importance of the natural world, and to remember we don’t have to be bombarded by technology. A Priori is a reminder of how the virtual world is almost inseparable from our lives, but doesn’t have to be.

A Priori, this year’s annual junior and senior sculpture exhibition at the University of Utah, is at the Alvin Gittins Gallery in the University of Utah College of Art Building (375 S 1530 E, SLC) through November 29.
Participating artists: Alyce Carrier, Joseph Christensen, Robin Clark, Alex Foster, Ta-Hung Kuo, Jake McIntire, Amanda Oechsle, David Price, Lyra Zoe Smith, Dan Wardell, Justin Watson, Alexandra Zawada and an installation by Sculpture Club Members.

Dale Thompson

Dale Thompson has a B.A. in Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College and an Masters degree in communications from Westminster College. Her writing career includes work for a local theatre, journalism in Park City, and freelance contributions for various nonprofit organizations.