Elmer Presslee, “The Flannel Void”

The title piece of Elmer Presslee’s first Salt Lake exhibition since 2017, “The Flannel Void” may be the least disturbing work for many visitors to this chamber of playful horrors in the Underground Gallery at Bountiful Davis Art Center. While his fans will accept it as part of his unifying take on worldwide cultural cosmology, they might find it less thrilling than his triptych of “Fabric Henchmen” or his exquisite “Canopic Jars,” a comix art modernization of the Egyptian vessels meant to safeguard the viscera of Pharaoh for eternity.

Both would be mistaken, of course: space really was, at least physically, “the final frontier,” as Star Trek had it, and its inconceivably vast emptiness, while it glorified the human species of which it is a naturally occurring part, also relegated us to a trivial corner of a trackless universe where the miracle of existing is always against the odds. Not concealed, but visible through the window that cuts like a gunsight across the soothing green fields of “The Flannel Void,” the random chaos of the heavens contrasts with the orderly mandala patterns in blue, black, and white.

Elmer Presslee, “Canopic Jar”

In June of 2012, 15 Bytes sent photo editor Shalee Cooper, now the director of Modern West Gallery, to photograph Elmer Presslee’s Millcreek home studio in advance of a showing at the much-missed Kayo Gallery. Much has changed since then, and while some of what Presslee has been up to will look familiar to those who witnessed his work then, he’s made changes. A subtle but pervasive one followed his decision to support a trip abroad with labor in a ceramics studio. On returning, clay became a focus, though he still uses (and creatively mis-uses) fabrics, found objects, and the cheap, manufactured goods that call out the characteristics of modern life.

Fantasy, speculation, and even science fiction have been around since the beginnings of art and illustration. Those who see Presslee’s variations on human form as a repudiation of convention have a good point, but we should also see them as legitimate efforts to make art that is both new and valid. BYU Arts professor Joe Ostraff, while he was jurying BDAC’s 48th Annual Statewide Competition, which runs concurrently with The Flannel Void in the Center’s main gallery, visited Presslee’s show and noted how the 18 shelf-mounted ceramic vessels that run through it constitute an extensive and legitimate exploration of that form.

Take just three examples: “Cavity Creep Jar” explores the distinction between the vessel’s exterior form and its sometimes several cavities; “Cracked Open Pot” considers the thing that often lends a pot both its identity and its character: its opening; in this case, a mouth, complete with lips; “Rooted Organic Matter Vase” wears its inner life on the outside. Others down the line possibly recall the British taste for tankards that depict various character types.   

Elmer Presslee, “Cavity Creep Jar,” “Cracked Open Pot” and “Rooted Organic Matter Vase”

Elmer Presslee, “Nature’s Glory”

It’s common at this point to assert that a psychiatrist could have a field day explaining Elmer Presslee’s worldview, the assumption being that it represents a disturbed psyche. I disagree. One of the greatest bodies of similar fantasies is found in the work of the Dutch artist, Hieronymus Bosch, whose recombinant plants and animals delighted a profoundly Catholic, Spanish audience five hundred years ago. However, an explosion of interest in world cultures has found equally transformative images on every terrestrial continent, during every century. Better, perhaps, to say that this prolific and internationally popular multi-media artist has tapped into a long-standing, organic and biological form of something that today’s computers strive to replace with Artificial Intelligence: something the power of which machines at their best can only hint at.

Elmer Presslee, The Flannel Void, Bountiful Davis Art Center, Bountiful, through July 27

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.