Installation view of The Face of Utah Sculpture XX at Utah Cultural Celebration Center

Early in the new millennium, a couple of inauspicious things occurred locally. Shawn Rossiter, a linguist turned painter, decided to start something he felt Utah needed: an arts magazine. 15 Bytes struggled for a few years, then hit its stride in 2005. Same applies to glass master Dan Cummings, who’d started what he’d hoped would be an annual sculpture salon. The Face of Utah Sculpture only began to deliver when Cummings found the Utah Cultural Celebration Center, whereupon his vision of an annual survey of a protean medium took off. It’s now been 20 years, and this anniversary edition sees many of the stalwarts back again, alongside some whose names are as unfamiliar as their materials and subjects are their own.

Pilar Pobil, “Las Campesinas,”

Start with a name both old and new. Pilar Pobil epitomizes the artist as social as well as cultural influence, and in recognition of her contributions to the community, the main space at UCCC, nameless till now, has been christened the Pilar Pobil Celebration Gallery. True to form, Pobil’s work in the show, “Las Campesinas,” features a pair of folkloric women, peasants seated amidst their market-day vegetables. They recall that a large portion of Utah’s population is Hispanic, including many leading artists, and that historic and biographical sources figure in any statewide accounting.

Other figure studies vary from traditional to unexpected. Mark Degraffenried’s “Ascension” reverses the trajectory of the Louvre’s famous Nike of Samothrace, showing a woman floating heavenward, rather than descending on the victorious Greek fleet. Ed Fraughton’s intriguing “Mystery of the Anasazi” employs a powerful gesture to invoke a major prehistoric mystery. At the other end of the spectrum, Mikey Silva illustrates Katherine Dunn’s sensational 1989 novel, “Geek Love,” with a satanic figure of a child whose deliberate deformity did not prevent assuming a role in a loving family. Then there’s Hannah Olive’s “Untitled Tower Piece,” which resembles a rehearsal for Romeo and Juliet’s Balcony Scene, but turns out to be figures made of tape, arranged on a much-used kitchen stool.

It sometimes happens that a contingent of artists shows up at a group show, and students from UVU’s recently energized program are in force at this exhibit. In addition to Silva and Olive, there’s Tyler Christensen, whose “Petrification” recalls Karl Marx’s monumental tombstone, while in “Icarus,” the boy’s wings for once appear to actually melt. Heather Rison’s male nudes, “Three Little Birds” and “Dial Tone,” break with precedent to show lyrical rather than heroic or tragic young men, while Mary Wells’ “Oops … My Bad” is a truly multi-media parable about red food colorings … including blood. Food figures large among these artists, including Maryann Crabtree and Samantha Snyder’s “Well Done,” a yard-wide, vinyl hamburger meant to encourage children to play with their food and make their own choices. Yen-Chen Liao came up with several comic delights, including “An Emergency Case for An International Student from Taiwan”— a found bottle of soy sauce in a box on the wall, on the glass front of which it says, “Break in case of emergency.” Americans are 3% of the Earth’s population, yet need to be reminded that our ways are just as strange to the other 97% as theirs are to us.

Alert readers may have noticed that several of these names appeared last month in our review of UVU’s Under the Surface. The connecting link is Jason Lanegan, who also admits to having taken a group of students to view art in Los Angeles, after which they were asked to create art on the theme of Travel and Identity. One of them, Kenya Heiner, was taken with the hugely influential, but seldom copied Marcel Duchamp, specifically his Box in a Suitcase, for which he created scale replicas of his celebrated works. Heiner’s own works in “Boxed in a Suitcase” echo those. As for Lanegan’s own contribution, his “Fount of Every Blessing” continues his recent trend of hanging hundreds of hand-rolled beads and found trinkets from one of his custom-built model homes, this one with an iconic child in the picture window.

Hannah Olive’s “Untitled Tower Piece” (left) and Clint Call’s “Sticks and Pencils” (right)

Mary Wells, “Oops … My Bad”

Ryiochi Suzuki’s “Sumer Cloud” and “Figure in Cloud”

Abstraction and cubism are still mainstays at The Face of Utah Sculpture. Stalwart regular Ryoichi Suzuki is showing two evocative cloud forms in marble: “Sumer Cloud” and “Figure in Cloud,” each of which invites the mind, through the eye, to converse with ones fingertips. Gary Anderson’s “Shift” is as big as the person who views it, giving the gesture a visceral impact. The much-lamented Darl Thomas’ “Zen Garden” is a true abstraction, in which the original can still be imagined in the presence of an essential version. His “Gizmo,” with a wood base by Clint Call, shows how one work can be a true visual duet.

Stylized images of nature run the gamut from Adam Rees’ aptly titled “Queen of the Forest” to Brian Christensen’s “Horns of Consecration” and “Red Rock Vessel.” Finally, Dana Kuglin’s continuing pleas for water and fish conservation nearly exceed the gallery’s capacity for monumental found objects. As always, there’s too much in the Face of Utah Sculpture to do more than scratch the surface here—a sculptural technique also in evidence.

Darl Thomas, “Zen Garden”

Face of Utah Sculpture XX, Utah Cultural Celebration Center, West Valley City, through Aug. 28

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.