Jared Clark’s Bild at the Salt Lake Art Center’s Locals Only Gallery

If you’ve been inside the Salt Lake Art Center any time this year you’ve noticed the cosmetic and structural changes: the brightly painted signage that steers you from one gallery to the next; the video screens on the lobby walls; and the Street Level Gallery’s new access point that makes the space readily viewable and enticing from the front desk. This month the Center unveiled its newest change, the transformation of the previous library space, located at the front of the building, into the new Locals Only Gallery.

For its inaugural exhibit, the LOG presents Jared Clark’s janus-faced installation of refuse, building materials, and used appliances. Clark calls these installations “bilds” and he has been creating them all across the U.S., from Utah, where he grew up, to Virginia, where he went to graduate school, and at points in between. The bilds might rise up on a vacant lot, built from the discarded materials found there; or they might be tightly squeezed into a uniform cube inside a gallery. They’ve even been embedded into walls. Impromptu bilds have risen up in unlikely places, like the wall-like structure that was built up between two trees along a stretch of the Utah County section of I-15 in 2009.

Clark’s materials consist of just about anything he finds at hand: bricks, stone and discarded wood, appliances, suitcases, cassette tapes, Styrofoam and children’s toys. Anything that might make its way to a landfill might also make it into a bild. For one bild Clark “rebuilt” a crumbling brick wall using bars of soap.

Compared to deserted roadsides and crumbling backyards, the Locals Only Gallery is a tame, institutionalized setting for one of Clark’s pieces, a fact the artist seems well aware of and eager to lodge between his tongue and cheek. Seen from the Art Center’s lobby, Clark’s Bild is a flat surface of appliances and lumber, piled up to resemble the grid structure of a Mondrian (without the primary colors). If the Bild looks familiar, if it calls to mind Mondrian and other twentieth-century artists who made the grid a hallmark of postwar art, it is supposed to. As the artist said, with the Bild’s facade he wants to call to mind the “privileged plane of painting” in Modernist discourse.

Step around to the back of the installation, though, and Bild explodes into long fractured planes. Here, where doors, microwaves and everything but the kitchen sink spill into the exhibition space, all has been painted a uniform white so that this face of Clark’s work resembles an uncorked Louise Nevelson.

If Bild’s “front” has more structure, attention to detail and form, its postmodern “rear” contains more surprises, juxtapositions and complications. Neither, in other words, is as simple as they seem. And each depends on the other.

The back side fo Jared Clark’s Bild at the Salt Lake Art Center’s Locals Only Gallery

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.