William Pope.L’s video, “The Great White Way,”

Creation, innovation, inspiration, novelty, ingenuity, genius: the terms we associate with art convey a sense of original invention. Yet most of the visual art we see falls somehow short of such ideals. Sunset falling on a rock landscape, those sheep grazing before the temple, this human figure, or that still life, often convey more than anything else the promise that everything is essentially what we already believe it to be. Such reassurance is something art can do for us, but beyond wish fulfillment lies a whole realm that once upon a time, perhaps when we were still young and avidly seeking novelty, thrilled us with the pleasure that the art critic Robert Hughes too narrowly labeled the ‘shock’ of the new.

One artist who has seen and struggled with this not just complacent, but often actively confining impact of imagery on the imagination is Jorge Rojas. Since returning to Utah after exploring the international art scene in New York, Rojas has alternated showing his own art—works that enable a viewer to see familiar objects as if for the first time—with facilitating encounters between the Utah audience and artists preoccupied with modern experience and appropriate expressive techniques. His latest endeavor, the product of over a year’s planning and execution, finds him working with co-curator David Hawkin to present two simultaneous shows at the Central Utah Art Center. The first, superHuman, assembles artists from around the world whose works consciously speculate about alternative ways of being and doing in the world. The second, New Mystics, focuses on local artists whose familiar voices, heard in this alternate context, resonate with a new sense of purpose.

Rojas and Hawkins lay out an extensive list of fictional precedents that they distinguish from art per se, including mythology, folklore, and such popular entertainments as comic books, pulp novels, and science-fiction films. Pointing to the near-universal popularity manifested by heroes—meaning individuals possessed of prodigious powers—including those that currently dominate Hollywood, they gathered art works that exploit the power of such narrative archetypes to affect broad cultural values. In the simplest form (and vestiges of such transformations are visible here) that could mean a superhero with ethnic characteristics not widely associated with popular icons. Given the probable division of the audience into those who already agree with the artists and those who firmly reject their cause, there are arguably only a handful of strategies that can prevent such works from quickly boring or alienating the audience. One is for the art to be sufficiently entertaining to compete, in its own way, with entertainments that possess far greater resources. The juxtaposition of familiar tropes and clever surprises play a part. So does humor. William Pope.L’s video, “The Great White Way,” in which a skinny black man with glasses, three characteristics that variously undermine his superhero costume, laboriously crawls through New York City, is a funny idea that in actual fact makes viewers as uncomfortable as it does the accidental witnesses who found themselves recast from bystanders to unwitting extras.

Pope.L takes advantage of his identity to subvert racial sensitivity, giving him an edge over mass-market entertainments. It also gives him a way to exploit the sympathy of the far larger portion of the audience that fancies itself free of prejudice and inherently sympathetic to his predicament. Xaviera Simmons, in “Untitled (Pink),” and Chitra Ganesh, in “Hidden Trails,” make similar use of female nudity to take their work places male artists hesitate to venture. For someone disinterested in superheroes, though, their familiar themes—confrontation with dangers both known and unknown, from wild animals to personal transformation—and their presumed resolution through individual courage lacked novelty in either theme or execution, in spite of exotic locales and evocative details. Perhaps the Internet and Lonely Planet have undermined the whole idea that anything is exotic any more.

Maybe that’s why Dulce Pinzon’s photographs of actual Latin American immigrants doing the jobs they actually do, in the actual places they work, accompanied by citations of the amounts of money they are able to earn here to send home, convey a stronger sense of heroism. Here only the costumes seem out of place, and the irony in that is for the viewer to discover, rather than the artist to belabor. In “Self-Portrait as Azua (The Fall 2),” Shaun El C. Leonardo uses sign-painters enamels on a cut-out image floating away from the wall, a bold combination that works with his unconventional pose—a powerfully-built body tumbling over backwards, its arms, legs, and head dangling passively—to create an image that demands attention and sticks in the mind. Like Pope.L, and Pinzon, he makes sure we see his characters’ Kryptonite: the vulnerability that gives superheroes their human dimensions.

Shaun El C. Leonardo, “Self-Portrait as Azua (The Fall 2)”

Given the venue and the publicity, it’s surprising how few of the works here employ experimental techniques like video. Most are comics-related and show off the kind of graphic invention and surface versatility that has made comix (to use Art Spiegelman’s combined term) one of the most influential media, in spite of rejection by galleries and collectors, for over a century. In “Horoscope Woman,” Kevin Darmanie channels Robert Williams while relocating the image of aquatic culture from the beach to the swimming pool. Blanka Amezkua seizes actual comic imagery and makes them her own, using nail enamels to overwhelm and repurpose their bold graphics. Elsewhere, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz’s “Wepa Woman, Exile,” raises the question why her enlarged comic pages belong on the gallery wall, rather than in one of the so-called graphic novels that appear to have inspired it. Kerry James Marshall’s “Dailies from Rythm Mastr”  captured attention with their large size and spontaneous, memoir-like feel, but also resorted to gimmicks that do the printer’s equivalent of what actors call breaking the fourth wall. They called attention to the medium without employing the disbelief-shattering innovations of Will Eisner. And speaking of the history that stretches behind these artists, whether they know it or not, no one should make the mistake of thinking there is anything here more street-smart, more gritty and realistic, than what appeared in the pages of The Spirit as early as 1940.

Jerry James Marshall’s “Dailies from Rythm Mastr”

Still, those ordinary, and very real citizens who were caught trying to figure out how to react to a black superhero crawling past at their feet, fitted out in an elaborate costume but accompanied by a meager crew, may have paused to marvel, not at his narrative deeds, but rather at his having found the means and the courage to live out his vision in a necessarily pubic space. Maybe, in an age where an artist’s life may have a greater impact than his or her work, that’s the real message of superHUMAN.

For anyone needing a little more reason to make the drive to Ephraim, and who hasn’t yet seen C.C.A. Christensen’s family cabin in its new guise as adjunct gallery to the CUAC, New Mystics provides an opportunity to stand in the original Utah landscape master’s studio and compare his impact on our collective imaginations with the work of today’s masters, including Fidalis Buehler, Tyrone Davies, Allen Ludwig, Fionn McCabe, and Art Morrill.

Every one of these artists demonstrates loyalty to the spirit of the now through the use, in some form, of collage technique. For Allen Ludwig, that means simulating a corner of the studio (or of the mind) with an accidental-seeming array, including digital prints that look hand made and painted panels that mimic computer software components. The feeling of collage arises in Art Morrill’s portraits in two ways: the faces are built from an assortment of graphic devices, and placed on a variety of pre-existing plywood surfaces that work like prepared grounds. Buehler sticks to conventional paper for his mixed media paintings, on which naive forms suggest tales from the dawn of time, once told in pictoglyphs but here given solid form inside sophisticated representation of space. Arguably the most sophisticated collages are the mash-ups of Fionn McCabe, which seem to capture the graphic-fueled revolution in our vision at the moment of its equivalent of the Big Bang.|10| In this context, Tyrone Davies three-minute video, Word, calls attention to the technical fact that collage is in the very nature of film.

What an artwork hangs next to can make us see it in a whole new way, and a once-in-a-lifetime assemblage like this can change the way we see the whole world.

Tyrone Davies

superHUMAN and New Mystics, curated by Jorge Rojas and David Hawkins, are at Ephraim’s Central Utah Art Center (CUAC) through August 3.

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.