Susan Makov, “Hide and Seek”

The President’s Art Show at Salt Lake Community College is essentially a juried, statewide art exhibition. It never fails to bring out a substantial cross-section of recent, high-quality Utah art, along with a large and enthusiastic audience. Its sponsors, the SLCC Art Committee, also challenge all involved by accepting a substantial selection: about 100 artists and their works. The result comes close to being encyclopedic, sampling a variety of approaches that extend from traditional subjects and techniques to the most recent, adventuresome examples of both. Oil painting, quilting, collage, and other time-tested techniques can be seen beside computer-assisted, digital-printed, and laser-cut examples. The image of families cooperating to raise the coming generations shares space in these works with challenges to those coming generations from environmental and social issues. Compared to more narrowly focused exhibitions, this show presents perhaps the most complete catalog of where our arts stand today.

One useful way to think about artists is that they are like social and historical filters. 
Events pass through an artist’s consciousness and are permanently represented in an aesthetic form they rarely, if ever, achieve elsewhere. An excellent example would be Alison Neville’s sardine can dioramas, wherein she memorializes deceptively trivial-seeming events in which humans encounter the natural world in ways that are actually anything but trifling. In this latest example, “Orcas Sinking the Champagne,” she looks at by far the most dangerous animal in the world’s oceans, once perhaps more accurately known as the “Killer Whale,” but which humans have tended to mistakenly regard as large porpoises who, like their smaller cousins, are inherently friendly to us, even though captive Orcas have killed their keepers. The recent attacks on several yachts suggest that once again we’ve made an unsupportable assumption about our place on the planet. In this example, Neville has made use of an oval can that has circles impressed in its bottom that suggest those made in water when something drops into it. And once again, she calls her audience to move nearer and take a closer look at something more meaningful and important than viewers might otherwise ignore.

Alison Neville, “Orcas Sinking the Champagne,”

This kind of originality, of innovation and experimentation, are regular features of the art of our time. After centuries in which artists learned their trade off masters from whom their work was often indistinguishable—think of Andrea del Verrochio and Leonardo da Vinci or Domenico Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo—Modernism inspired an era in which looking like your teacher was, and is, anathema: again, compare Jackson Pollock with his teacher, Thomas Hart Benton. At SLCC, examples abound. Among the more noteworthy are Jiyoun Lee-Lodge’s “Waterman” series, in which human arms and legs emerge from a powerful, and vividly drawn eruptions of water. Her works are often large prints, but in the example here, “Waterman—On the Bed,” we have instead an original painting, in which the textures left behind by her brush make the image more than usually telling. Or there’s “Yarn Tree,” by io hiatus, in which surely the largest source of biomass on Earth, a widespread and indispensable ally of human success, is represented using a craft technique that can be applied to bring virtually any real or imaginary object into the gallery.

Some artists use a particular material approach, like Rebecca Klundt’s reclaimed and painted wood in “Gifts From the Sea,” or Robert Fuerer’s sewing button versions of pivotal artworks: here “Frida and the Monkey.” Michael Haswood’s traditional Navajo masks and accessories in “Winter Blessings” give his subjects a vaguely unsettling, yet powerful and still approachable look.

Jessica Booth, “Harbor”

Throughout the years, some of the most beautiful and evocative, new approaches somehow feel likely to become standards, much as oil replaced egg yolk as the painter’s preferred medium, or Cubism or Surrealism went from controversial to perennially popular. We might consider that papier maché, invented long ago by serious artists, in time became a stalwart of every grade school crafts program. We have the opportunity to see at least one technique here that may one day follow that path: Jessica Booth’s “Harbor,” an unrealistically large, sensuous, and initially eye-and- mind-delighting seashell, may well boggle the viewers’ minds and alter their consciousness upon their learning that this seeming miracle of nature is made of banana paper pulp applied to a wire armature. It’s easy to imagine such evocative treasures inspiring mainstream decorator knockoffs, but for now it’s a marvelous original.

Elsewhere, such visual inventions clearly identify their makers as consistently original. Vincent Mattina uses a laser to cut a pattern of holes into the layers of his digitally-printed and elaborately constructed paper assemblage, “Queen of Bees,” in which the holes echo and elaborate on the hexagonal cells that are the unique signature, storage sites, and nurseries of their makers. It’s a new approach here, and most likely he will find original uses for the technique in exploring other subjects.

Even the most comfortably familiar and venerable techniques are reborn today. The quilting of Rosanna Lynne Welter’s “Spudnut” (What a title!), Sheryl Gillilan’s “Color Bomb!” and Margaret Abramshe’s “Heat Wave” is as original as the subjects they celebrate.

From left: Rosanna Lynne Welter, “Spudnut,” Sheryl Gillilan, “Color Bomb!” and Margaret Abramshe, “Heat Wave”

In a sense, all of the artists chosen for this exhibition are masters of their traditional methods. But some stand out for their achievement. Kelsey Critchfield–de Ferrari’s “La Rosa Benedetta” seams together a portrait that exceeds a photograph as only oils can with a background borrowed from El Greco to produce a vision that we might otherwise expect to find on the cover of a science fiction or fantasy novel. Or a film poster.

Arash Shoveiri, “Absurd Euphoria”

With just under one hundred artists and their works present, examples far exceed the limits of this examination. We will close then, with two standout works: one of the largest here and the other a tiny reply from the world beneath our feet. Arash Shoveiri has been perfecting his vision of human irrationality through several recent outings, and his “Absurd Euphoria” brings the central image definitively to Utah by including scenes from Arches National Park and the last nine months of national news. The absurdity of how much ingenuity and material wealth a purportedly modern population invests in distraction, rather than in confronting and at least trying to solve the overwhelmingly daunting problems that face us, here takes on a form that is at once fantastic, symbolic, and as precise as laser surgery. Only someone conversant in a world of examples of human folly could have painted it, and the shock Shoveiri experienced as he fled across the face of the Earth in order to encounter these images was an essential step in its creation. As before, his protagonist evokes a stone idol from a land of warfare and human sacrifice, who dwells in a harsh desert he does not see, thanks to the advanced technology that downloads pleasant fantasies and distracting lies directly to him from a source hovering for its own safety somewhere unseen, while its anodyne poison feeds him through a fiber optic umbilical cord that dangles to wherever it can do the most damage. Sadly, it might be the most trenchant vision among so many more hopeful and more to be desired alternatives.

The final example is as charming as that one is powerful. Megan Wilson’s “Isopod Cluster” offers an equally important change in perspective, showing how art can once again bring viewers close to something that may seem trivial, or even invisible to the casual or occasional observer, but which exemplifies the natural order that undergirds our lives and we ignore at our peril. Instead, Wilson lavishes close examination and meticulous drafting, along with animating imagination and a mixed media of detail that duplicates the way the world becomes richer the more closely we examine it: in essence recalling that the longer the looking, the more will eventually be seen, and so she leads us to discover again what was once called the miracle of life, but should more accurately be styled the miracle of all being. It’s not yet too late to contemplate the humble and modest in our midst and the example they set by the way their lives contribute, giving more for all than they take for themselves. And so many of them are artists.

Megan Wilson, “Isopod Cluster”

President’s Art Show, SLCC South City Campus, Salt Lake City, through Nov. 18.

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.