Statewide annuals — those exhibits that solicit entries from all artists across the state of Utah and submit them to the judgment of a juror or jurors — happen all over Utah. The most well-known is up right now at the Springville Museum of Art. Though it’s almost a century old, the Springville Salon is not Utah’s oldest statewide exhibition of Utah art (that honor goes to the Arts Council’s Statewide annual) but it is certainly the state’s biggest. The French Salons of the 19th-century, for which Springville’s exhibit is named, attracted huge crowds and gave inspiration, or indignation, to the pens of countless critics. Despite its notoriety and size, though, relatively little is ever written about Springville’s Salon. I can only remember ever seeing a couple of articles on the Salon in 15 Bytes. This year the Salt Lake Tribune has been silent on the exhibit, and the Deseret News’ article on the show gives most of its column space to discussing the number of entries, which reads very much like their article on the 2010 show. No one, however, seems to talk about the art on display, and that may be because the Salon is too big to handle.

Painting by Sunny Belliston Taylor

Size is one of the Salon’s strengths. Where else can you see so many Utah artists (and a few from Idaho, I noticed) in one place. Many of the artists will be household names to people interested in Utah art. When the artists aren’t pushing themselves this can make the Salon seem repetitive; but when things are good you are delighted to discover a new direction for one of your favorite artists — like Sunny Belliston Taylor’s darker, stripped down series of abstracts with an apocalyptic feel, one of which won a third place prize. The exhibit’s size also means you’re likely to discover new artists, either young and fresh on the scene, or even experienced artists who so far have not entered your radar.

One of my favorite discoveries this year was Heather Campbell, a Logan artist who uses mundane objects to create finely-crafted marvels that call to mind gilded Old-World fabrications, but that never let you forget they are made of marbles, jacks, spoons, and crafted polymer.

Another discovery is Suzanne Conine, whose massive metal and clay piece looks as if it might tear the wall down. Hung like a normal 2-D object, “Red River” is a series of thick ceramic slabs, finished in a variety of glazes. They call forth the red mud and lustrous surfaces that take so many to southern Utah. The work has such presence that I couldn’t help wishing it had more room to breath so that its physicality could be displayed to full effect.

Suzanne Connine’s “Red River”

If size is a strength for the Salon it is also its weakness. To have so many works in one place doesn’t help if in the end you can’t actually see the pieces. In the same room as Conine’s piece, John Helton’s “Symphony of Flight” is hemmed in by wood benches. I’m always happy to find a place to sit and look at works for more than a few seconds, but in this case the benches so surround the sculpture that you aren’t able to look at the piece in the round, nor feel the impact of its fused shards of copper-clad wood.

Making sense of the macro is as hard as the micro in an exhibit like this. To solve this Springville has had the habit of dividing works into categories: traditional, impressionistic, visionary and abstract. The last two categories are apparent in the two galleries devoted to this work. Visionary is always the most eclectic and the most fun, as it tends to be a catchall for what doesn’t fit in the other categories. Where else would you put Julie Jentzsch’s “Portable,” which from afar looks like a straightforward sculpture of the Eiffel Tower but which on closer inspection is a “portable” yarn sculpture that “stands” because it is suspended from the ceiling. With the snip of the supporting string the piece would collapse and easily fit into a large handbag.

Shirley Tegan, “Grounded”

The ordering of the other galleries is not as apparent. Photography has been hung all together, in an easily-missed side gallery, rather than in the normal categories. In the Dumke gallery three figurative works, by John Erickson, Adrian Waggoner, and Stephanie Deer stand out amongst landscapes and still lifes. In the same gallery you might almost miss Shirley Tegan’s “Grounded,” a wood sculpture, encased in plexiglass that shows a cactus below and above ground, but you shouldn’t. In places one gets the sense that some effort was made to curate the hanging of the show so that certain pieces speak with others. This can be jarring, to see a three-toned, minimalist Buffalo next to an intricate oil painting of Dead Horse Point, but it helps avoids the lethargy that can ensue when entering a room full of like works.

The most intriguing of rooms is just off the entrance, where three large figurative works stand out amongst works that otherwise seem to have no relationship. The figurative pieces are similar enough in concept — each is a large painting of another artist — that one might think they were sought after by a curator rather than happened on by a juror. Randall Lake’s full length portrait of fellow painter David Estes as a musketeer feels a little odd; Ryan Brown’s studio-size ode to plein-air painting too grandiose; but Zachary Proctor’s portrait of a cigar-smoking David Dornan in his studio, which won a Curator’s Award, felt just right. The hazy glow of its finish brings out the aura of a Utah icon and teacher whose presence looms over many Utah artists. That Proctor pulls off “a Dornan” within his portrait of Dornan reveals the type of cheek that gives one hope the student will be able to get beyond the teacher.

This year the exhibit spills on to the museum’s second floor. Climbing up the stairs small signs tell you to turn left, where a large alpine scene by John Hughes pulls you across one gallery to a series of small rooms, painted a dark cranberry color. Hughes work, which I have seen reproduced in his 15 Bytes columns, doesn’t disappoint in person. Exactly how these rooms are organized is not entirely clear. A minimalist orange painting by David Jones hangs next to a narrative work by Matt J. Larsen that feels like it came out of a novel by Zola. The two works, and others in these galleries, have no discernible relationship, making the area feel like the Salon’s annex. To make matters worse, a couple of the rooms, painted in the same color, are not even devoted to the Salon. This only became apparent when I noticed that a number of the paintings were by deceased artists.

Zachary Proctor’s portrait of David Dornan

On the same floor one finds two galleries devoted to the museum’s collection of early Utah art, always a delight to see, though these first-rate works don’t make the living artists who are still working in the same vein look good by comparison. Also upstairs is a large room devoted to Soviet era impressionist painters, an exhibit that in one form or another has been in the museum every time I have visited. I couldn’t help but think how much better the 253 accepted works in the Salon could have been displayed if they had been allowed to nudge aside these large paintings from the other side of the world.

Precisely because the Salon is so big and does include so much art, one is always struck by what does not appear. Looking through the galleries I was happy to find a number of my favorite names; at the same time I could come up with a long list of artists, all well-established, that I didn’t see here. One can never know if this is simply because they were not selected by the jurors, or if, as I have heard a number of prominent artists mention, they simply stay away from the show.

What does seem to be lacking in the Salon is new media. Except for one small, easily-missed component on a piece by Vance Mellen, there are no video or digital works. The one “installation” piece is more of a allegorical sculpture. The Salon is already crowded, so what would happen if they began choosing non-traditional works?

Assemblage by Travis Tanner

The Salon has its own unique method of selecting works. For the sake of partiality some statewides get out-of-state jurors, but the Salon usually chooses people from the community. This year Phillip Malzl, a PhD and art instructor, and the Salt Lake Art Center’s Adam Price, selected the works. Or at least most of them. Springville has something they call “Utah’s Most Honored,” a list of 100 artists first introduced during the 2002 Olympics. These are automatically given a spot on the wall, which can either ensure quality or redundancy (I’ve always wondered how this list is created. Is an algorithm used to determine the value of one honor over another, coming up with an artist’s “Honored” score; or is it simply a matter of the Museum choosing its favorite artists?) In addition I have seen past calls that indicate the director reserves the right to jury in works of his own selection.

Shea Guevara, “Back Alley”

Like most juried exhibitions, awards are also a notoriously sticky subject. The Salon sprinkles “Awards of Merit” liberally enough to make them meaningless. A handful of Director and Curator awards are given and one first-place, two second-place and three third-place prizes are awarded. The latter seem spread out enough to satisfy the Museum’s categorical approach: Taylor’s award for Abstract, Travis Tanner’s immaculately constructed assemblage box for the Visionary, and Sandy Freckleton Gagon’s “She Remembered She Could Fly” for the traditional or figurative category. I was pleased to see Shea Guevara’s “Back Alley,” a study of color and form whose cityscape subject is a welcome change from the ubiquitous landscape, get a second place award. Jeff Pugh’s “Skyscrapers & Cowpies” was the Salon’s big winner, and while there is nothing objectionable in the slightly angular depiction of cows in a central Utah scenery, one wonders what about it made Malzl and Price think it superlative.

But that is the nature of statewide annuals: disappointed artists who didn’t get in and perplexed patrons who second guess the jurors. As the biggest of them, the Salon must be used to it by now. They are also used to getting bigger each year, as they continue to tell the media. But bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. Sometimes it just means more crammed or more confusing. It can be hard on the patron to see the works and to make any sense of them. The Arts Council’s statewide spreads itself over three years, focusing on a specific set of media each year. The Eccles Art Center in Ogden does something similar, choosing alternating years for its Black and White show to give space to photography and other monochromatic media that might get lost along more colorful counterparts. This may not be the solution for Springville, but since their yearly exhibit already seems too big to handle how will they deal with the future — when the younger generation of artists, working in new and challenging media, must be accommodated lest the Salon become irrelevant?

Jeff Pugh’s “Skyscrapers & Cowpies”

The Spring Salon continues at the Springville Museum of Art through July 3.

Tony Watson

Tony Watson is originally from Washington State but has lived most of his adult life in Utah. No one occupation has occupied his working hours but his leisure hours are spent either climbing southern Utah’s redrock country or engaging his mind with aesthetic issues.