{"id":101791,"date":"2026-02-17T21:11:46","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T04:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=101791"},"modified":"2026-02-18T21:55:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T04:55:17","slug":"art-beyond-alarm-the-kimballs-case-for-wonder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/art-beyond-alarm-the-kimballs-case-for-wonder\/","title":{"rendered":"Art Beyond Alarm: The Kimball\u2019s Case for Wonder"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Usually, when a creative event is described as \u201cnot to be missed,\u201d the claim is rooted in its contemporary relevance. Numerous indispensable art exhibitions have conveyed alarm about the environment and what threatens it, and to be sure no political or social circumstance feels more pressing, nor so inexplicably ignored. For the last decade, the Kimball Art Center in Park City has alternated sounding that alarm with a proffered alternative, one that looks beyond the human folly of the moment to explore the source of our fatal predicament in the timeless nature of the human condition. Currently, in Returning to Wonder: Moments of Awe in the World Around Us<\/em> and All Sketches Wish to be Real<\/em>, Kimball director Aldy Milliken and curator Nancy Stoaks\u2014who are surely among the most comprehensively attuned stewards of our shared art\u2014have pulled together a mix of local and national artists to celebrate something fundamental, which might best be described as the role of actual sensory experience, as seen in the gallery, in the creations and sharing of conscious experience and memory.<\/h4>\n

Early in his career, American glassblower Josiah McElheny, clearly unwilling to follow in the footsteps of his contemporaries, let alone copy the empty ornaments of his Italian and Bohemian forebears, chose to pursue what he called \u201cbeautiful, non-decorative objects\u201d that included advertising his faux Roman glass as grave goods from the (fictitious) \u201conly known tomb of a Roman glassblower.\u201d Then, in a parody of another academic staple, he displayed three categories of glass side by side: authentic pieces, copies of rare works made for broader exhibition, and forgeries intended to deceive collectors\u2014all three made by him in the glass shop. His further work involved making actual physical copies of glass objects that survived, whether they were ever real or not, only in prints, paintings, novels, and other images of two, or fewer, dimensions.<\/h4>\n

McElheny today, while moving ever closer to the existential core of the individual, hand-crafted object, has found a way to refresh the image, or mental construction, of geometric forms. Making them of colorless, extremely clear glass brings them as close as possible to the pure diagrams of math textbooks or computer graphics, yet adds the physical, three-dimensional experience back into the stripped-down data. Rotate them and they come to life. Calling them \u201cFrom the Library of Future Geometries\u201d suggests they are still in the action of becoming, which is to say part of the reciprocal realization and idealization of ideas and actualities.<\/h4>\n
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Mended spiderwebs by Nina Katchadourian<\/p><\/div>\n