{"id":102746,"date":"2026-04-28T10:29:43","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T17:29:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=102746"},"modified":"2026-04-29T10:51:36","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T17:51:36","slug":"john-wood-and-cuong-tas-lively-conversation-at-phillips-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/john-wood-and-cuong-tas-lively-conversation-at-phillips-gallery\/","title":{"rendered":"John Wood and Cuong Ta’s Lively Conversation at Phillips Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>There\u2019s a wisecrack by Ad Reinhardt (or some say Barnett Newman) that a sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to get a better look at a painting. That notwithstanding, having the two media share a gallery can be an effective use of space. One goes on the walls, the other between them. That said, it\u2019s a challenge for the installation photographer, who will struggle to avoid the ultimate mixed metaphor of making one artist\u2019s soulful contribution a mere backdrop for another\u2019s.<\/h4>\n

Then again, when two artists who are partners, professionally, or personally, or both, choose to show together, sympathy between their styles can make a statement about far more than their aesthetic principles. Artists are often portrayed as suffering and ill-rewarded victims of their muses, but John Wood and Cuong Ta, currently showing at Phillips Gallery, where Wood has been a steady favorite ever since he graduated from the U of U in 1971, are better seen as examples of what Utah offers its artists: they appear to be happy, hard-working, and content in the important choices that determine their lives.<\/h4>\n

Modern art criticism tends to confuse abstraction, wherein something essential is drawn out from a sight encountered in nature, and concrete art, which is an original construction from marks and gestures. In fact, artists like Wood and Cuong tend to begin a work in one and work their way into the other. Wood is known for favoring two sources, the landscape and the figure, that are sometimes still discernible as a sketch buried in the layers of color arrayed on top of it, and at others present in the overall organization of a work. Like a composer or jazz artist, he may start with a simple theme, elaborate it extensively, and then apparently return to sum up the beginning at the end.<\/h4>\n

Cuong Ta often begins a sculpture with a concept, like his variations here on functional objects. His \u201cboxes\u201d seem to have been built of wet clay, then cut up in various ways, while the \u201cbottles\u201d have had disks, pierced off-center by holes that suggest handles, attached in such profusion that they depart function for something else entirely. Both artists may predicate a work\u2014or a series in Cuong\u2019s case\u2014in language. Wood\u2019s \u201cPoems on the Wall\u201d is his primary example here, in which just enough of the letters survive to identify the poem, while some viewers may regret not being able to pick out enough to gather a sense of what it originally said. In Cuong\u2019s case, as we will see, the label is pretty much all that remains of the original function.<\/h4>\n

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