{"id":103658,"date":"2026-06-25T10:50:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T17:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=103658"},"modified":"2026-06-11T14:03:53","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T21:03:53","slug":"103658-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/103658-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Adam Larsen’s Studio Grows Like One of his Sculptures"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Adam Larsen’s studio on his property in Sanpete County is a work in progress. Image by Geoff Wichert.<\/p><\/div>\n

Sanpete County might well be celebrated as the home of more near-misses than any other Utah locale. It contains what cartographers assure us is the precise center of the entire state of Utah, an isolated and hard-to-find spot marked by a stone that invokes the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley\u2019s description of Ozymandias, around which he says, \u201cboundless and bare \/ the lone and level sands stretch far away.\u201d<\/p>\n

The town of Manti bears two such accolades: its temple might have become the oldest such structure in Church history, had not Brigham Young, whose second home was blocks away, decided to demote it to a tabernacle and build a later temple on a more prominent location. And then there\u2019s the Mormon Miracle Pageant, which over its 52-year run drew an estimated 4.5 million history and music enthusiasts to witness what was rumored to be the world\u2019s largest outdoor theatrical event. It was summarily cancelled in 2019.<\/p>\n

The key to both the unquestioned appeal and the limited recognition of Sanpete is its isolation. Faculty and staff at Snow College, perhaps the oldest community college west of the Mississippi, testify to the difficulty of finding professors willing to relocate, even for a few r\u00e9sum\u00e9-building years, to such a remote locale. For those who do, of course, it\u2019s an opportunity to participate in the best-kept secret in education: that schools like Snow offer students direct contact with their teachers in what can be the best learning experience they will have. It also means the faculty tend to have deep roots. This is, simply, one of the few places where a professor born nearby can grow up, travel to earn a degree, then return and spend an entire teaching career in that place with no need to seek advancement elsewhere.<\/p>\n

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Adam Larsen (left) discusses craft with glass artist Suzanne Larson.<\/p><\/div>\n

Consider Adam Larsen<\/a>, the senior full-time faculty member of the Department of Visual Art, or DOVA. Larsen focuses on teaching design, drawing, multimedia skills, and printmaking at Snow, and in his independent work adds to those the fabrication of assemblage sculpture. In fact, it will be argued here that in his personal prints he also creates assemblages, only doing so in his imagination, the assemblages realized as two-dimensional renderings in the medium of print. In fact, in these sometimes quite bold commentaries on how life is lived and spoken of, he closely approaches the contemporary school of photography in which the camera artist, having grown weary of the necessity to find something promising to photograph, instead constructs an original object or scene for the explicit purpose of taking its picture. So there\u2019s a continuity between the objects Larsen makes and the ones he depicts that simply isn\u2019t always the case among artists.<\/p>\n

Everything he does make shares something else that is frequently commented on by his colleagues. It can all be described by a level of skilled completion that routinely calls forth accolades like \u201cflawless\u201d and \u201cperfection.\u201d In an age where flaws are sought out as proof that a rare object is hand-crafted, his appear to the eye to have been manufactured rather than made by hand, and to have been done so to be exactly what they appear to be and play the role he assigns them. Not surprisingly, such objects require months of meticulous labor to produce, and quite often years before that spent searching for precise concepts and materials, whether found discards or acquired new. Their appearance of having been machined and finished to plan is an illusion that is belied by the foremost principle of genuine art-making: the artist is necessarily open to steps that may turn out other than as planned; to lead to an unexpected result, or even a wholly new direction.<\/p>\n

During the current century, while he and his colleagues were growing and reforming Snow\u2019s DOVA, Larsen was simultaneously collecting the parts for a new project, his studio-to-be, which was taking shape over time much like one of his sculptures, though on a very different scale. For comparison, the property his family had owned since the mid-19th century included about six acres they rent out annually to shepherds, and several homes, including one that Larsen replenishes as circumstances allow, like the time he took up the floor of the demolished gymnasium where he first danced with his high school sweetheart, later his wife, and used the boards to replace floors in the house.<\/p>\n

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Originally a granary, Larsen’s studio was moved by truck from its original location to his property. Image by Frank McEntire.<\/p><\/div>\n

He also acquired a building that had been moved about several times by previous generations of his agrarian family, and hauled it to a spot just close enough to the house for convenience, but far enough to require the daily commitment art requires. Today he can stand amidst half a dozen structures, pointing to each and giving its approximate date of construction. He can also explain such technical details as how the stone foundation of the brick chicken house enabled it to survive being heaved apart by frost. It later became his relief printshop.<\/p>\n

The studio is very much a work in progress, but functional at the same time. Knowing how the irrigation channel can back up, he placed the venerable structure on a high foundation that still awaits stone trimming. Inside, the loft is reached by a rough lumber stair with no railing, details that will be fixed when they can be done properly. It can also be hard to distinguish a necessity from an opportunity, and like most, but not all, of his fellow artists who also teach art in rural Utah, Larsen can satisfy his multiple-media proclivities by using his school\u2019s facilities for certain tasks and focusing his personal studio on others. Printmaking requires a lot of room when an edition is in progress, and for this he has his spacious classroom and shop at Snow College. Meanwhile, in his home base he can focus synergistically, though not exclusively, on the demands of his assemblages.<\/p>\n

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Temporary stairs were put in, but with so much art to make, who knows when they’ll be replaced. Image by Geoff Wichert.<\/p><\/div>\n