{"id":106466,"date":"2026-10-13T14:24:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-13T21:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=106466"},"modified":"2026-10-29T07:27:26","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T14:27:26","slug":"abe-kimball-where-time-collides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/abe-kimball-where-time-collides\/","title":{"rendered":"Abe Kimball: Where Time Collides"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Printmaker and assemblage artist Abe Kimball (left) shows Frank McEntire and Suzanne Larson his studio in Mt. Pleasant. Image by Geoff Wichert.<\/p><\/div>\n

I refuse to accept the notion that artworks are puzzles meant for the audience to decipher, especially when it is assumed there is only one right answer. Ideally, an encounter with a work of art is more like a collaboration in which the artist and a viewer come to share an experience, one that is agreeable to both of them. Also, many hypotheses attempt to explain why artists make their art and why others want to see it. To me, the only satisfactory explanation is for pleasure. It comes to mind that almost everything humans do might be said to be, ultimately, for that reward.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that \u201cpleasure\u201d alone is sufficient to explain what an artist struggles to find in a given subject matter or technique, even when it is sufficient to win over viewers. Printmaker and assemblage sculptor Abe Kimball, who is currently showing Architecture of Memory and Place<\/em> in the Eccles Art Gallery at SLCC\u2019s South City Campus, provides an ample assortment of his works that provide a relatively transparent demonstration of how pleasure arises from the struggle to successfully achieve a personal goal, and how the results of that effort can in turn please an audience with no particular idea of what the particular artist set out to do.<\/p>\n

Abe Kimball did not start out to become an artist, perhaps because of a disinclination to follow in the footsteps of his father, Wayne Kimball. As both a printmaker and a teacher, Wayne is the sort who gives the term \u201cleading\u201d a literal sense, as could be seen when more than forty well-known Utah artists were invited to see what they could do with one of his prints<\/a>. Although Abe confesses to having studied with his father, his primary area of concern was initially sociocultural anthropology. Success in this field often takes one of two forms: either conscientious labor in obscurity or the sort of notoriety and professional conflict that dogged the likes of W.E.B. du Bois and Margaret Mead. Such was the dilemma the younger Kimball faced.<\/p>\n

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Architecture of Memory and Place at the Eccles Art Gallery at SLCC\u2019s South City Campus features assemblage art and printmaking by Abe Kimball. Image by Shawn Rossiter.<\/p><\/div>\n

As he tells the story, Abe felt constricted by the rigid cultural expectations surrounding him, and he realized that his desire to get past this influential element in order to address his local audience was likely to be best achieved through the medium of art, an endeavor that generally soars above the skirmish of politics, academic or otherwise, and due to its visual, rather than verbal presentation, communicates less explicitly, even ambiguously. In that way, the exchange could remain flexible and more likely to reach a satisfactory conclusion.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, the drawing titled \u201cPending Verification.\u201d In this relatively straightforward image, a possibly sinister-looking gentleman in Victorian attire seems to suspend a supine woman in midair, entirely by the force of an invisible power. To a rational observer, the title discloses a provisional acceptance of something that, after all, is seen by one\u2019s own eyes: evidence that asks to be taken without further examination. But \u201cpending verification\u201d argues that since it defies everything the viewer knows about how the real world works, it will require further exploration. Taken directly from one of Kimball\u2019s numerous and wide-ranging sketchbooks\u2014as witness the fold visible across it\u2014this is the artist contemplating just where the dividing line falls between what one person proposes and another disposes.<\/p>\n

While the sketch, though skillfully drawn, represents the artist\u2019s weighing of a question, a formal, complete work is often closer to a performance. Thus \u201cFortuna Primigenia No. 22,\u201d a lithograph, unveils a fully formed, nested set of occupying ideas that may unfold in the viewer\u2019s mind. Fortuna is the Roman goddess of luck, chance, or fortune. Because her name identifies her as the \u201cfirst-born\u201d child of the supreme god Jupiter, she also ruled over the conditions of life\u2019s beginnings, and so was insightfully associated with childbirth. Here the artist has chosen to show her as a nurse holding an infant, an image that also invokes the Virgin and Child from Christian art.<\/p>\n