{"id":11418,"date":"2012-07-05T00:23:17","date_gmt":"2012-07-05T06:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=11418"},"modified":"2025-11-30T08:38:37","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T15:38:37","slug":"superhuman-and-new-mystics-at-the-cuac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/superhuman-and-new-mystics-at-the-cuac\/","title":{"rendered":"superHUMAN and New Mystics at the CUAC"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

William Pope.L\u2019s video, “The Great White Way,”<\/p><\/div>\n

Creation, innovation, inspiration, novelty, ingenuity, genius: the terms we associate with art convey a sense of original invention. Yet most of the visual art we see falls somehow short of such ideals. Sunset falling on a rock landscape, those sheep grazing before the temple, this human figure, or that still life, often convey more than anything else the promise that everything is essentially what we already believe it to be. Such reassurance is something art can do for us, but beyond wish fulfillment lies a whole realm that once upon a time, perhaps when we were still young and avidly seeking novelty, thrilled us with the pleasure that the art critic Robert Hughes too narrowly labeled the \u2018shock\u2019 of the new.<\/p>\n

One artist who has seen and struggled with this not just complacent, but often actively confining impact of imagery on the imagination is Jorge Rojas. Since returning to Utah after exploring the international art scene in New York, Rojas has alternated showing his own art\u2014works that enable a viewer to see familiar objects as if for the first time\u2014with facilitating encounters between the Utah audience and artists preoccupied with modern experience and appropriate expressive techniques. His latest endeavor, the product of over a year\u2019s planning and execution, finds him working with co-curator David Hawkin to present two simultaneous shows at the Central Utah Art Center. The first, superHuman, assembles artists from around the world whose works consciously speculate about alternative ways of being and doing in the world. The second, New Mystics, focuses on local artists whose familiar voices, heard in this alternate context, resonate with a new sense of purpose.<\/p>\n

Rojas and Hawkins lay out an extensive list of fictional precedents that they distinguish from art per se, including mythology, folklore, and such popular entertainments as comic books, pulp novels, and science-fiction films. Pointing to the near-universal popularity manifested by heroes\u2014meaning individuals possessed of prodigious powers\u2014including those that currently dominate Hollywood, they gathered art works that exploit the power of such narrative archetypes to affect broad cultural values. In the simplest form (and vestiges of such transformations are visible here) that could mean a superhero with ethnic characteristics not widely associated with popular icons. Given the probable division of the audience into those who already agree with the artists and those who firmly reject their cause, there are arguably only a handful of strategies that can prevent such works from quickly boring or alienating the audience. One is for the art to be sufficiently entertaining to compete, in its own way, with entertainments that possess far greater resources. The juxtaposition of familiar tropes and clever surprises play a part. So does humor. William Pope.L\u2019s video, “The Great White Way,” in which a skinny black man with glasses, three characteristics that variously undermine his superhero costume, laboriously crawls through New York City, is a funny idea that in actual fact makes viewers as uncomfortable as it does the accidental witnesses who found themselves recast from bystanders to unwitting extras.<\/p>\n