{"id":2203,"date":"2011-04-06T19:37:55","date_gmt":"2011-04-06T19:37:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=2203"},"modified":"2025-10-23T13:47:32","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T20:47:32","slug":"rio-gallerys-homage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/rio-gallerys-homage\/","title":{"rendered":"Rio Gallery’s Homage"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Justin Wheatley<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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We pay most of our attention to innovators in the arts: individual artists who forge new expressive means, seemingly entirely by their own creative powers. Yet the more closely we look at, say, Van Eyck\u2019s substitution of linseed oil for egg white, or Titian\u2019s replacement of boards with canvas, the more reasonable it seems to admit that while those artists proved the value of the changes, they did not originate them. Earlier practitioners were there first, and eventually they inspired the great man to emulate them, and the famous success that followed levered a far wider change. The truth is that influence is how change makes its way through art.\u00a0The Smithson Effect<\/i>\u00a0argues that a single artist\u2019s vision can take root in the perception of many others, examples of which were traced and tracked down in their works by curators acting like detectives.\u00a0Homage<\/i>, now at the Rio Gallery, looks at the same process from a different point of view. It was artist Namon Bills\u2019 idea to just ask artists who influenced them, and then invite them to exhibit works that showed off the influence. Those who responded include many of the best-known local artists. The influences they named reveal something about the DNA of Utah art.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, we get much of who we are from our parents, but judging by the numbers, artistic ability is not something that is commonly inherited. On the other hand, one of the more common complaints made against modern art is that it lacks emotional content that affects viewers. When he was growing up, Joe Ostraff felt the common drive to distinguish himself from his father, Albert, but fortunately both men lived long enough for the son to come to admire and appreciate his dad\u2019s unique \u201cgifts.\u201d Saying more would only dilute the pleasure of encountering these men through Joe\u2019s artistic response to his dad\u2019s influence, but the theater he built\u00a0|0|<\/strong>\u00a0and filled with an audience of his dad\u2019s birds is the sort of art experience that grows on the viewer and often asks to be shared with others. Blue Critchfield\u00a0<\/strong>is another artist whose father made things; Turtle Depley is a musician, but also the kind of man who turns everything that comes his way into art. His son became a visual artist, but the sort who turns not just things into art, but his ideas as well.<\/p>\n