{"id":25728,"date":"2014-06-04T22:16:36","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T04:16:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=25728"},"modified":"2025-11-04T15:27:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T22:27:06","slug":"sourcing-the-new-morgan-donovan-nancy-vorm-and-john-mack-at-finch-lane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/sourcing-the-new-morgan-donovan-nancy-vorm-and-john-mack-at-finch-lane\/","title":{"rendered":"Sourcing the New: Morgan Donovan, Nancy Vorm and John Mack at Finch Lane"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Every time art renews itself, there is the impression that something entirely new is taking place: something coming into being that has never been seen before. More likely, taking in the whole picture, the artists are actually narrowing the field, selecting a small part of what went before, and by isolating a kernel, foregrounding a seed that may grow into the next big thing. This month, the indispensable Finch Lane Gallery exhibits three artists who each offer a cross section of this progress. On first viewing, Morgan Donovan\u2019s photographic portraits appear conventional, while Nancy Vorm offers seemingly endless variations on ornamental design. John Mack focuses on materials and techniques, suggestively slotting him into last century\u2019s breakout of art rooted in crafts. With time, such initial impressions come to seem premature and short sighted.<\/p>\n

Morgan Donovan begins by ignoring most of the options expected from photographic portraits or figure studies. Take the assumption, which came early to camera work, that each subject requires, or at least rewards, its own treatment: angle, distance, lens, lighting, and so on. By framing each of her two dozen models identically, with the same absence of background or personal adornment and in the same light, she signals that what she is after has nothing to do with any of these traditional means of self-expression. What she offers in their place looks on first viewing like a stunt: each model close up, stripped down, scrubbed clean, and presented straight from the shower, still dripping wet, as metaphorically, spiritually naked as they appear to be in the flesh. And indeed, this could have turned out to be nothing more than a gimmick, were it not for the alchemy that occurs when artist and subject gaze into each other\u2019s eyes through a camera. To do what Donovan does forces intimacy between her and her models, in itself a process that could come down anywhere from a doctor visit to a police investigation. Whatever comfort the artist\u2019s sensitivity may offer, whatever trust they may develop, merely allows the threat of the camera to emerge like a bone lifting the skin of a flexing body. Anyone who has been to, for just one example, a nude beach knows the difference between simply being naked and being photographed in the nude.<\/p>\n

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The infinitesimal adjustments of facial muscles that Donovan captures hint at a more essential story than would her subjects\u2019 choice of clothing or pose, had those choices been available. \u201cKaren\u2019s\u201d self-assertion gradually distinguishes itself from \u201cLillian\u2019s\u201d caution, while \u201cRachel\u2019s\u201d angst could have more to do with her adolescence, since the much younger \u201cYoung Boy\u201d asserts himself as positively as anyone here. The rainbow of races, ages, and types, however, mostly serves to make the familiar point that universal traits are common property, not means to individual discernment.<\/p>\n

The real breakthrough here has to do with the very nature of photography. It\u2019s generally understood that most of the time, upon seeing a photographic image, viewers ignore the medium and immediately engage its subject. This is so true that even when the technique is hugely intrusive, most of the audience will respond by doubling down: increasing the mental effort to penetrate it. We have become experts at seeing through the lack of color in early photos, the blur and poor detail in snapshots, and\u2014if more proof were needed\u2014the almost total lack of any visual virtue whatsoever in today\u2019s cell-phone and video images. What Donovan achieves here, then, is to turn her subject into something other than itself: to capture the returning gaze as if it were a mirror, and, by so doing, to put us in her place, making us become as close as possible to being the photographer who confronts these vulnerable persons, and in turn is confronted by them. As we look upon their images, they seem to come alive and to engage us in the delicate negotiations that all successful photography requires. Forget the mumbo-jumbo about photography showing us some unchangeable, personal essence\u2014the very existence of which recent studies have increasingly called into question. The notion that today\u2019s art is doing something new has a lot to do with its unmistakeable didactic quality, and Morgan Donovan\u2019s contribution is to make clear what is always true\u2014even<\/em>\u00a0of photographs: perceived truth is always momentary, instantaneous. Eternal verities, if they exist, require another approach.<\/p>\n

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Another approach is one way of describing Nancy Vorm\u2019s use of rust, paper, and beeswax. The twentieth century saw contemporary breakthroughs in the mixing of media, in the revival of the long-lost medium of encaustic, and in the entry of abstract ornament into the gallery. Vorm has taken what is common to all three and built her own world from those elements. With help from Finch Lane\u2019s discerning curators, she\u2019s filled an entire room with a range of wall-mounted and hanging variations on the encounter between her three materials and three approaches, presenting just the right range and number of examples in sufficient density to overwhelm the notion that the combination has been seen before.<\/p>\n

Vorm\u2019s basic building block is a delightful oxymoron: rusted paper. There\u2019s an enigma here, and evidence that the encounter of iron oxide and vegetable leaf is often preceded by some unspecified processing of one or the other. At times it looks like printmaking, with various steel surfaces standing in for zinc or copper plates and rust playing the part of ink. At other times, especially when she uses a translucent paper like unyru, the mottling of orange pigment seems more organic and mysterious. Add to the mix that the result is invariably subjected to further manipulation, ranging from simple crumpling to the most elaborate collaging, layering, and mounting. Paintings, hanging curtains, scrolls, plaques, and wall paneling are among the references her objects suggest, along with the implication that any pre-existing visual or decorative language could be translated, so to speak, into her new means of expressing them.<\/p>\n

Hanging in the center of the gallery, six \u201cRusted Scrolls\u201d demonstrate how an installation could acquit itself against the demands of architecture as well as can any comparable textile. While the fundamental color range is narrow, running from yellow to oranges and browns, a row of \u201cMandalas\u201c<\/em>\u00a0on one wall display not only the compatibility of rust with other colors, but its ability to hold its own in strong contrast with blue and green. A trio labeled \u201cRestoration\u201c<\/em>\u00a0inserts rust into conventional encaustic paintings\u2014if one can call anything in that reborn medium \u2018conventional.\u2019 \u201cDangling Permutations,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0juxtaposed against other treatments throughout the room, show off the cohesion of the materials across different effects. Climaxing the exhibit, \u201cHoosier 9-patch,\u201d which covers the end wall and invokes tile more than wallpaper, is comprised of 77 panels, slightly less than one square foot apiece, demonstrating the infinite versatility of a single grid\u2014the 3 x 3 squares referred to in the title\u2014colliding with a handful of textures in a context of free accidents and good judgment.<\/p>\n

Throughout, the translucency of the paper, the transparency of wax, and the palpable way the sense of touch responds to Vorm\u2019s visible textures bring to life the suggestive resources and evocative power of abstraction at its purest and most welcome: concrete sensual facts that seem almost to assemble themselves into a universe of pleasure to be explored.<\/p>\n

Exploration is also a way to summarize John Mack\u2019s efforts \u2018to make connections between what is known and what we have yet to discover,\u2019 as he describes the impulse that produces his organically suggestive wood-and-metal objects. It\u2019s worth noting that he begins with real world references\u2014to actual vessels like boats and imaginative ones like space ships\u2014but that he also strives to delay the viewer from becoming acclimated to them. To slow that process and keep them estranged, he first gives his objects, in place of titles, names that mimic the binomial nomenclature, or two-name system of classification, that scientists use to identify species. \u201cAtolla wyvillei navis,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0for example, is a vertical steel fin with a swelling in the center that gives it a resemblance to a upright manta ray, equipped with interactive features that allow it to interact with gallery visitors. Here, though, Mack twists one of the emerging clich\u00e9s of techno-art: the sensors that make it interactive with the audience are located on the opposite face from the light they control. Thus the dance viewers so commonly perform in an effort to make such a work \u2018do its thing\u2019 ends up frustrated, since it\u2019s actually being controlled not by the person in front of it, but by whoever happens to walk behind it while looking at something else. The effect is a little more like interacting with an actual living being: something with alien motives and, to us, baffling ways of reacting to its surroundings.<\/p>\n

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\u201c<\/em>Pomacanthidae navis,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0a hassock-sized steel donut supported on six sinuous copper legs, flashes lights within its glass center like lightning within a cloud, but only in response to vibrations on the floor. Again, the \u2018motives\u2019 of the other\u2019s behavior require some effort to decode. Yet a case can be made that the most moving objects here forego such reactive mechanics in favor of a more old-fashioned reticence, which in the past has moved humans to reach out in a more tenuous, cautious, and alert fashion. \u201cDactylobatus clarkia navis,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0made of wood strips that overlap like they might on the hull of a truly fine boat, caresses the senses as if it had been freeze-framed in the act of swimming by, concerned with its own mysterious purposes, its eyeless and earless progress guided by senses we lack. And looking like a fossil left over from a previous great extinction, \u201cBassozetus Compressus navis\u201d\u00a0<\/em>preserves the recognition that living things achieve many contrasting forms. Looking like a giant marlin spike or an even more enlarged seashell, it evokes the formative influences that shape tools and living beings alike.<\/p>\n

Scholarly observers seek in vain for the sources of human invention. Where did we get our elaborate languages, when close study only shows them constantly breaking down? Where does art come from: fully formed from the outset, yet capable of so much elaboration? In seeking to simplify and focus her task, Morgan Donovan has rekindled the emotional immediacy missing from so much contemporary art. Choosing a single pigment and support let Nancy Vorm uncover not only the breadth of technique, but the depth of the eye\u2019s appetite. By using his mind to challenge what his hands can do, John Mack finds common elements in disparate narratives. Each of these artists has taken a familiar subject matter and found an elevated presentation suitable to it, in the process transforming both.<\/p>\n

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Exhibits by Morgan Donovan, Nancy Vorm and John Mack are at the Salt Lake Arts Council\u2019sFinch Lane Gallery<\/a>\u00a0through June 20.<\/p>\n

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