{"id":27020,"date":"2014-11-05T23:49:50","date_gmt":"2014-11-06T05:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=27020"},"modified":"2025-10-24T13:01:29","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T20:01:29","slug":"musings-on-space-blake-luther-anne-wolfer-and-jill-barton-at-15th-street-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/musings-on-space-blake-luther-anne-wolfer-and-jill-barton-at-15th-street-gallery\/","title":{"rendered":"Musings on Space: Blake Luther, Anne Wolfer and Jill Barton at 15th Street Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This month 15th Street Gallery has brought together three local artists, who, though individually working through their own aesthetic sensibilities, all create works that succeed through their exploration of space. Shown together, the works of Blake Luther, Anne Wolfer, and Jill Barton create a formal unity and harmony that is rhythmic, soothing and revealing.<\/p>\n

Luther\u2019s landscapes might be called stark, bold, and, in his use of vertical structures, even figural. There is a sense in his works of human presences that might even be called \u201cexistential,\u201d as his use of the linear, in these contexts, is so strong. Even in \u201cPark Matrix,\u201d where there are a number of trees, there is less of a tendency to grove the trees than there is to stand them alone in their place, together, yet isolated, in the existential manner of Giacometti.<\/p>\n

In Wolfer\u2019s landscapes there is more of a Diebenkorn-esque tendency to play with the patterns of the land. \u201cAll Terrain,\u201d makes the most of turquoise, blue and yellow, and like Diebenkorn\u2019s work, creates divisions in the expanse with color, with the same element of Modernist flatness, up until the horizon, where there is an implied recession and then a great white of sky.<\/p>\n

Whether the artist uses a figural monumentality or a stylistic structuralism, space is the controlling factor that allows each of these singular characteristics to be.\u00a0 Spatiality admits for the monumentality and the stark, bold approach, dividing up the land, and spatiality allows for the being of the expanse and recession into space and then sky.\u00a0 As these paintings are hung next to each other there is a marvelous synergy.<\/p>\n

With Luther, we see an extremism of the allowance of space to articulate the dimensionality of his landscape in a work like \u201cFrancis Silo.\u201d\u00a0 It might be a lonely and barren scene, but the contrasts made between the large rounded tree, the tall silo, and the shallow cluster of farming structures creates a scene of powerful minimalist structural interest.\u00a0 Again, the silo stands alone, a figural allusion to an existential phenomenon represented in these reductive and barren elements, which becomes intriguing in their isolation.<\/p>\n

In Wolfer\u2019s \u201cHarpswell Dock\u201d we find the opposite, a canvas consumed by structure. The subject, which fills the picture plane, is a weathered and weary dock in a bay, with only three basic picture planes, a band of ivory sky, the lifeless dock, and the glistening and refreshing water, the redemptive element to the painting contrasting lifeless elements with animation.\u00a0 Again, in whatever ways these paintings may differ, in each, spatial structure creates their being, and lends compositional elements that unites them.<\/p>\n

Space also activates Wolfer\u2019s series of still lifes.\u00a0 These are empty bottles cursorily painted against a nondescript ground.\u00a0 \u201cDark Bottles 2\u201d is the composite of a short glass medicine or cosmetics jar refracting the green from the ground beneath it.\u00a0 Next to it is a taller, black jar, an olive oil container perhaps, refracting the menthe and cooler tones in front of the blackness.\u00a0 These bottles are defined by their space.\u00a0 Their being and structure is made recognizable by the space they inhabit.\u00a0 This is no different than Luther\u2019s \u201cSentinel\u201d where a lone evergreen stands erect in the middle of a field, isolated against the field and hazy hills behind, and an even hazier sky.\u00a0 It is its spatiality that makes possible its being and acknowledges its existential presence in the field as it resides alone and silent.<\/p>\n

We have asked what is the figure with or without spatiality to give it presence and reality.\u00a0 But what is space without the figure, the lone, silent tree?\u00a0 What is space without the bottles, or the dock, or the silo, or the planes, or the grouping of trees to give it presence and reality?\u00a0 Barton\u2019s paintings, in their abstract purity, present a representational counterpoint to this dynamic.\u00a0 Her \u201cBig Ocean\u201d is a painting totally abstracted, with the most reductive elements of color: steel and cold gray, blue, and ice white, with slate gray, painted in an ethereal application of horizontal stratus-like streaking, with no subject other than the purity of the color, mood, tone, expression, emotion, intensity and subtlety. Her \u201cLittle Bird I\u201d and\u00a0 \u201cLittle Bird II\u201d form a diptych, each requiring the other. As teal blue melds into pearly white and chalky gray, it creates space itself, charged with meaning.\u00a0 Apparently, space is not autonomous, but like the figure, space, too, is a reality that must be defined by \u201cthe other,\u201d in order for it to be present and real.<\/p>\n

Space is frequently seen as the negative, as the surrounding, as the thing that isn\u2019t around the thing that is, but as this grouping of three intriguing artists at 15th Street Gallery reveals, space\u00a0 is an activating dynamic, a reality as important as form to create compelling works of art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month 15th Street Gallery has brought together three local artists, who, though individually working through their own aesthetic sensibilities, all create works that succeed through their exploration of space. Shown together, the works of Blake Luther, Anne Wolfer, and Jill Barton create a formal unity and harmony […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":850,"featured_media":27023,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[979,2129,2128,264],"class_list":["post-27020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-15th-street-gallery","tag-anne-wolfer","tag-blake-luther","tag-jill-barton"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/blog15thstreet.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-16 19:41:31","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/850"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27020"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97432,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27020\/revisions\/97432"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}