{"id":35701,"date":"2018-03-13T15:05:14","date_gmt":"2018-03-13T21:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=35701"},"modified":"2018-09-19T07:37:49","modified_gmt":"2018-09-19T13:37:49","slug":"oh-my-heck-euphemism-is-sugar-coated-at-finch-lane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/oh-my-heck-euphemism-is-sugar-coated-at-finch-lane\/","title":{"rendered":"OH MY HECK! Euphemism is Sugar Coated at Finch Lane"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Allison Neville, \u201cMalaysia Airlines Flight 17, parts 1 & 2\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

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Darn! . . . Shoot! . . . Fudge! . . . . Euphemisms\u2014inoffensive ways of not quite saying what you mean\u2014permeate every language and clog everyday speech. Angry young speakers bristle at having to use compulsory substitutions, which aim to comfort not the speaker but those listeners who don\u2019t want to hear it, who are offended by direct expression and honest feelings. Even as linguists worry that such emotionally powerful expressions can only lose impact if overexposed, euphemism remains a loophole in the sacrament of free speech. Yet artists Holly Cobb and Michelle Montrose Larsen point out that there are other forms of euphemism, not only verbal but also visual that permeate and undermine communication just as much as enfeebled words, while often going unnoticed. To demonstrate their point, they\u2019ve mounted a collection of work by 10 artists (at Finch Lane until April 13) that, as the clich\u00e9 goes, should have something to offend almost everyone.<\/h4>\n

For instance, there\u2019s Alison Neville: Weber graduate, artist-in-residence at UMOCA, education coordinator at Bountiful-Davis Art Center, and founder of the Bob Ross Society. Neville doesn\u2019t seem to have met a medium or an art project, from graphite in a gallery to polymer clay in a pop-up show, that can\u2019t benefit by her contribution. Her\u00a0Nasty Women<\/em>, a show by female artists that used widespread anger at President Trump to garner support for the indispensable work of Planned Parenthood, showed how art can move away from its traditional role of spectator and closer to the center of events. For\u00a0Sugar-Coated<\/em>, Neville has constructed tiny, exquisite dioramas, mostly in pairs, to illustrate the reality of military events. Each pair operates like the familiar children\u2019s game, Battleship: two imaginary players sit across from each other, on either side of a playing board, of which each can see only his or her own side. Unlike war, which is nothing like a game, the goal here is presumably to score harmless points while preventing the other player from doing the same. What both war and Neville\u2019s games have in common is the deliberate obscuring of one\u2019s own actions. At its extremity, euphemism is indistinguishable from outright hypocrisy.<\/h4>\n

Most euphemisms are recognized as such by speaker and listener alike, and shared as such. Facial expressions and crooked fingers making \u201cair quotes\u201d are sometimes used to signal \u201cI know I\u2019m not being candid, here.\u201d Visual substitutions are another matter, as Jamie A. Kyle demonstrates in two photographic landscapes that, while less realistic than Neville\u2019s, equally evoke games and make-believe. Easily confused for collages cut and assembled from other photos, they probably work better for men who, as boys, played with action figures on not-to-scale, unrealistic backgrounds of furniture, rugs, and other textiles. It\u2019s not hard to imagine how the necessary imaginary work of such child\u2019s play can beget artists, and while Kyle\u2019s works here are more fanciful than realistic, it will be interesting to see what sort of visual vocabulary he invents that may give him more range and control over his effects.<\/h4>\n
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Michelle Montrose Larsen \u201cFlavor Burst\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

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There\u2019s a range of demonstrated ability here, but also schools of thought about the purpose of art. Derrek A. Wall paints his celebrities and Gay icons down to the level where content matters more than presentation. His titles give away the game while undermining the hypocrisy that protects mainstream consumers from what they choose not to acknowledge. Rock Hudson is \u201cMuscle Mary Fairy\u201d and as for Lady (not<\/em>\u00a0Princess) Diana, \u201cShe\u2019s Gone To a Better Place, You\u2019ll Never See Her Again.\u201d Most political art trades in long life for immediate appeal; this is art bordering on therapy, which tends to do its best work before it leaves the studio. Michelle Montrose Larsen\u2019s hyperrealism, on the other hand, does something similar not with sexuality, but with biology: in other words, not with a current social quandary, but with a most intractable predicament. Her \u201cLuster of Moisture\u201d contrasts the dry exterior and moist interior of human bodies to call attention to fortunes spent seemingly trying to invert the healthy, natural order. Some of her references are arbitrary or uncertain, but the glossy advertising-level skill with which she represents them identifies their dissembling technique as a perversion of talent that renders the underlying arguments moot.<\/h4>\n

Ever since the Romans, the apotheosis of representation has been\u00a0trompe l\u2019oeil<\/em>, the image that fools the eye. Scott R. Horsley drawing the front page of the newspaper fits squarely in this tradition, with an added twist. With their common title, \u201cAll Out War On Everything,\u201d and their references to Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, Vice-President Mike Pence, and former presidential aides Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon, these pieces leave little doubt that Horsley is \u201cdrawing\u201d a line between partisanship and the disregard for truth. It\u2019s just hard for true believers to hear their opinions criticized. The true genius of Horsley\u2019s technical approach, however, comes in the easily overlooked squirts and sprays of paint\u2014color on one side, black and white on the other, which look spontaneous until examined more closely, at which point their flawless mirror-imaging reveals how the totally false and artificial can be made to look authentic.<\/h4>\n
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Holly Cobb \u201cJoe, 68\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

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Parts of Holly Cobb\u2019s paintings can also fool the eye, or could have before she overpainted them. Her four subjects\u2014Aji, Heather, Alisha, and Joe, all in monumental headshots\u2014look variously like photos or impressionist portraits, over which she has loosely painted bravura fragments related to how she sees them in her mind. For the duration of the show, she has attached to each a greeting card that also refers, in an arguably more euphemistic language, to their significance to her. She has identified her concerns as sex, aging, pregnancy, and death, but companionship, solitude, possibility, and bereavement are equally present. And while euphemisms often confound and blunt encounters with all these experiences, the masks Cobb paints over her loved ones (for surely she must know and care about them deeply), like the birthday candles that illuminate Heather\u2019s face, do more to ennoble than to obscure them. It\u2019s as if she set out to reveal some knowledge so personal and powerful to her that it vaporized the euphemisms she set out to expose.<\/h4>\n

Euphemism, with its implied duality of ideal truth versus deflected truth, suggests that it might be well represented by a pair of images. That was the strategy chosen by Keith Beard, but \u201cThe Believers of Alternative Facts,\u201d his witty and evocative combination of sculpted and painted figures, joined together in turn by an assemblage of industrial and biomorphic elements, ends up perhaps too perfectly balanced to make its point. For those in the audience who imagine that art is a struggle because the blank page so totally defeats the would-be artist, here is a revelation: the real struggle begins much later, at a point non-artists never encounter, when a good idea and skillful execution lead to an expressive deadlock. Beard has so completely matched his red and blue hells that it\u2019s impossible to see the advantage of one over the other. And while it\u2019s true that two competing sides may agree on a goal\u2014say, ending school shootings\u2014but totally disagree on the means to achieving it, that does not make the two approaches equal. Even if there are errors on each side, those will not be, cannot logically be, the same mistakes. Perhaps more to the point, there are no \u201calternative\u201d facts. The alternative to a fact is not a fact at all.<\/h4>\n

Another artist with only one piece in\u00a0Sugar-Coated<\/em>, Brecken Bird, sidesteps the more common side of euphemism, when it\u2019s used to conceal an unpopular truth, in favor of an uglier reality, which is that verbal deception can save embarrassment, inconvenience, and even lives when used to bypass social hypocrisy. Like Derrek Wall\u2019s \u201cFriends of Dorothy,\u201d \u201cA Walk With Aunt Flo\u201d depends on viewers recognizing a turn of speech that may not be familiar to everyone, but which in the past eased the task of evading a whole host of unconscious and prejudicial values and judgments: a job that isn\u2019t done, but has only changed its location.<\/h4>\n
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Lisie Beck Brundage \u201cDisagreeable\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

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Neither Lisie Beck Brundage nor Fidalis Buehler presents the sort of clear choice between reality and its willful replacement that some of their fellow artists attempt. As one of her titles says outright, Brundage\u2019s canvases create polite fictions, from \u201cGood Manners\u201d to \u201cDisagreeable.\u201d The images so labeled might be described as vegetable or biomorphic abstractions: pleasing visual gardens inhabited by nature neither red of tooth nor claw. She almost denies that irony even exists, except that she oversteps into fantasy: in a world where reality is completely replaced by euphemism, nothing can possibly answer to its name.<\/h4>\n

Fidalis Beuhler, on the other hand, is a living embodiment of irony. Because of his mixed American and Micronesian parentage, he\u2019s often described as biracial, but race is a fiction invented by post-Renaissance Europeans to justify exploiting the rest of the world, and two centuries later it still has no basis is biological fact. So to supposedly belong to an allegedly inferior race that has no actual existence is to risk drowning in irony. As for Buehler\u2019s art, meanwhile, its charm\u2014charm being one of art\u2019s vital organs\u2014lies in its seeming to originate outside any of the artistic traditions that were, in any case, unavailable to him growing up, so that when he began to invent his own visual world he was able to partake of some primeval and essential visual characteristics. By escaping what was predetermined for other artists, he found something true that was common to all.<\/p>\n

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Fidalis Buehler \u201cKing Maker\u2019s Vision 1 of 25\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

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Visitors to Finch Lane during the run of\u00a0Sugar-Coated<\/em>\u00a0will have the chance to cast a vote on the show. Not to worry, though: no one will be asked to choose a favorite artist or artwork. Rather the curators have divided the realm of euphemism into five areas of conflict: emotion, truth, social-political issues, trauma, and the body. Each in turn has five or six examples, and members of the audience are invited to vote for one, two, or more of them, and vote as often as they like. Faced with the question, no one should be surprised to realize that there are some things that are more difficult than others to discuss. Like art itself, euphemisms can be tools for self-discovery.<\/h4>\n

Sugar-Coated,\u00a0<\/em>group show,\u00a0Finch Lane Gallery<\/a>, Reservoir Park, Salt Lake City, through April 13, gallery talks and discussions with artists March 16, 5 p.m.- 6 p.m., opening reception that evening, 6 p.m.- 9 p.m. in conjunction with Gallery Stroll.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Darn! . . . Shoot! . . . Fudge! . . . . Euphemisms\u2014inoffensive ways of not quite saying what you mean\u2014permeate every language and clog everyday speech. Angry young speakers bristle at having to use compulsory substitutions, which aim to comfort not the speaker but those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":36710,"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":[3218,1176,96,2100,2101,2102],"class_list":["post-35701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-allison-neville","tag-fidalis-buehler","tag-finch-lane-gallery","tag-holly-cobb","tag-lisie-beck-brundage","tag-michelle-montrose-larsen"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/MichelleMontroseLarsen-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-10 03:39:04","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\/35701","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\/847"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35701"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37730,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35701\/revisions\/37730"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}