{"id":38751,"date":"2018-09-22T11:59:04","date_gmt":"2018-09-22T17:59:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=38751"},"modified":"2018-10-09T22:47:50","modified_gmt":"2018-10-10T04:47:50","slug":"todays-sculpture-at-a-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/todays-sculpture-at-a-gallery\/","title":{"rendered":"Today’s Sculpture at A Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Brian Christensen’s “Reconstructing a Dream”<\/p><\/div>\n

For all intents and purposes, statuary was invented in ancient Egypt. These earliest figures, meant to provide a home for the soul in case the body was lost after death, took the cautious form of virtually indestructible cubes of stone. The Greeks took over the idea and, using malleable bronze, liberated the figure to produce idealized human forms, including individual portraits. Alexander the Great took this art to India, where his hagiography inspired images of local gods, saints, and of course, the Buddha. Meanwhile, back in Egypt, a second school of statuary grew up, featuring scale models of pharaoh\u2019s army, his servants, and even pharaoh himself, meant to accompany him to the afterlife. Utterly charming, thousands of years later they still march and stand guard, grind grain, and ride the back of a cosmic leopard through the night, ready to continue in their roles through eternity.<\/h4>\n

In modern art, we no longer speak of statues. In what\u2019s now called sculpture, we have a less purely representational kind of object, one that speaks a more elaborate language. Portraits and scale models are still part of it, but any carved, molded, or assembled object, whether it stands on its own or hangs on a wall, can qualify so long as it performs an artistic function. A representative sampling of today\u2019s sculpture, if a necessarily incomplete picture of its range, can be seen this month at A Gallery. Ten of their most popular artists have brought 54 new works, which stand among the gallery\u2019s previous offerings.<\/h4>\n

One artist here could almost represent the range of modern sculpture singlehandedly. Brian Christensen may be Utah\u2019s foremost sculptor, working in many materials to produce work in most of the known genres. He was the first artist I wrote about for 15 Bytes, shortly after my arrival in Utah, and it seems everyone who has ever written for this magazine has had a chance to cover him. I\u2019ve never forgotten the way he grafted the frame of a revolver to a cast bronze hand, presenting the pointing finger as a deadly weapon. Much later, he showed a lighthouse the size of a human body, thereby disclosing a previously unexplored metaphor that may help explain the popularity of these universal structures. Recently, here and in a collaboration with Frank McEntire that\u2019s just left the Bountiful-Davis Art Center, he\u2019s turned his attention to ubiquitous structural supports, like the billboard he fabricated with McEntire and the scaffolds that cradle the rough-hewn heads in \u201cLayers of Time,\u201d \u201cShard Head,\u201d and \u201cReconstructing a Dream.\u201d Two huge, painted ceramic containers, \u201cLotion\u201d and \u201cRepurposed Jug,\u201d celebrate familiar objects while questioning some cultural values. Also present here are \u201c3 Frozen Bladders\u201d and \u201cBirth of Venus,\u201d a pair of blown-glass ensembles that revisit the eloquence of pure form that has all-but-disappeared from contemporary glass.<\/h4>\n

Of course A Gallery has always shown glass art (which is not the same as art glass). Seth Fairweather presents a sampler of sorts: some recent developments in blown- and kiln-formed glass. Glass objects divide themselves naturally into two camps: opaque<\/em> objects, which absorb and diffuse light to produce vivid colors that benefit from interior luminousness, and clear<\/em> or transparent<\/em> objects, which may present an illusion, often-dramatic, of interior space. \u201cBlue with Red Chevron,\u201d which looks like a vase but is a sculpture, belongs in the former camp, as do the \u201cAscetic\u201d series, which place translucent busts atop opaque rods. Here light plays a traditional role, representing consciousness or spirituality after a long ascent through darkness. Among those seeming to harbor inner space, \u201cJellyfish Disk\u201d and \u201cAngled Reflection-Dream\u201d are more abstract, while \u201cBelief is a Doorway\u201d presents a more specific, if ambiguous scene. The latter two also play with the difference between the object\u2019s skin seen from outside and the same surface seen from within.<\/h4>\n