{"id":42639,"date":"2019-02-15T12:35:15","date_gmt":"2019-02-15T18:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=42639"},"modified":"2023-11-13T13:57:36","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T19:57:36","slug":"a-captivating-curse-elisabeth-bunker-explores-dirt-inversions-and-beauty-at-draw-inc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/a-captivating-curse-elisabeth-bunker-explores-dirt-inversions-and-beauty-at-draw-inc\/","title":{"rendered":"A Captivating Curse: Elisabeth Bunker Explores Dirt, Inversions and Beauty at DRAW, Inc."},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Utah State Capitol on January 11th, 2019”<\/p><\/div>\n

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The conundrum: dirt is bad; dirt is sometimes beautifully dramatic.<\/h4>\n

Dirt and dust make sunset beautiful, many-veiled: that\u2019s the magic particulate richness of dust. We\u2019re alive due to excess, things leftover: cast-off matter forms planets; stars are globbed accumulations of recycled matter.<\/h4>\n

We are of dust\/dirt, as expressed by golden-haired Joni Mitchell\u2019s song line: \u201cWe are stardust, we are golden.\u201d<\/h4>\n

So what does an artist in Salt Lake City, or in any city, make of inversions<\/em> \u2014 the filling of the valleys we live in with poisonous hazes of automobile exhaust and industrial fumes \u2014 our mountainscapes behind a haze of grime, till the cleansing solvents of moving air, snow, or rain, free the landscape from their dirty hanging veil? (In a fairytale, the plight and conundrum would be expressed as: For a<\/em> curse had fallen over the land.)<\/em><\/h4>\n

An artist, of course, can imagine what he\/she wants to see: Monet painted with failing vision, as Beethoven composed with almost no hearing; yet what they managed to see, or hear, made beauty. And dirt can be beautiful, almost a sophisticated city perfume of filth, as in the Impressionists\u2019 many paintings of London a century ago in the midst of its unsolved heaves of coal\/industrial filth. It was intensely beautiful, dramatized by its dirt, the way silver is \u2014 more beautiful with tarnish.<\/h4>\n

\u201cThe Potato Eaters,\u201d the famous dirt-brown painting by van Gogh, is a compendium of dirt: hunched hungry people as grimed in every pore as the potatoes on their plates. Its honesty, its poverty and hunger and desperation, make it true and ugly and<\/em> beautiful. (The painting makes us glad they have, however poor, found solution to their hunger; the dirt-poor and the dirt-potatoes seem to merge into one.)<\/h4>\n
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“View of Refineries from 300 North on January 11th”<\/p><\/div>\n

In her paintings on display at DRAW Inc. \u2014 a charming twilight-blue old brick building on a corner in the Avenues, once, fittingly, a Laundromat, and a picture-framing shop\u2014 Elisabeth Bunker employs black silhouettes, much as Shakespeare employed hangers-about-the-castle, to set up drama. In \u201cView of Refineries from 300 North, January Eleventh,\u201d it is an extremely tall, lone, light pole, clouds ganging up behind it a bit like hoodlums; in \u201cUtah State Capitol on January Eleventh,\u201d a fringe of trees seem to frantically wave at a strangely pink-underbellied sky. The nightlight in the Capitol\u2019s dome can barely pierce the thick, sickly frosting of the inversion-rich clouds; it\u2019s a sickly cupcake with an almost frosting-swamped candle, dimmed and shamed and sputtering, a ruined birthday. In \u201cThe Living Room Trailhead on January Twelfth,\u201d Bunker\u2019s silhouettes of several trees reach and reach into the painting, trying, and failing, though multiply-fingered, to scrub the desperate sky clean.<\/h4>\n

Bunker\u2019s silhouettes serve not only as foreground for drama, but as measure: We feel a flash of recognition that before us are the dark markings of thermometer, or barometer, sharp and judging, defining the condition of what we see. \u201cView of Neff Canyon on January Twelfth, 2019\u201d has a fringe of black trees at its base as foreboding and warning as charred trees left after forest fire: beyond is the beautiful rumple of marshmallow-cream sky. But look closer: it\u2019s the same scraped, dribbled, disturbed sky which appears also in \u201cBeck Street\u201d and \u201cView of Refineries\u201d and \u201cNeff Canyon,\u201d skies which suggest wounds the body is laboring to heal, abscesses it is trying to relieve.<\/h4>\n

HEAL Utah, fighting the worsening air quality caused in valleys in Utah, is helping sponsor this exhibit, named \u201cKeep Breathing\u201d \u2013 two words often intoned to people in crisis to distract them from their doom. Bunker\u2019s skies in these paintings are like hungry membranes, containing abundant air, yet, struggling<\/em> for air.<\/h4>\n

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