{"id":43386,"date":"2007-06-07T14:34:41","date_gmt":"2007-06-07T20:34:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=43386"},"modified":"2025-11-15T11:28:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T18:28:24","slug":"joshua-luther-and-jeffrey-d-winkler-the-main-library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/joshua-luther-and-jeffrey-d-winkler-the-main-library\/","title":{"rendered":"Joshua Luther and Jeffrey D. Winkler @ the Main Library"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Joshua Luther and Jeffrey D. Winkler are two very different artists with one thing in common: they both doubt the effectiveness of rational thought in enabling consciousness to even approach, let alone make contact with, objective reality. Where they differ lies in how each presents his critique of reason. Luther constructs sophisticated jokes that undermine our conviction that the picture show in our heads has anything to do with what\u2019s really going on outside our minds.|1|<\/strong>\u00a0Winkler focuses instead on the irrational experience left to us as faith in enlightened science withdraws. Then he paints the chaos that remains.|0|<\/strong><\/p>\n

Antecedents for Luther include Ren\u00e9 Magritte, Conceptual art, and all of late 20th century \u201cepistemology,\u201d as philosophers like to call the study of knowledge. As Luther reminds us, everything we know comes through our senses, which evolved to make us compete better, not see vast truths. Thus we never know for certain how closely experience reflects reality. In the space between what\u2019s outside and its electrochemical image in our minds, Luther locates artworks that call attention to the uncertainty they inhabit. For viewers who think, his is an engaging art: engaging us in the way it teases our pretensions to certainty, but engaged also with elusive reality, which always seems to lurk behind the next puzzle. Even as he mocks the pursuit of \u201ctruth\u201d and \u201cbeauty,\u201d he cannot resist the temptation to go on seeking, thus becoming the object of his own joke.<\/p>\n

Working in several mediums, Luther characteristically uses some form of printing, often labels. The six works in this exhibition cover only part of his range: they hang on the wall, each a set of two, three, or four identically\u2013sized surfaces, and all include language. In four, the components are square, warning viewers up front that their energy will not be visual. Images, if they appear, stand in for the idea of information. In “Resolution Images,” two pixilated photos of a sunflower argue that degraded information can be replaced but not restored.|2|<\/strong>\u00a0The texts on “Existential Photographs 1\u20144” deny everything visible behind them, making a futile claim for the eye\u2019s ability to control what it sees.|3|<\/strong>\u00a0In “Hidden Messages,” citations from the Bible, scientific cosmology, and philosophy allegedly appear in the same color as the fabric they are printed on: the truth is at hand, but not in a form that can help.<\/p>\n

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Perception Test by Joshua Luther<\/p><\/div>\n

In “Perception Test,” three red paintings are labeled The Perceived Color, The Color God Intended, and The Actual Color.|4|<\/strong>\u00a0All three appear identical, raising the question how categories can be useful, or even exist, if no two things are ever really the same. Despite their manufactured quality and resistance to virtuosity, Luther\u2019s creations urge us, as good art always has, to view each prospect as if we were seeing for the first time.<\/p>\n

In one of Luther\u2019s printed texts there\u2019s a typographical error. It\u2019s a measure of their differences that nothing by Winkler could be similarly labeled a mistake. In spite of the implied patterns in his neat rows of numbers cut through, or collaged atop, canvases covered by impastos of churning or swirling colors, his attempt to render chaos in the universe as we encounter it makes standards of accuracy\u2014or what he calls the beauti\/futile systems of quantification, value, and control\u2014meaningless.<\/p>\n

If Luther\u2019s conundrums please thinking viewers, Winkler\u2019s paintings are for sensualists. It\u2019s not that they are bereft of ideas: to contrast landscapes of industrial waste, corrosion, and deterioration with the eternally pristine abstraction of numbers is, after all, an idea. But the point is less telling than the way the simultaneous contrast between these two qualities makes both of them more extreme, more febrile, and more deliciously tactile. Where the skin is cut away to mark the numbers it curls delicately, or paint gathers into membranes trying to heal the fissure. The numbers, once pure but rapidly being reclaimed by their environment, could be the good intentions whose transmogrification into material form produces the chemical wreckage we see.<\/p>\n

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Resolution Images by Joshua Luther<\/p><\/div>\n

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Existential Photograph 4<\/p><\/div>\n

Winkler uses language only for titles, and even these are less conscientious than Luther\u2019s. “Bleach,” predominantly yellow, and “Cyanide,” mostly blue, suggest a sensory or emotional correlation. Or it may be the sound. Occasionally, a reference is clear: one title refers to war in Baghdad, and three streaks across the surface of its canvas suggest rockets in flight. Another canvas is called “Across,” apparently in reference to a heavy wire that meanders over its front from one side to the other. It seems Winkler hasn\u2019t imposed a system on himself yet. Better if he doesn\u2019t. The galleries are full of one\u2013trick ponies, and an artist could stand to have room to move.<\/p>\n

Like “Across,” some canvases claim the third dimension with scraps of tape, hardware, and wood that may refer more specifically to the material limits of painting. A heavy cable moors “Birth Certificate” to something that looks like a fencepost. All three elements are painted the same red, suggesting that the real world is not just a poor choice, but a matter of bondage. Thus Plato, with his belief in ideals that precede material existence, finds relevance even in today\u2019s more pragmatic world.<\/p>\n

Winkler\u2019s overall title\u2014A Failure of Imagination<\/em>\u2014may refer to this collapse of the orderly ideal into the chaotic real. But while enjoying his voluptuous simulations of organic and industrial detritus, of workshop walls and factory floors, observing how the artist — as a photographer friend of mine once said of Kodachrome film– makes even pollution beautiful, I couldn\u2019t help think of the old theme of art\u2019s conflict with technology. I rode up the glass elevator to the gallery on the Library\u2019s fourth floor: technology makes the space and makes it accessible. But it was an architect who made the building beautiful\u2014like the City and County Building across the street, but like so little else in human enterprise. Maybe in the long run the irrationality, the inscrutability of the universe, and the contrast between dream and waking that so fascinate Joshua Luther and Jeffrey Winkler, are just a failure of imagination: a failure they can do something about.||<\/p>\n

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The Average Color of an Erotic Image by Joshua Luther<\/p><\/div>\n

Obstructions\u00a0by Joshua Luther and\u00a0<\/em>A Failure of Imagination\u00a0by Jeffrey D. Winkler will be on exhibit at Salt Lake City’s Main Library (4th Floor Gallery) through July 7. This exhibit is co-sponsored by the Utah Arts Festival, which will host 130 artists during the four day festival, June 21 – 24.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Joshua Luther and Jeffrey D. Winkler are two very different artists with one thing in common: they both doubt the effectiveness of rational thought in enabling consciousness to even approach, let alone make contact with, objective reality. Where they differ lies in how each presents his critique of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":98862,"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":[4776,788],"class_list":["post-43386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-jeffrey-d-winkler","tag-joshua-luther"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/70-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-04 16:24:55","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\/43386","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=43386"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98869,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43386\/revisions\/98869"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}