{"id":43853,"date":"2009-04-04T15:05:36","date_gmt":"2009-04-04T21:05:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=43853"},"modified":"2019-07-25T11:40:50","modified_gmt":"2019-07-25T17:40:50","slug":"newer-frontier-chad-cranes-re-presentation-of-the-west-at-palmers-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/newer-frontier-chad-cranes-re-presentation-of-the-west-at-palmers-gallery\/","title":{"rendered":"Newer Frontier Chad Crane’s re-presentation of the West at Palmers Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>by\u00a0A.C. Bacall<\/em><\/p>\n

The inauthentic disrupts the authentic in Chad Crane’s\u00a0Taming the Myth<\/em>, an exhibition of new paintings opening at Palmers Gallery as part of the Gallery Stroll on April 17th. With sardonic whimsy, Crane explores the heroic clich\u00e9s of the nineteenth-century American West, which are mostly reduced to conflicts between “cowboys and Indians.” His deft manipulation of multiple media\u2014acrylic gel transfer, oil, colored pencil, graphite, and a fine layer of encaustic over all\u2014allows viewers to accept that these somewhat ridiculous characters and incongruous symbols can be coherent in time and place, even as his caricature-like rendering of them unites us in seeing our reality as firmly distinct from theirs. They remind us that, as Crane puts it, “what’s represented isn’t actually what happened at all.”<\/p>\n

Less a critique than a tongue-in-cheek investigation of artifice,\u00a0Taming the Myth<\/em>\u00a0enables Crane to synthesize an abundance of influences and memories. He attributes this particular body of work to his exposure to another clich\u00e9 of the West: the county fair, where he encountered kitschy, though earnest, genre paintings in the mode of Charles Russell and Frederick Remington. “My first exposure to fine art was limited to garish oil paintings of cowboys in blue jeans, Indians and wolves, ponies galloping in fields of hay,” he says. Raised in small-town Morgan, Utah, Crane does not lack for what might be labeled as credibility; his childhood diversion of playing cowboys and Indians was made all the more real by a general consciousness of the history and landscape of the region. There were also B-Westerns, graphic novels, and video games\u2014all are intermingled in his paintings to suggest that our collective memory of the West is in many ways a construct, one that is “exaggerated, romanticized, and false.” Crane alludes to the knottiness of this construct in a poem that accompanies the show:<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t remember if it\u2019s a movie,
\na postcard, a painting at the county fair
\nor the opening lines of Louis L\u2019Amour,<\/p>\n

but it\u2019s the West\u2014the only West
\nyou have ever known.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“Taming the Myth”<\/p><\/div>\n

“Taming the Myth,” the large painting from which the exhibition takes its title, demonstrates the complexity of unweaving myth from memory.\u00a0Set in a barren landscape with an endless sky, the work presents an unlikely grouping of figures: a high-stepping, slightly elderly cowboy leers, while a Native American man of indeterminate tribal origin gallantly wields a forked implement at a crudely rendered dinosaur, which is in turn ridden bareback by a busty Annie-Oakley type. The fanciful proportions of these figures reference the style of the graphic novels Crane admires, while the absurdity of their interaction the result of his jumbling of these novels and other images and impressions. There is a rupture here, but not within the time of the painting; we can accept this interaction as long as it is confined to the realm of myth. The rupture is between the painting\u2019s audacity and the viewer\u2019s distrust of its sincerity.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“Code of the West”<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“Convert”<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“Water Hole”<\/p><\/div>\n

The painting also demonstrates the complexity of Crane\u2019s process. He begins with a ground of Pollock-esque splatters of acrylic, onto which he layers graphite, pencil, and oil paint. Instead of building up the figures, however, he builds up the spaces around them, making each a void that reveals the mottled ground, which the artist sees as ephemeral as that ever-changing construct of the West. As a result, the figures are actually absences, even as their surroundings assert a more noticeable material presence. Certain articles of clothing\u2014the cowboy\u2019s shirt and hat, the younger man\u2019s loincloth, and the woman\u2019s fringed getup\u2014are further articulated by layers of pale yellow oil paint, offering distraction from the uniformity of the figures\u2019 bodies, faces, and hair and, more importantly, calling attention to the costume-like nature of their attire. Several isolated heart-shaped forms are seemingly carved from the heavy impasto near the center of the panel; these symbolize for Crane the \u201coverly venerated nature\u201d of representations of the West, portrayals that are \u201coverloaded with sentimentality.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Elsewhere in the exhibition, Crane makes an interesting connection between the game of bowling and these (mis)conceptions of the West. He began incorporating bowling pins into his paintings in what he describes as intuitive strategy. Looking back, Crane recognizes the significance of observing a group of fatigues-clad teenagers playing an arcade hunting game; as he watched them relish killing for sport, he thought of how disconnected this seemed from the act of purposeful hunting\u2014it was merely a romanticized echo of something real. Combining this event with his memories of those childhood games in which the cowboys always defeated the Indians, he began to see games, and specifically bowling, as a lens through which he could \u201cexaggerate the story that\u2019s been told to me,\u201d an essentially ahistorical account narrated by Marlboro advertisements and John Wayne films.<\/p>\n

Crane directly cites bowling with “10 Frames,” a series of 22 small panels installed in two identical rows to suggest two lines on a bowling score card, with a rectangular panel for the player\u2019s name followed by ten square panels, or frames, in which to record scores.|2|<\/strong>\u00a0One of the rows is dedicated to images of cowboys, the other to Indians, making these two groups the \u201cplayers\u201d in the game. Many of the figures that populate the panels have been created via acrylic gel transfer: Crane takes an existing image, copied from old graphic novels and the how-to bowling manual he discovered at a thrift shop, flips it, then presses it into the wet surface of acrylic gel that has been applied to the panel. After the gel has picked up the ink and thus the image, he sands down its surface and continues to paint on and around it. The transfer technique is especially suited to this subject, for it produces images that are hazy around the edges and faded in spots, like the mythic West itself. As the last step in a rather complicated process, the painting’s final coating of encaustic smoothes over any unevenness of surface, essentially suspending the figures in an impenetrable space out of time.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>With his 1986 Cowboys and Indians series, Andy Warhol also drew attention to the inauthentic authenticity of figures like John Wayne and Geronimo. The twelve prints in the series continued his earlier photo-dependant work, in which Warhol used tabloid or newspaper photographs as stencils in order to reproduce the images through silkscreen on canvas. Both artists produce somewhat grotesque parodies of iconic figures, and grainy celebrity photographs are as ubiquitous as B-Westerns or bowling alleys, which are, as Crane points out, a small town-fixture. Unlike Warhol, however, Crane chooses to avoid the specific. His figures are clearly archetypes, rather than individuals; as such, they strangely resist the cult of originality that is often bound up in ever-problematic conceptions of a wild West.<\/p>\n

Taming the Myth is Chad Crane\u2019s MFA thesis exhibition and marks the end of his studies at the University of Utah. He earned a BFA from Utah State University. Palmers Gallery, part of the Salt Lake Gallery Association, is located at 378 West Broadway in Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0A.C. Bacall The inauthentic disrupts the authentic in Chad Crane’s\u00a0Taming the Myth, an exhibition of new paintings opening at Palmers Gallery as part of the Gallery Stroll on April 17th. With sardonic whimsy, Crane explores the heroic clich\u00e9s of the nineteenth-century American West, which are mostly reduced to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44139,"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":[17,14],"tags":[159],"class_list":["post-43853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artist_profiles","category-visual_arts","tag-chad-crane"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/03s-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-09 12:37:47","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\/43853","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43853"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44140,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43853\/revisions\/44140"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}