{"id":44062,"date":"2009-10-20T17:00:32","date_gmt":"2009-10-20T23:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=44062"},"modified":"2025-10-23T19:25:47","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T02:25:47","slug":"where-youre-coming-from-the-art-of-myranda-bair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/where-youre-coming-from-the-art-of-myranda-bair\/","title":{"rendered":"Where You’re Coming From The Art of Myranda Bair"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“How Will I Know?” by Myranda Bair at the Maryland Institute College of Art<\/p><\/div>\n

There are many little contradictions to be unraveled from an installation of love letters. Issues of the private being made spectacularly public, the artist’s past being re-lived in the viewer’s present, the intimately ephemeral being displayed as though it has a more enduring physicality than it truly does\u2014all can be drawn from such a work. The installation in question, titled simply\u00a0Love Letters<\/em>, is an open-ended project from Salt Lake City-based artist\u00a0Myranda Bair<\/a>\u00a0that offers viewers a peek into her own memories, correspondences, and musings on romantic relationships. Eighteen “letters” are arranged chronologically and grouped by subject (that is, by boyfriend, whether ex-, unconsummated, or current, seven in all), with each printed on small sheets of Italian handmade paper and tacked, unprotected and raw, to gallery walls. Love Letters will be on view at Austin’s Creative Research Laboratory this month as part of the exhibition\u00a0Tell Me Everything, As You Remember It<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What constitutes a love letter? Some are letters Bair sent to former boyfriends, or poem-like recountings of conversations and events. Some are brief and entirely borrowed, like “Coronado Island,” which Bair takes from a postcard she received:<\/p>\n

Myranda,
\nThis is where I stayed in SD,
\npretty nice place. Sorry I forgot
\nyour birthday and sorry I make
\nyou upset all the time.
\nlove,
\nDaniel<\/p>\n

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detail from “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” by Myranda Bair<\/p><\/div>\n

Such a concept is representative of Bair’s practice as a whole; when asked to characterize her work, she explains, “I want everything to take as little space as possible.” To accomplish this, she often works in and on paper\u2014a perfect medium for art that deals with fragility and the passing of time and the related actions of archiving and remembering, as hers often does. Her 2007 MFA thesis show at Maryland Institute College of Art, for which she named each work after a Whitney Houston ballad, included a series of 33 watercolor illustrations of every piece of rock-climbing equipment a pair of climbers would need (“I Wanna Dance with Somebody”)\u00a0and a mountain constructed of crinkled paper with two watercolor sleeping bags at its base (“How Will I Know?”).|0|<\/strong>\u00a0Her most recent work, which will be on display at this year\u2019s 35 x 35 exhibition, centers on salamanders as fragile specimens, essentially stand-ins for human beings and their frailties. Painted in watercolor on paper and presented in glass jars, these specimens inhabit their enclosures like more traditional works on paper do their frames.\u00a0Paper seems pervasive in contemporary art at the moment; for example, the Museum of Modern Art is exhibiting works on paper from its contemporary collections, with images in ink and watercolor and even cigarettes on paper. Seeing these works, and Bair\u2019s, demonstrates just how aptly paper can encapsulate human experience and artistic process simultaneously.<\/p>\n

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“Snail” by Myranda Bair, at 35 x 35 exhibit<\/p><\/div>\n

One can easily draw connections between Bair\u2019s project and work from Sophie Calle and Tracey Emin, two artists whom she admires. Calle, however, usually makes photographs a part of her documentation process; photography is absent from Bair\u2019s work, replaced by watercolor\u2014an arguably more intimate, and of course more subjective, mode of capturing images, one more ideally suited to address one-sided memories and imprecise longings. Love Letters functions something like Emin\u2019s notorious embroidered tent, which bore the names of everyone she had to that point slept with, giving viewers just a hint of salacious detail in a somewhat whimsical, but mostly defiant, manner. There is something defiant about the love letters as well, but it\u2019s much less a defiance of conservative sensibilities and more an insistence that over-sharing is useful, certainly therapeutic for the artist but emotionally impactful for the viewer as well.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Maybe this viewer is meant to feel a little uncomfortable in breaking down walls that should be somewhat impenetrable. At times the letters can be gut-wrenching, at least if the viewer comes equipped with some point of reference; in \u201cThe last apology email,\u201d after reviewing the events of an especially disastrous Christmas party, Bair writes,<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sorry it wasn’t enough.
\nI’m sorry, I only wanted more.
\nI’m sorry that I need you to love me\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

I can’t help it.<\/p>\n

Like a whisper, the italicized words at the end of this email that Bair did send to an ex-boyfriend are intimate enough to give the viewer pause\u2014something akin to the artist checking into a hotel suite and inviting an audience to watch her dream, or booking a hall and inviting viewers to snip away strips of her clothing, as Yoko Ono famously did with Cut Piece.<\/p>\n

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“We Are Sensitive Creatures” by Myranda Bair, at 35 x 35 exhibit<\/p><\/div>\n

Bair fittingly demonstrates excellent recall when it comes to conversations she\u2019s been a part of, and she remembers a critique offered by one of her professors at MICA: \u201cThe problem with conceptual art is, it just doesn\u2019t work.\u201d This is clearly a polemical statement, but its chief problem here is not its mistakenness\u2014it\u2019s in its oversimplification of work that has both conceptual and material presence. To speak of the Love Letters\u2019 \u201cmaterial presence\u201d seems odd and possibly irrelevant, but it\u2019s not, in the modest opinion of this writer. The small cream-colored sheets of handmade paper, which Bair orders from Florence, are about six inches by eight, tentative and almost striving for insignificance in a sea of white wall. Rather than handwriting the text, however, the artist uses a laser printer, which she finds \u201cmore relatable,\u201d in contrast to the \u201cmore personal\u201d delicacy of the stationary. Orderly arranged throughout the gallery and simply tacked to the walls instead of framed, which is perhaps the key, the letters have an abject quality; their undeniable reality is that they can be literally crushed. They are stand-ins for the artist, who can be crushed in other ways.<\/p>\n

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“Love Letters” by Myranda Bair<\/p><\/div>\n

To complement the letters, Bair\u2019s Lost at Sea will also be on display at CRL. Consisting of a boat illustrated in watercolor and floating in static craft paper waves on the gallery wall, Lost at Sea at least in theory shares Love Letters\u2019 interactive quality because the boat can be moved around the wall just as the stepstool can be moved around the gallery for letter-viewing.|5|<\/strong>\u00a0It also continues Love Letters\u2019 embrace of uncertainty. The letter project will end when Bair turns 30, as it began when she entered her 20s\u2014to generalize, the decade of one\u2019s life that is practically defined by doubt and indecision. If, as Bair explained, \u201cit\u2019s about trying to understand where people are coming from,\u201d it\u2019s surely about her trying to understand herself as well. Lost at Sea, in turn, features an actually unmoored vessel, and it\u2019s made again of ephemera and takes up as little space as possible. Together, the works are adaptable but affected, much like the artist.<\/p>\n

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“Lost at Sea” by Myranda Bair<\/p><\/div>\n

Myranda Bair’s<\/a>\u00a0work is on exhibit in Salt Lake at the\u00a035 x 35<\/em>\u00a0exhibit at\u00a0Finch Lane Gallery\u00a0through November 6. A reception with the artists will be part of\u00a0Gallery Stroll<\/a>, October 16, 6 – 9 pm. Bair’s\u00a0Love Letters<\/i>\u00a0will be on display at\u00a0Tell me everything, as you remember it<\/i>, a group exhibition curated by Leona Scull-Hons, that opens Saturday, October 17th, at the Creative Research Laboratory at the University of Texas, Austin, and continues through November 7.<\/p>\n

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

There are many little contradictions to be unraveled from an installation of love letters. Issues of the private being made spectacularly public, the artist’s past being re-lived in the viewer’s present, the intimately ephemeral being displayed as though it has a more enduring physicality than it truly does\u2014all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1660,"featured_media":46971,"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":[17,44,14],"tags":[240],"class_list":["post-44062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artist_profiles","category-videos","category-visual_arts","tag-myranda-bair"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/40.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-28 15:52:03","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\/44062","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\/1660"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44062"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97243,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44062\/revisions\/97243"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}