{"id":47493,"date":"2019-09-30T11:40:45","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T17:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=47493"},"modified":"2019-11-04T22:46:34","modified_gmt":"2019-11-05T04:46:34","slug":"box-of-myth-modern-west-fine-art-features-storytellers-buehler-mantle-and-ross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/box-of-myth-modern-west-fine-art-features-storytellers-buehler-mantle-and-ross\/","title":{"rendered":"Box of Myth: Modern West Fine Art Features Storytellers Buehler, Mantle, and Ross"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Wren Ross, “A Great Spirit Walks the Land,” mixed media, 36 x 54 in<\/p><\/div>\n


\nMyth, <\/em>open at Modern West Fine Art until October 31 and featuring three of the gallery\u2019s newly represented artists \u2014 Fidalis Buehler, Mitch Mantle, and Wren Ross \u2014 combines their three bodies of work, which share a preoccupation with pictorial symbolism and a dash of aesthetic abruptness. Colorful, confrontational, and sometimes bizarre, the work of these three artists cracks the mold, but also poses classic conceptual questions.<\/h4>\n

One commonality is that the pieces in the show, diverse as they may be, all reference ideas that first came from the German anthropologist Adolf Bastian and were brought into mainstream consciousness by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. The central avenue of discussion in Bastian’s work is the \u201ccollective unconscious\u201d \u2014 a concept that has stirred controversy and produced a field of discussion about human symbol-making for almost 100 years. In a panel at the opening of the exhibit, the three artists mention the legacy of Jung\u2019s idea on their artistic processes, specifically symbols\u2019 and storytelling\u2019s role in communicating complex ideas. In Jung\u2019s landmark 1927 essay \u201cThe Structure of the Psyche,\u201d he states that the \u201ccollective unconscious appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images. \u2026 The whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious.\u201d In the reflections on their work, Buehler, Mantle and Ross say they sometimes borrow symbols found in fairy tales and epics. Our dreams or religious ceremonies also contain images that at times communicate or reflect key indicators of our overall psychological health or damaging preoccupations, as Jung saw it.<\/h4>\n
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Fidelis Buehler, “Wolf and Plants seated at the Caution,” mixed media on canvas, 54 x 48 in<\/p><\/div>\n

A few prominent symbols repeated in Myth<\/em> include moons, clothing, fire, and wolves. But with these symbols being used by individual artists in different contexts we are spurred to questions that informed Jung\u2019s own investigations: Are they firstly personal (do they reflect something that happened to a person when they were young)? Or do they sometimes reflect a shared vocabulary of images and concepts that would be communicated genetically, orally, or through physical means, like rituals? No psychologist has, to date, answered completely where, why, and how a symbolic lexicon builds up over time, spilling from one set of individuals in a generation to the next. Myth <\/em>places these questions at the forefront of the collection of work and the artists\u2019 own reflection on their creative process.<\/h4>\n

In Fidelis Buehler\u2019s \u201cWolf and Plants seated at the Caution Table,\u201d a wolf wears long black gloves and crosses its arms on a striped tablecloth, while Mitch Mantle\u2019s red dog runs stiffly across a soiled carpet in \u201cSleeping Giant.\u201d The artists show canines framed in hinted-at narratives, but insert an absurdity that also defies a strict traditional story structure. Wren Ross sticks to prey animals, with many backwards-gazing hares in the \u201cbe still be quiet do nothing \u201d series. Ross\u2019 game symbols look like pictographs from the Southwest, and her inversion of typical linear perspective, favoring the flattening more common in hieroglyphs or Medieval texts, is also common among the three artists. Buehler\u2019s \u201cLei for the Wolf\u201d shows a wolf, legs stiffly crossed, below a human figure in a yellow hoodie holding a loop of flowers, also pushed up to the visual plane. The animal and figure have the same flat and tilting, dreamlike quality of Marc Chagall\u2019s painted figures. Ross’ \u201cA Great Spirit Walks the Land\u201d has fish and human figures splayed, with simple shapes like crosses or infinity symbols painted in thin lines between the more detailed elements.<\/h4>\n

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\n\u201cMythology is important because it is not law that was tipped onto us, but a joint agreement about what magical answers exist for our humble questions,”\u00a0said Wren Ross in an exchange<\/a> with the gallery. “Myth reaches out and reassures us that the trees lose their leaves with purpose, not dispassionate surrender. \u2026 It is a kind of portable transmission \u2014 like a radio \u2014 that pats us on the back when we enter a room full of strangers.\u201d Here, she communicates the essential function of myth: connecting people with a shared set of concepts they can use to communicate their emotions and fears. The symbols connect on a level that bypasses strictly reasoning functions.<\/h4>\n

Mantle takes this warping of perspective and applies it to his large canvases of figures, reminiscent of 19th-century group portraits like Edouard Manet\u2019s \u201cThe Lunch on the Grass,\u201d or Paul Gaugin\u2019s \u201cTahitian Women on the Beach.\u201d The effect is an impressive, bright look at abstracted figures that approach full-size in some works like \u201cEmpty Chair,\u201d \u201cWoman Resting,\u201d or the 73-x-60-inch \u201cBird Catchers.\u201d Often the human figures have hands unbent, which look like symbols for \u201chere,\u201d \u201cstay\u201d or even \u201cstop.\u201d The faces are simplified into near masks, with \u201cEmpty Chair\u201d giving us a red-and-white-faced woman facing forward and a pink-faced woman in profile.<\/h4>\n