{"id":55092,"date":"2020-10-24T12:09:18","date_gmt":"2020-10-24T18:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=55092"},"modified":"2020-11-19T01:51:46","modified_gmt":"2020-11-19T07:51:46","slug":"still-here-james-rees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/still-here-james-rees\/","title":{"rendered":"Still Here: James Rees"},"content":{"rendered":"

With our \u201cStill Here\u201d series, we are checking in with members of Utah\u2019s art community to see what the past several months has meant for them.\u00a0A widely-known champion of the arts, James Rees<\/a> is a passionate advocate for art education that balances theory,\u00a0 research,\u00a0 and practice. With more than 24 years of teaching experience, Rees currently teaches full-time at Provo High School, but he has also taught undergraduate and graduate courses in art and art education at\u00a0 Brigham\u00a0 Young\u00a0 University,\u00a0 Utah\u00a0 Valley\u00a0 University,\u00a0 and Westminster College. Rees a Fulbright Memorial Scholar, a Teachers Institute of Contemporary Art Fellow, and an Art21\u00a0 Fellow.\u00a0He was elected by his peers to become vice president of the National Art Education Association. The artist primarily uses monotype printing and transfer ink drawing processes in creating his images.<\/em><\/p>\n

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As COVID hit and unraveled several plans for travel, exhibits and presentations, my wife and I did what a lot of people did\u00a0that were stuck at home: We began cleaning and organizing around the house. As a result\u00a0my wife finally got to a project she had been wanting to do for years \u2014 to photograph all of our children’s artwork that we had stored for over 30 years.\u00a0In the process she came across\u00a0a series\u00a0of\u00a0drawings our\u00a0youngest\u00a0son did when he was three (he\u2019s now 26)\u00a0that had an uncanny likeness to the shape of the coronavirus.<\/p>\n

I enjoy seeing artists push against the limits and the ways we explore materials and themes in new ways and so\u00a0I\u00a0thought this would be a good time to try something new and\u00a0decided\u00a0to incorporate his drawings\u00a0with mine to create\u00a0a “collaborative” piece. I glued\u00a0his red line images\u00a0onto large sheets of paper and printed my own black ink images on top.\u00a0The result was a surprisingly new way to see these works.<\/p>\n

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

Since things changed so much for me during this time, I decided to work within the constraints that COVID-19 provided and hunkered down and explored different forms of expression for myself. One benefit of this pandemic has been the time that it has made available to me to keep on revisiting and hammering out earlier ideas into new forms of expression.\u00a0I revisited\u00a0former\u00a0themes that I felt I wanted to breathe new life into and\u00a0to\u00a0see where\u00a0this would take me and\u00a0I’ve used\u00a0this time to open up the flat file and look at works\u00a0that\u00a0didn\u2019t quite make it in the past to see what I could do to revive and revitalize these images\u00a0into\u00a0complete and whole\u00a0works.<\/p>\n

The creative constraints created by the pandemic also gave me the opportunity\u00a0to return to figure drawing and explore again\u00a0what I used to do years ago.\u00a0It was a way to\u00a0relook at\u00a0the direction and course that my art has\u00a0taken in recent years. Perhaps it was doubling back to make sure that I didn\u2019t make a wrong step in the past and what it did was\u00a0to\u00a0reaffirm for me the route that I had taken. It was\u00a0reassuring to revisit old ways\u00a0and\u00a0old images to find that they no longer served\u00a0me in quite the\u00a0same\u00a0way they used to. The pandemic forced me to re-center and reestablish the trajectory\u00a0of my\u00a0creative path.<\/p>\n

Interestingly\u00a0enough, the series\u00a0I’ve\u00a0been working on for the last couple years, “The\u00a0Weight\u00a0We Carry,” seems particularly relevant under the weight of the pandemic.\u00a0Many individuals\u00a0connect to these works in\u00a0surprising\u00a0ways\u00a0and\u00a0I find that so\u00a0rewarding.\u00a0Originally this series was\u00a0a way to\u00a0confront\u00a0and deal\u00a0with personal struggles and trials\u00a0I felt I had to bear and\u00a0ultimately find a way to\u00a0gain strength\u00a0from them. It also was about finding equilibrium in the struggle which I think we can\u00a0all\u00a0relate to in these times.<\/p>\n

This weird and chaotic time can provide an avenue for artist to reevaluate and establish new directions in their own work.\u00a0Circling back to the works that I found through the process of cleaning out our house and adding to them in new ways\u00a0has allowed me that chance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As COVID hit and unraveled several plans for travel, exhibits and presentations, my wife and I did what a lot of people did\u00a0that were stuck at home: We began cleaning and organizing around the house. As a result\u00a0my wife finally got to a project she had been wanting to do for years \u2014 to photograph all of our children’s artwork that we had stored for over 30 years.\u00a0In the process she came across\u00a0a series\u00a0of\u00a0drawings our\u00a0youngest\u00a0son did when he was three (he\u2019s now 26)\u00a0that had an uncanny likeness to the shape of the coronavirus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55098,"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":[3837],"tags":[677],"class_list":["post-55092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-still-here","tag-james-rees"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Screen-Shot-2020-11-09-at-9.22.46-AM.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-28 17:16:39","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\/55092","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=55092"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55099,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55092\/revisions\/55099"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}