{"id":65770,"date":"2022-10-27T18:25:20","date_gmt":"2022-10-28T00:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=65770"},"modified":"2022-11-12T18:28:21","modified_gmt":"2022-11-13T00:28:21","slug":"jesse-meredith-from-a-certain-vantage-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/jesse-meredith-from-a-certain-vantage-point\/","title":{"rendered":"Jesse Meredith: From a Certain Vantage Point"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We now use the less meaningful term \u201cmixed media\u201d in preference to more precise words that range from \u201coil on canvas\u201d to \u201cExpandable foam, epoxy clay, epoxy gel, resin, wood, steel, acrylic paint, quartz, glass rhinestones, and pencil\u201d\u2014a description that was posted next to a recent work in Park City. While \u201cmixed media\u201d might actually be a better choice for the latter, it also signals the decline of designating material usage, a process that may have begun when Julio Gonz\u00e1lez and Pablo Picasso welded together a preexisting bicycle seat and handle bars to make a brilliant image of a bull\u2019s head. With the arrival of assemblage, the usefulness of labeling materials began to break down. It\u2019s one thing to expand the vocabulary by adding new words, but it’s another to shrink it by labeling everything with the same name.<\/h4>\n

\u201cMixed media,\u201d then, might be reserved for occasions when an artist does something where the mixture is part of what the work is about. A good example, on view in the AIR Gallery at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, would be Jesse Meredith\u2019s<\/a> \u201cOverton Windows.\u201d If the exhibit\u2019s name sounds familiar, it\u2019s most likely because it\u2019s become a term of art in academic discourse, where it\u2019s used to describe the range of acceptable public policy ideas circulating at any given time. In his art, however, Meredith, uses it to refer to a durable \u2014 even a stubborn \u2014 attitude concerning the question of public vs private space. He traces this holdover back to the American Dream and belief in Manifest Destiny, but what particularly concerns him is the connection between so-called \u201crugged individualism\u201d and the peculiarly American ideal of private property.<\/h4>\n

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Indeed, the works in \u201cOverton Windows,\u201d all of them untitled, simulate windows, as paintings have more-or-less done since the Renaissance. Meredith\u2019s windows are neither paintings nor sculptures, but bas-reliefs, most of which contain both 2- and 3-dimensional parts. That is, most combine an image, such as a poster or photograph, with some kind of construction material that covers, shades, or outright obscures it. It\u2019s vinyl siding taking the place of lace curtains. As viewers walk around the gallery, they are led on a merry chase, a metaphor for the trip the artist took, from Texas to Utah and on to California, where he alternately saw art works retailing the open spaces of the West and, contrasting with them, spaces closed off by the use of industrial materials created for that purpose, even as those same materials often seek to create a nostalgic image of the traditional, handmade home.<\/h4>\n

Metaphors have ways of expanding, and Meredith soon found eloquent ways of growing his. After all, the plentiful vistas of the Wild West weren\u2019t just hidden behind fences, billboards, and the like. They were literally sliced up by yet more industrial tools, into identical segments called lots or plots, and sold off for individual replicas, however inadequate, of the terrain that inspired them. And so he took similar tools to his images, slicing them like the land into repeating parcels. These are among the most intriguing, because frustrating, pieces in \u201cOverton Windows.\u201d Even though they are fully exposed, cutting and manipulating has made them challenging to decipher.<\/h4>\n

In the simplest, but also the most advanced image, a mobile home-style window has been cut through a photo of a tree standing before a section of vinyl siding. Through it, we see … another vinyl wall. It\u2019s a reminder of Oscar Levant\u2019s famous quip about yet another source of artistic delusion: \u201cStrip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath.\u201d When media are combined this way, layered like so many conflicting thoughts, \u201cmixed media\u201d become as meaningful as John Keats\u2019 \u201cnegative capability,\u201d and art takes a step further into understanding the murky vantage point where we stand today.<\/h4>\n

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Jesse Meredith: Overton Windows<\/em>, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art<\/a>, Salt Lake City, through Jan. 7<\/p>\n

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All images Jesse Meredith from the “Overtown Windows” (photos by Geoff Wichert)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We now use the less meaningful term \u201cmixed media\u201d in preference to more precise words that range from \u201coil on canvas\u201d to \u201cExpandable foam, epoxy clay, epoxy gel, resin, wood, steel, acrylic paint, quartz, glass rhinestones, and pencil\u201d\u2014a description that was posted next to a recent work in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":65788,"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":[],"class_list":["post-65770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/IMG_1782.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-16 06:58:57","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\/65770","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=65770"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65790,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65770\/revisions\/65790"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}