{"id":66107,"date":"2022-11-21T08:10:04","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T14:10:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=66107"},"modified":"2022-12-16T10:41:14","modified_gmt":"2022-12-16T16:41:14","slug":"swa-2022-works-are-embedded-in-our-common-cause","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/swa-2022-works-are-embedded-in-our-common-cause\/","title":{"rendered":"SWA 2022 Works Are Embedded in Our Common Cause"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Installation view of SWA 2022 at Ogden Contemporary Arts, including, from left, works by Alexis Rausch, Cody Chamberlain and Douglas Tolman (photo by Eden Buxton)<\/p><\/div>\n

The largest work in Utah Arts & Museum’s Statewide Annual at Ogden Contemporary Arts is Cody Chamberlain\u2019s \u201cProcession,\u201d an almost mural-sized, hyper-realistic depiction of a place somewhere in the vast Utah desert. It\u2019s an accepted convention not to reveal the locations of rock art, for fear that if it becomes widely known it may be deliberately defaced, or otherwise damaged. Under a brilliant blue sky, laced with wisps of high-altitude clouds, \u201cProcession\u201d shows a vivid red rock wall, protected behind a defensive parapet of rugged white stone, on which can be seen an extensive array of petroglyphs. These pale images of sophisticated, mysterious, prehistoric art were made by laboriously grinding away the desert varnish, a dark coating of minerals washed over the rock surface during centuries of rare rainfalls, and are currently believed to have been nodes in the first people\u2019s social network: places where they paused in their travels to leave behind messages, whether for each other or for themselves being uncertain. The painting must be so large in order to show the title feature, a procession of dozens, perhaps hundreds of tiny figures that appear to walk across the rock above the field of images spread out below. Without originally meaning to, today they recall one of the great mysteries of art history: the procession that winds its way around the Athenian Parthenon, carved reliefs mostly stolen by British imperialists that have become the poster child, so to speak, of the international movement to repatriate looted artworks to their places of origin.<\/h4>\n

In a sense, however, there are a pair of even larger works at OCA, which can be found in the meandering upper part of its modernistic use of space. Christopher Kanyusik\u2019s \u201cProxy\u201d and \u201cSeparate\/Together\u201d are conceptual giants despite their tiny physical dimensions. Each consists of a broken piece of stone that has been restored by matching its original form with molded plaster. At a time when authenticity is everywhere a quandary and the specter of DNA manipulation, even outright cloning, looms on the horizon, the eloquent example of these two stones says something new about an ancient thought problem, usually called the Ship of Theseus. Like that much-repaired ship, how much of anything can be replaced and have it still retain its identity? Which of the objects in \u201cSeparate\/Together\u201d is authentic, or are they both \u2014 and if so, how many times can this division be repeated before the original is lost?<\/h4>\n
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Christopher Kanyusik “Proxy” (photo by Geoff Wichert)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Stephanie Leitch activates her installation “Milk Field” (photo by Eden Buxton)<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s often been suggested that philosophy is the proper realm of art, though it seems likely cognitive science has an equal claim. Someone whose seemingly challenging artworks have found a surprisingly ready audience might well agree. Stephanie Leitch\u2019s \u201cMilk Field\u201d is another one of the large constructions she began making as a child, before she realized they could be art. Most of them have something to do with vertical motion, like controlled descent, and so deal with the great, baffling force at the center of everything: gravity. It\u2019s possible to watch a work like \u201cMilk Field,\u201d which combines the attributes of an installation with those of a performance without exactly being either, and read the downward flow of something like honey, or a fluid likened to blood, or in this case, glue representing milk, as either spiritual, or physical, or for that matter, as like the quality of mercy, which in “The Merchant of Venice” Portia tells us \u201cIs not strained; it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed \u2014 it blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.\u201d<\/h4>\n

This year\u2019s Statewide jurors, Ya La\u2019ford and Anna Valdez, have done an impressive job in choosing artists whose works depart from the conventions of their techniques. Not all have invented a new medium, like Leitch, but they\u2019ve all put something new on the wall, the pedestal, or in the case of Rocio Vasquez Cisneros, on the floor. Her series of six embroidered pillows may be the most inadvertently ill-timed art this year, given the recent connection between pillows and reactionary, anti-democratic politics, while its implications \u2014 that fetuses are sentient beings, that immigrants come here entirely by choice, and everyone who comes to America is happy to be here, are more inflammatory than she meant them to be. Yet her poetry, in which she witnesses and contemplates the uprooting and displacement of peoples, is deeply moving and her fundamental idea, that the place we lay our heads to rest and dream is as good a place for art as any, made \u201cMis Ra\u00edces\u201d one of the more emotional experiences to be found in a gallery, even in a time of seemingly endless crises.<\/h4>\n