{"id":68554,"date":"2023-07-26T11:55:17","date_gmt":"2023-07-26T17:55:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=68554"},"modified":"2023-08-31T09:42:10","modified_gmt":"2023-08-31T15:42:10","slug":"third-times-the-crisis-at-kimball-art-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/third-times-the-crisis-at-kimball-art-center\/","title":{"rendered":"Third Time’s the Crisis at Kimball Art Center"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Beth Krensky\u2019s \u201cKeys to Open the Beginning Before the End\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

Three\u2019s the charm this week as a third socially committed art exhibition joins two already in progress, one at UMOCA and another at Phillips. As it happens, Crisis<\/em> is also the third part of Between Life and Land<\/em>, a year-long survey of environmentally concerned art at the Kimball Art Center in Park City. The remarkable thing about all three is that, with more than fifty artists and arts partnerships involved, there is no fatiguing redundancy in their specific concerns. Each offers a fresh take on current concerns, even if the closest they come to a light-hearted moment is a 75-year old story about parachuting beavers into remote waters.<\/h4>\n

Throughout contemporary art, two contrasting impulses come largely to the fore. On the one hand is the urge to acknowledge a dilemma \u2014 a difficult, even lose-lose choice \u2014 facing artists and the public. The other is to encourage an audience to take action. In the best art, the two are inseparably intertwined. In Beth Krensky\u2019s \u201cKeys to Open the Beginning Before the End,\u201d the artist presents a venerable display case full of skeleton keys she\u2019s crafted from found castoffs. Anyone who has closely followed the social discourse on environmental threats must have come to realize that large parts of the affected population \u2014 which, after all, is everyone \u2014 have settled into a posture of waiting for a miracle, a deux-ex-machina, or a heroic leader to deliver us all from approaching doom. Krensky\u2019s keys may well proffer a means of unlocking such a passage into a livable future. She has adroitly given each universal key two qualities: one is the aura of some unknown power to do what no one seems to know how to do. The other is a suggestion of improbability: of folly even. By placing them out of reach in a closed box, she makes it clear that, as Kafka famously said, \u201cOh, there is hope, an infinite amount of hope, just not for us.\u201d Then again, since the keys are largely made of formerly living materials \u2014 branches, seed pods, corals, a feather \u2014 she might be suggesting that delivery lies in a return to our shared biological nature and a community, indeed an alliance, with those creatures whose suffering has enabled us to see the threat clearly and in time.<\/h4>\n

Identity, which was the focus of Part II, can refer to uniquely distinguishing characteristics of an individual: indeed, it\u2019s often assumed that is what is intended when the word is used. But more often its actual intention is effectively the opposite. \u201cIdentity\u201d then tags or links to the groups one \u201cidentifies with.\u201d Familial, social, political, gender, and ethnic associations are included in this set. In Part III, \u201cHuehuetlatolli: Words of the Elders,\u201d presented in bold type that directly confronts the viewer, may express DesertArtLAB\u2019s frustration, surely felt by many facing the inexplicable inactivity, often in fact obdurate denial, shown even by the most adversely affected. \u201cACT! TAKE CARE OF THE THINGS OF THE EARTH. DO SOMETHING,\u201d it begins. If anything, it denies the traditional indirection and open-mindedness of art in favor of a direct statement, expressed in the linguistic style of the Aztec oral tradition, giving it a theatrical power even as it identifies with another culture\u2019s own, more convincing identity.<\/h4>\n
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Lily Brooks, “Before Opening: February”<\/p><\/div>\n

Given the appalling way so much anger that should be directed at the causes of global warming is visited instead on those trying to combat it, I take comfort in the emergence of certain focal points shared among activists and concerned alike. Bodies of water and trees appear frequently as visual markers of progress and loss. In their videos suggesting topics for reflection, Meditation Ocean Constellation makes the oceans accessible to contemplation the way lakes have already served, and continue to do in Lily Brooks ongoing study of the Bonnet Carr\u00e9 Spillway, an Army Corps of Engineers flood control project on the Mississippi River near New Orleans. It\u2019s been more than a century since Mark Twain expressed doubts about the often-repeated claims that the Mississippi, so important to him throughout his life and work, could ever be made to meekly serve human interests. An unbiased look today will show the river, if anything, has grown more dominant as successive control measures have proven ineffective.<\/h4>\n

Meanwhile, fully a quarter of the works here make strong use of trees. Wendy Wischer\u2019s \u201cOnce there was a tree . . . and she loved a little boy\u201d comments in multiple layers on the wasteful and one-sided exploitation of trees. By constructing petroleum-based models of the parts of them that cannot easily be made into lumber, which were tossed aside before a combination of factors forced a change of approach, she calls attention to the exhaustion of stocks from overuse, economic pressures, and industrial development that led to the replacement of real lumber with inferior composites. John Grade\u2019s \u201cEmeritus\u201d presents an elegy for an \u201cabsent tree\u201d that consists of meticulously molded and assembled replacements for the parts of the tree that are replaced annually, like needles and cones. These are then installed in the forest, in a place where in the past a true giant would have stood, but which is now an unnatural and deceptive event: a tree farm in the guise of a forest. The completed version then appears as a translucent ghost of the life forms that, like the sandstone canyons and pinnacles of the Southwest, so impressed the explorers who first beheld them less than two centuries ago.<\/h4>\n
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Wendy Wischer\u2019s \u201cOnce there was a tree . . . and she loved a little boy”<\/p><\/div>\n

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have essentially brought Andy Goldsworthy\u2019s determination to use only natural art materials into their work in various urban environments, where they have grown lawns on the sides of buildings and found ways of growing photographic imagery in grass. In \u201cBeuys’ Acorns,\u201d they hark back to the transformative German artist\u2019s determination to use trees as memorial \u201csocial sculptures,\u201d but also invoke the American myth of Johnny Appleseed, one of several national heroes around the world whose legendary tree planting efforts served to encourage belief in individual action. Of course personal efforts, while commendable, need be backed up by community involvement, which Ackroyd and Harvey pursue in projects like \u201cInto Blue,\u201d which raises questions about who makes decisions such as those represented in Utah by massive, recreational landscape projects.<\/h4>\n

When Tiana Birrell presented her inquiry into vast commercial deceit, \u201cThe Cloud Cycle,\u201d in the AIR Gallery at UMOCA in 2021<\/a>, it filled the entire room. She\u2019s since distilled its exposure of undemocratic resource allocation \u2014 specifically the use of enormous quantities of electricity and water in maintaining the enormous computer installations that make possible the Cloud \u2014 to a single, wall-sized poster capable of being displayed almost anywhere. This important outreach fits compactly on a scale that includes Postcommodity\u2019s “Going to Water,\u201d which in its current version requires three video projectors, matching screens, and ideally a theatrical space. Anyone who has seen the movie \u201cChinatown,\u201d should remember the secret conspiracy its detective uncovers, to kidnap the water of Central California\u2019s Owens Valley, a resource of the Paiute tribes since time immemorial, and later a boon to agriculture, to supply some of the needs of the burgeoning city of Los Angeles. In a collection of time-lapse videos, \u201cGoing to Water\u201d collapses and displays the impact on the Valley of having lost this resource. It might well be that the Kimball should install a second entrance, one leading directly into this space, for those who would still deny that the climate is changing in ways that threaten life itself. Maybe after seeing these images and reading about the toxic dust released by the lake\u2019s demise, with accurately implied parallels to what is happening to Great Salt Lake, they would be ready for the thoughtful and eloquent works in the rooms next door.<\/h4>\n
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Postcommodity\u2019s “Going to Water”<\/p><\/div>\n

Between Life and Land: Crisis<\/em>, Kimball Art Center<\/a>, Park City, through Oct. 29<\/p>\n

For a broader context, read reviews of Part I<\/a> and Part II<\/a> of Kimball’s Between Life and Land<\/em>.<\/p>\n

All images courtesy the author<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three\u2019s the charm this week as a third socially committed art exhibition joins two already in progress, one at UMOCA and another at Phillips. As it happens, Crisis is also the third part of Between Life and Land, a year-long survey of environmentally concerned art at the Kimball […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":68560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[94,4321,4317,4320,4319,76,4318,3023,1972,1887],"class_list":["post-68554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-beth-krensky","tag-dan-harvey","tag-desertartlab","tag-heather-ackroyd","tag-john-grade","tag-kimball-art-center","tag-lily-brooks","tag-nancy-stoaks","tag-tiana-birrell","tag-wendy-wischer"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/Wisher-Once-there-was-scaled.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 18:33:07","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\/68554","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=68554"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68675,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68554\/revisions\/68675"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}