{"id":73947,"date":"2024-01-16T12:05:44","date_gmt":"2024-01-16T19:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=73947"},"modified":"2024-01-23T12:21:57","modified_gmt":"2024-01-23T19:21:57","slug":"sarah-stoddards-anthologia-is-a-journey-through-collage-and-narrative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/sarah-stoddards-anthologia-is-a-journey-through-collage-and-narrative\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Stoddard’s ‘Anthologia’ is a Journey Through Collage and Narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sarah Stoddard, “Silver Spoon and Silver Pool” at Bountiful Davis Art Center. Image credit: Geoff Wichert<\/p><\/div>\n

The practice of carrying one’s own water in a purpose-made bottle\u2014a modern canteen\u2014has become commonplace, but it doesn\u2019t rule out the possibility that the person carrying water also has a carafe set aside for the purpose at home. And they may even have a traditional silver spoon they keep in it. While modern science rejects the efficacy of the practice, for centuries people kept such a spoon in their water, often keeping that water in a silver carafe as well, in order to preserve it, pure and safe. Such advice, or some such old tale, probably underlies the collage, \u201cSilver Spoon and Silver Pool.\u201d Here a woman dressed in what might be a Victorian nightgown and surrounded by foliage that suggests an outdoor setting, accompanied by a horse that is either a dwarf or else far away, gazes into a small, highly reflective body of water. Well apart from her, but still in the same work, a barn owl, bag of flour, daguerreotype portrait, chambered nautilus, serpent, stuffed chair, and so forth are distributed upon a landscape of mountains and foliage. Such a dry description might prompt a reader to wonder just what it\u2019s all about.<\/h4>\n

In her exhibition statement, artist Sarah Stoddard<\/a> thoughtfully undertakes the reviewer\u2019s first task: describing the work. \u201cAnthologia,\u201d she writes, citing her exhibition\u2019s title, consists of \u201c… meticulously hand-cut shadow box collages and their wallpaper complements.\u201d She rightly considers this information important to decoding and appreciating her efforts. The contrast between the two collages in each piece, one the 3-D contents of the shadow boxes, the other the 2-D elements outside the box, arguably accomplishes three transformative goals.<\/h4>\n
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A view of two walls of work by Sarah Stoddard at Bountiful Davis Art Center. Image credit: Geoff Wichert<\/p><\/div>\n

First, it establishes a format. The repeated pairing of an unframed collage, mounted directly on the wall, and the framed-and-glazed box that erupts from its visual center, compares to the volumes in a set of books or the chapters comprising one of them. It\u2019s only necessary to step outside the gallery where \u201cAnthologia\u201d resides to be reminded that most art shows, regardless of theme or purpose, collect works whose size and shape were individually determined. Rather than being separately conceived and executed like them, these collages are parts of a greater invention.<\/h4>\n

Second, it establishes a hierarchy of presence. The contents of the box are originals, seemingly taken from random sources. Being mounted in space brings them to life in a way that delights the eye even as it frustrates photography. Needing to be seen in person, they are the heart of the work, the crown of this creation. On the other hand, the \u201ccomplements\u201d have been reduced by being attached, unframed, directly to the wall like so much paint\u2014or wallpaper\u2014after first being copied and printed in a low-definition or grainy fashion. We probably look in the box first, finding what\u2019s there isolated from our own space by not one, but two steps up.<\/h4>\n

Then there\u2019s Stoddard\u2019s statement, invoking authors, their books, and their characters and events, to the exclusion of other visual artists. Stoddard\u2019s art, though necessarily visual, will be in search not of the objects she invokes by depicting them, but in pursuit of the roles those objects play in building believable stories that the viewer may choose to enter. Nothing is precious; instead of carefully copying the natural world, she has collected somewhat random examples from it. She no more means to trivialize these by such means than she intends to trivialize stories by calling them \u201cfairytales and fantasy.\u201d Her structure works against the tendency to conceive fiction as trivial or the opposite of reality, when instead, for her, it is reality that has been elevated and structured by being \u201ccurated,\u201d and so made suitable for her purposes.<\/h4>\n
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Sarah Stoddard, “Empty Shell, Unraveled Spool” at Bountiful Davis Art Center. Image credit: Geoff Wichert<\/p><\/div>\n

Stoddard cites four examples of objects enchanted by their roles in storytelling. There\u2019s the barely material curse that sends Snow White to sleep . . . perhaps found in a leather-bound book, or made entirely of breath. In \u201cSabriel,\u201d author Garth Nix assigns necromancy, or communicating with the dead, to seven magical bells. Jo March, the protagonist of \u201cLittle Women,\u201d cuts off her hair, forced to trade her vanity for something more practical. And Bertha Mason, the secret wife of Jane Eyre\u2019s Mr. Rochester, burns down his mansion and drives Jane away. If these don\u2019t sound like fairytales, they\u2019re certainly not the sanitized versions that have replaced an earlier collection of myths and legends that captivated children while preparing them for real life.<\/h4>\n

Perhaps the best description of Sarah Stoddard\u2019s “Anthologia\u201d\u2014a 17th-century term that comes from Greek and once meant a bouquet of flowers, so by extension a collection of poems or epigrams\u2014is to call them talismans: objects with magical powers of suggestion that may prompt the imagination to carry a sensitive person, such as a writer, on a journey full of formerly familiar objects made strange by an uncanny process, and with her, to bring others, such as us, along.<\/h4>\n
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Sarah Stoddard, “By Sound and Light” at Bountiful Davis Art Center. Image credit: Geoff Wichert<\/p><\/div>\n


\nAnthologia: Sarah Stoddard<\/em>, Bountiful Davis Art Center<\/a>, Bountiful, through Feb. 17<\/p>\n

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The practice of carrying one’s own water in a purpose-made bottle\u2014a modern canteen\u2014has become commonplace, but it doesn\u2019t rule out the possibility that the person carrying water also has a carafe set aside for the purpose at home. And they may even have a traditional silver spoon they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":73949,"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":[2504,4536],"class_list":["post-73947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-bountiful-davis-art-center","tag-sarah-stoddard"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Empty-Shell-Unraveled-Spool--scaled.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-17 09:08:43","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\/73947","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=73947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73953,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73947\/revisions\/73953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}