{"id":87849,"date":"2024-10-17T12:51:10","date_gmt":"2024-10-17T19:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=87849"},"modified":"2024-11-06T17:31:59","modified_gmt":"2024-11-07T00:31:59","slug":"artists-in-landscape-and-identity-reflect-on-the-meaning-of-place-and-belonging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/artists-in-landscape-and-identity-reflect-on-the-meaning-of-place-and-belonging\/","title":{"rendered":"Artists in “Landscape and Identity” Reflect on the Meaning of Place and Belonging"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Untitled photograph by Josephine McCullough is one of a suite of eight featuring the same scale house on stilts.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

No one work of art can \u201csay it all,\u201d but the poster image for Landscape and Identity<\/i> tells the story that led Jason Lanegan to once again gather a group of artists whose works address some concern they share with him. Unlike curators who start from a notion and try to find art that expresses it, Lanegan watches what his friends, students and colleagues are doing, what moves them to make their art, what has recently animated them, and gives it a name. A firm foundation is important in life, supporting both a sense of place, of home, and an identity. So his \u201cFirm Foundation\u201d starts with what gallery director James Walton calls a \u201cgranny cart,\u201d a wire basket on wheels that can hold shopping, laundry, or anything that needs gathering. Lanegan fills his cart with handmade blankets\u2014quilts and knits\u2014which might be essentials for filling in his idea of a homestead. He tops these with one of his domestic reliquaries: a detailed\u2014yet in this case generic\u2014scale model of a house that contains, in what might be the locale of a garden or reflecting pool, some objects that recall the type of persons who would have lived there. These possessions thus end up in possession of the identities of the unknown occupants.<\/h4>\n

Lanegan includes two more of these reliquaries in Landscape and Identity<\/i>. \u201cRelics of a Dream IX: Puget Sound Beachcombing\u201d recalls his youth in the Northwest via a cutout silhouette of another house, one that contains a collaged view of cliffs and mountains that surround a seascape, with pools of seawater on the beach that blend into parts of a map. The silhouette is flat, but opens like a window into the natural setting, which then becomes flat again in the map, in which a real window opens into a collection of actual flotsam found on the real beach. Like it, \u201cMemory\/Mirage\u201d also hangs on the wall, but presents so many transitions between reality and art that it beggars description.<\/h4>\n