{"id":91531,"date":"2025-03-21T19:51:10","date_gmt":"2025-03-22T02:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=91531"},"modified":"2025-03-27T11:56:23","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T18:56:23","slug":"three-artists-shape-meaning-from-fragments-at-alpine-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/three-artists-shape-meaning-from-fragments-at-alpine-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Artists Shape Meaning From Fragments at Alpine Art"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Mixed

Bill Lee, “Isolation #19 \u2018Covid 19\u2019”<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

There\u2019s only one thing more enjoyable for an arts writer than discovering a fresh young artist (usually just escaped from one or another splendid college program and shyly showing off inventions they\u2019ve been misled to expect no one will be thrilled by)\u2014that even greater, if only because less common, pleasure is to further explore the reliable revelations of a familiar favorite, a survivor of a life focused on sensitivity in a brutal world, along with the ups and downs of its marketplace. This month, in Fragments and Formulations <\/i>at Alpine Art on South Temple, we are thrice-blessed by a collaborative showing of three such veterans: Bill Lee, Frank McEntire, and Darryl Erdmann.<\/h4>\n

All three of these originals learned early the value of art that recycles the visual world from which it emerges, and not just through aesthetic filters, but literally in the form of collage. In turn, each teaches a master class in how formal design relates to and emerges from vernacular sources. Bill Lee intersperses thickly-layered comments on the everyday quarantine that flesh is heir to, like \u201cIsolation #56\u201d and \u201cAK Finally Found,\u201d with collages closer to the original meaning of the term, like \u201cIsolation #19 \u2018Covid 19\u2019,\u201d which combines found calligraphy and ambiguous anatomical and biological illustrations to suggest that our recent, lonely challenges had a longer and deeper grasp on us than we care to admit.<\/h4>\n
\"Abstract

Bill Lee, “DKY 910”<\/p><\/div>\n

Two of the fundamental elements in the exhibition statement, \u201cdeconstruction and reassembly,\u201d clearly refer to the mental process of art making in the mind as well as to the physical labor of the artists\u2019 hands. The most transparent examples are from Frank McEntire, whose works here come from the more refined side of his assemblage technique. In place of antique industrial and farm implements that locate today\u2019s only-too-familiar struggle between agriculture and hydraulics on the scale of entire continental epochs, here he shows how more subtle, if still ingeniously clever reconsideration of domestic knickknacks and bibelots can replace volumes of tedious social criticism. Whether it\u2019s \u201cThe Rider, the Elephant, and the Path,\u201d with its western everyman naively following the Hindu flight from Illusion, or \u201cResource,\u201d wherein sheer brawn turns its attention to the resources of grace, these illuminating meditations, which fit neatly on a desk or shelf, remind us that even more than literary texts, appearances benefit from close reading.<\/h4>\n
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\"Sculpture

Frank McEntire, “Divine Flautist with Bansuri”<\/p><\/div>\n

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