{"id":92425,"date":"2025-04-21T16:19:14","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T23:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=92425"},"modified":"2025-04-24T02:53:48","modified_gmt":"2025-04-24T09:53:48","slug":"what-we-have-to-prove-nolan-flynns-practice-and-play-at-has","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/what-we-have-to-prove-nolan-flynns-practice-and-play-at-has\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Have to Prove: Nolan Flynn’s Practice and Play at HAS"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A

Nolan Flynn’s exhibition of work at Harrington Art Studio. Image courtesy of Harrington Art Studio.<\/p><\/div>\n

A painter, part-time high school art teacher, and fellow writer for 15 Bytes, Nolan Flynn<\/a> is showcasing his spectrum of play at Harrington Art Studios in Midvale with a pairing of large and small works. The two styles are striking together, one working to prove technical prowess and the other a testament to the power and success of play. Hung together, they provoke a question: in the act of making art, what do we have to prove, besides our own pleasure in the making?<\/h4>\n

Harrington Art Studios (HAS), tucked in a post-industrial zone of Midvale, sets the stage for Flynn\u2019s inquiry. The space is run by artist and custom framer Ryan Harrington, and his wife, Cassidy. It exudes a gritty charm. The walk-up has a quaint front showroom, with a wall of frame samples facing the gallery walls. The space overflows into the back warehouse-turned-workshop for the framing business where local artists and the influence of Harrington’s skate background abound on the walls.<\/h4>\n

Flynn\u2019s larger pieces, \u201cNight Hike,\u201d and \u201cCottonwood Plan,\u201d are what the artist calls \u201cnaive Photoshop activity collages\u201d\u2014crude digital collages splicing and scrambling photos of the Mountain West into disjointed fragments that somehow retain a sense of familiarity. The works are painted and airbrushed on a canvas in icy palettes of blue and gray, with sudden flashes of red, orange, and yellow\u2014colors that will be familiar to anyone who spends time in the Wasatch. Their frenetic quality simulates the whooshing of speed at which descending mountain slopes make everything a blur\u2014disorienting, almost like a crash, like broken vision.<\/h4>\n