{"id":96330,"date":"2025-09-22T07:31:57","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T14:31:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=96330"},"modified":"2025-10-06T07:59:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T14:59:10","slug":"halee-roth-finds-clarity-and-elegance-in-the-union-of-form-and-spirit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/halee-roth-finds-clarity-and-elegance-in-the-union-of-form-and-spirit\/","title":{"rendered":"Halee Roth Finds Clarity and Elegance in the Union of Form and Spirit"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Painting

Halee Roth, “Origin of Light,” oil on panel, 32×34 in.<\/p><\/div>\n

It was just over a year ago, in August of 2024, that Halee Roth<\/a> debuted in a two-artist exhibition<\/a> at her local venue, which happens to be the Bountiful Davis Art Center. Recalling those large abstractions, mixed media fields of flawlessly controlled color articulated in depth by map-like lines in ink and gold, and the unexpected use of bleach, it was apparent that she had two assets in abundance: training and talent.<\/h4>\n

So a year has passed and she has her first solo show at \u201cA\u201d Gallery, and in the interim it seems she has polished that skill for pure color design, and yet gone in another direction entirely, one in which what were veils and clouds and landscape impressions have become imaginary, natural architecture in deep space. Embedded in each colorful, spatial universe is a lone figure, or in one case a couple, that are nude or close to it and captured not so much in a pose as in a full-body gesture: one that bespeaks the experience of being alive. Titles like \u201cWhen We Were the Wind\u201d and \u201cWater on Parched Earth\u201d leave no doubt that for all their interaction with the painted space and, most particularly, the light that grants them form and power, their visible bodies are meant primarily to reveal their internal possession of that most elusive, yet essential quality: the Human Spirit.<\/h4>\n

The theme that organizes these 14 episodes might be approximated in the word \u201cresonance.\u201d The ability of these subjects to adapt their postures to the environment, or to create beauty in a sympathetic collaboration with what surrounds them, speaks to the possibility of discovering, or perhaps re-discovering, harmony in where and how we dwell. One painting that encapsulates such an alliance of image with language is titled \u201cKomorebi,\u201d a term loaded, as so many Japanese locutions are, with an aesthetic quality and containing three words that together speak of the experience in nature of light filtering through the leaves of a tree, and so producing a dappled pattern wherever, and upon whatever, it lands. In this canvas, as in \u201cForced to Feel\u201d and \u201cOrigin of Light,\u201d Roth adapts the figure and the ground to each other so as to place the figure largely in shadow, thus allowing the light to find, highlight, and focus the contours of her body. This should remind viewers how perceiving light and shadow enable greater knowledge of things that are otherwise known only to exist. Suitable guidance to when this process is working is when the observer finds palpable pleasure in the act. Not for nothing do physicists use words like \u201cclarity\u201d and \u201celegance.\u201d<\/h4>\n