An opening reception will be held for the artist from 6 – 9 pm in association with the monthly Provo Gallery Stroll. The show will remain open to the public through August 30th and is viewable from 12-8pm Monday through Saturday, or by appointment by calling 801.599.0680.

For the month of August, when you walk into the Sego Art Center’s gallery you will encounter the pristine white walls and painted canvases that have come to epitomize the traditional art world. However, Jared Latimer’s abstracted landscape paintings in “Still Conflict” suggest a natural contemporaneity as they invade the mind of the viewer recalling nameless communal anxieties. In this new body of work Latimer assumes the role of cartographer, mapping a personal conflict within the contemporary American psyche through a series of aerial landscape paintings. However, the bird’s-eye viewpoint employed in these works simultaneously engages various psychosocial concerns: our nation’s lingering fears of terrorism; the ubiquity of Internet satellite images; the sensorial alienation of airplane passengers looking through cabin windows 35,000 feet above terra firma.

Obscuring this ordered land below is a sophisticated overlay of abstract planar and linear forms, which Latimer suggests represent an artistic battle between the elements of design. Thus as he layers, removes, and applies paint Latimer transfers conflict into his works, thereby imbuing them with the anxiety inherent in creation. These conflict-born anxieties are then reconciled by a “third party,” in the form of a tumourous nebula. But, even as the warring factions of line and planar form are partially reconciled, a new conflict arises between the landscapes’ realism and the encroaching abstractions superimposed upon them. The amorphous forms create a cancerous entropy within the work, charting a new visual clash between foreground and background, thereby perpetuating the conflict-centered concerns that typify the larger body of Latimer’s work.

In a hyper performatistic manner, and indeed, in a manner not unlike many of his contemporaries, Ludwig refuses to engage in direct discussion of theory through his work. He has therefore created, like Nancy Spero or Mark Tansey, a collection of characters who engage in metaphorical dilemmas and destinies, inhabiting their own special universe- who ultimately act as Ludwig’s ambassadors for theoretical conversation. Ludwig’s characters comprise of, but are not limited to- “the wilderness brotherhood, fences, walls, clocks, flying clouds of fire, and other ghostly images”. Ludwig’s characters, like a hybrid of Trenton Doyle Hancock and Neo Rauch- live in a state of continual narrative that is at the same time enigmatic in its dimension.

The characters’ habitation is at once organic and geometric- in decay and regeneration. The geometric facet appears architectural, yet at other times, purely mathematical. A tree, rendered in a naturalistic manner, is forced to admit a self identity as pure material- paint, and does so because of an overlapping plane of transparent color which flattens the form to the surface of the support itself. Ludwig thus purposefully and lovingly acknowledges his lineage to Greenbergian Modernism, an admittance and honesty that is becoming ever more relevant, in light of recent global obsessions with pure abstraction.

Rebecca Neely’s sculpture Dipped in paint to represent a day, conceptually reveals and analyzes struggle and personal narrative. The piece is comprised of nearly 1000 crudely made sacs of fabric. Each pod or sac physically and symbolically represents a day in which Neely has sought conception. When the scope of Neely’s personal associations embedded in the work is realized, many emotions come to mind such as: desire,frustration, disappointment, despair, impatience. The work immediately offers varying levels of comprehension to individual viewers- levels which are limited or facilitated by viewers’ gender and experience.

Like Ludwig, Neely possesses a keen realization of her personal art historical lineage. Cloth and the action of sewing reference feminist materials, along with the gender specific, body references inherent in the work’s concept and physicality. It definitely exudes the previously mentioned negative emotions, yet does not contain violence or anger. Neely’s work analyzes the human experience through a specific, personal lens, in a manner which reminds all of us that the feminist construct and ideology has continual and recurring place within individual contemporary situations (even locally), and most importantly “that not all waste is meaningless.”

Gian Pierotti’s porcelain sculptures contain a freshness in application of media, formalism, and structure. Although small, almost precious in scale, they possess a largeness of presence- a rarity among objects hewn from clay. Pierotti recently struggled for perfection in his works, desiring to overcome the slumpy, earthy feel inherent in fired clay. This aspiration was a product of having a Lamborghini Countach poster placed on his wall as an adolescent in the late 1980’s. The slick lines of the race car, ingrained within his subconscious, inspired Pierotti to achieve machined edges in a material that defies precision. The results were indeed slick and polished, objects familiar to our contemporary society obsessed with iPods and all things polished and new.

Recently Pierotti overcame the desire for physical machined perfection in his objects. His artistic goals now lie in some other area, not completely understood or realized. The current results are gorgeous, and are “created from an archaic, imprecise process to achieve a meeting of the old and the new”. Pierotti creates slabs of porcelain clay and paints polka dots or lines on the surface, often pressing or molding additional textures. He then dissects the planar surface into polygons, assembling them into forms which are often stilted upon thin legs of porcelain. The objects resemble 1990’s 3-D computer imaged extraterrestrial amphibious forms. Pierotti states that they “defy complete recognition”.