TWENTY FOUR SEVEN
On February 6th, 2009, the Sego Art Center will open Twenty-four/Seven, an exhibit of new work by local artist Roland Thompson. In the Annex, Sego presents Big Wreck, a work by California artist Carleton Christy. An opening reception will be held for the artists from 6 – 9pm that evening in association with the monthly Provo Gallery Stroll.
Like the 1960s art icon Frank Stella, whom he cites as an important influence, Utah artist Roland Thompson straddles the hazy divide between the prescript of High Modernism and that of Minimalism. In his characteristic work, Thompson invents systematic rules – based on patterns of color, line and shape – by which he paints large, geometric, aluminum cutouts. Thompson’s inclination toward Modernism is apparent in his striving to keep his paint as flat as possible to the surface of his work, yet his relish for the slight deviation from uniformity speaks strongly to the influence of Minimalism.
Thompson’s new body of abstract, gestural drawings, on display this month in the exhibition Twenty-four/Seven at the Sego Art Center, is itself a deviation, an attempt to “unspring” his formerly concentric, precise patterns of color. Though Thompson admits these works have taken on an allegory for him, representing the orbital momentum of adult life around the many centers of gravity that must be attended to – home, family, work – these vibrant works are primarily formal. To borrow the words of Stella, “What you see is what you see.”
What Ought to Be
DECEMBER 08 - In the Aristotelian tradition, art functions as an imitator, showing us what is, what ought to be and what might be. Though typically imitation in art is couched in the notion of representation, it is the imaginative process of imitation that is communicated tacitly, even
instinctively, through the work in Gian Pierotti’s new show at the Sego Art Center. Evolved from their earliest stages as formal variations on a Minimal theme, Pierotti’s latest porcelain sculptures encase small polygonal shapes in architectural exoskeletons that may be disassembled and reassembled. The results are a playful advancement of an archaic process. The unique forms are deliberately accidental, artificially organic and defy any one direct referent.
Yet the work is both immediately familiar and immensely satisfying. Fitting together the pieces of one of Pierotti’s works is as gratifying as locking together two Legos or snapping Construx into place. The toys of childhood are the tools of imaginative imitation, teaching us how to act as adults. Pierotti’s works, fantastic constructed entities that call upon us as viewers to animate them, remind us to embrace childlike wonder in the gallery. In the aftermath of Postmodernism, the trend in art has been toward what ought to be – both formally and contextually. The reward of Pierotti’s work at Sego Art Center this month is that it offers up what art might be. And what art might be is fun.
Megan Whittaker completed undergraduate work in English at Brigham Young University and later recieved her MA in Art History from the same institution. Her master’s thesis was titled Takashi Murakami: Role-Playing the Artist. She currently lives in Spanish Fork, Utah with her husband Colin Tuis Nesbit.
CHICKEN, A PROVO STORY - a group installation between Brigham Young University students and Faculty of the Department of Visual Arts
The average American eats 81 lbs. of chicken annually.
If each chicken averages 5 lbs. then we each eat approximately 16.2 chickens annually.
All those numbers add up to .04 chickens eaten daily per person.
Provo has a population of approximately 120,000 people.
At .04 chickens per person daily, approximately 5,326 chickens are eaten daily in Provo.
The group completed 5,326 small paintings that were sold for $1 each. The majority of the proceeds went to the Food and Care Coalition of Provo. Approximately 1,000 paintings were sold throughout the duration of the exhibit.
Virtual Identities // Real Space
DECEMBER 08 – The artists selected to exhibit in the first annual Sego Art Center Juried Show are varied in their scope of media and concept, and represent a small but accurate sample of the ever more diverse contemporary art world. The artworks in the exhibit include media such as painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, conceptual jewelry, video, html, textile, fashion, and mixed media among others. Conceptual investigations are no less diverse, with artists analyzing and or constructing / deconstructing issues as varied as as are the artists’ locales (Shanghai, New York, Santa Fe, Boston, and Salt Lake City are only several of the many locations from which the artists reside).
Although this juried show achieves what all such shows accomplish: an opportunity for emerging artists working in many veins to show in one institutional framework without the parameters of the standard curatorial process of the host institution, this show provides yet another unique opportunity: the ability for artists who normally engage with one another in a virtual community, to physically bring their work together into a tangible temporal environment, arguably the overriding goal of many artists who engage in Artbistro and other similar social networking communities
participating artists in this year’s juried show are: Hidemi Shimura, Daniel Deluna, Natalie N O’neal, Pooneh Maghazehe, Yusuke Nishimura, Chris Purdie, Chao-Ming Teng, Mireille Vautier, Mark Rumsey, Adam Taye, Alan Bigelow, Holly Veselka, Valerie Atkisson, Brian Christensen, Jonathan Vaughan, Ryan Browning
Collective
In conjunction with the Collective and Autumnau, On Thursday September 25, Sego will present its monthly Evening with the Artist lecture and discussion series. The event is free and open to the public. The show will remain open to the public through September 27th and is viewable from 12-8pm Tuesday through Saturday, Mondays by appointment. Special appointments can be made by calling Jason Metcalf at 801.599.0680.
Over the last decade, Adam Bateman has built meticulously layered sculptural forms from language. Composed of hundreds of used books often gathered from libraries, Bateman’s sculptures at first appear Minimalist, and it is easy to formally compare them to the works of Donald Judd or Tony Crag. But upon closer examination these towering stacks are full of complex conceptual meaning. The carefully composed books are oblique triggers for a knotted relationship between object and word-laced thought. Bateman’s latest creation is a stolid wall nearly blocking the entrance to the gallery, boldly confronting the viewer. The titled spines are stacked inward and remain unseen to the viewer, the idea of the words contained on a page more important than the book itself. While the sculptures feel solid and have a heavy presence, the work is more experiential than visual. The relationship between content and object is personified in the yielding layers of books, an unexpected flow in a rigorous rectangle.
Weaved with compulsive gesture, Pam Bowman’s latest sculpture is an amalgam of personal experience and communal navigation. Important to understanding Bowman’s work is an appreciation of ritual, experience, and process. The sculpture in Collective is the result of thousands of sinuous fibers looped together over and over in a continuous braid. The fibers are caulking cotton, a material used to bind and seal wooden planks together in ship-building. The artist used over thirty-five miles of the twined cotton in the work as a material reference to domesticity. An integral part of interpreting the work is a comprehension of the compulsive nature of process: a repetitive method symbolic of memory, ceremony, and ritual. For Bowman, the intertwined strings represent the intersections of people, the combined whole ultimately stronger than the individual. But the work has more to offer than the seemingly simple analogy, as the ropes do not idly line up but violently pull, cover, tug, and jockey for position in a complex shared journey.
The play between Bowman’s tension-knotted twists and Bateman’s architectural stacks belies a deeper meaning that relies on the experiences of the viewer and his or her thinking processes. Adam Bateman studied literature and language at BYU and received his MFA in sculpture from New York’s Pratt Institute. He has shown extensively in NYC, Rekyavik, and UT. Former Director of the Central Utah Art Center, he is the Director of the Birch Creek Service Ranch and continues to work in his studio in Sanpete County. Pam Bowman received a degree in interior design and later an MFA from BYU. She travels extensively and lives with her family in Provo.
Jeff Lambson is curator of contemporary art at the BYU Museum of Art. Prior to coming to Utah he worked at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC for six years. Jeff is married to Ann Lambson, former director of youth education at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, and lives in Provo with their precocious daughter.
Still Conflict
On 1 August 2008 the Sego Art Center will open Still Conflict, an exhibition of new paintings and video by Utah artist Jared Latimer. The exhibit will feature an adjoining critical essay by Laura Rowley.
Lamborghinis, Sacs, & The Senior Captain of The Wilderness Brethren
This three person exhibit draws formal and conceptual lines between the three artists- lines which are often not straight or readily discernible, and which sometimes travel beyond the sphere of the artist, resulting in a show which challenges viewer’s experiences of progression and narrative in curatorial settings.
Allan Ludwig’s paintings present many layers of possible interpretation. Ludwig purposefully places in his work an assortment of environments, animate and inanimate objects, and geometric shapes and forms in what at first seems to be an arbitrary arrangement. When given time, the shapes and forms produce compositionally sophisticated relationships which holistically generate equality between the complete work and its parts which possess individual, relevant identities.
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.
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.