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.