On 5 September 2008, the Sego Art Center will open Collective, a two person exhibition of new sculpture by Utah artists Adam Bateman and Pam Bowman. The exhibit will feature an adjoining critical essay by Jeff Lambson, curator of contemporary Art at the BYU Museum of Art. The Annex (Sego's space connected to the main gallery) will feature Autumnau, an exhibition of paintings by Utah artist Roland Thompson.

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.

AUTUMNAU: Roland Thompson

"For me, painting is an act of meditation. The artwork results from concentration on a single moment or event. A million or so single events presented next to each other, within a context, consitute the completed art object.

The painting is initiated by a production plan. Execution of the plan (the medium of meditation) is made through a series of decisions considering the boundaries of the production plan.

The meditation is double-minded. While a portion of my brain is kept active moving my body and making judgments, the rest is left to think freely--to imagine.

The painting might be influenced by the free thoughts of the meditation. Possibly the marks vaguely represent images of reverie, or maybe the reverie is simply a fantastic elaboration departing from the image of the marks. And yet, maybe my experience isn't relevant to the enjoyment of the work. But to the those who are curious, my favorite themes to contemplate are: notions of beauty (ancient and modern), desert landscape, cartography, and technologies (real and imagined) that aid seeing across time and space."

Roland Thompson studied painting at BYU and then received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. He has shown extensively across the united states including at White Columns, Pierogi, The Painting Center, The Museum of Contemporary Art Fort Collins, and many other places. He lives in Cedar Hills, UT with his wife and children.

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.

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.

Laura Rowley is an artist and writer who lives in Provo, UT with her husband Jim Dalrymple II. She is currently completing undergraduate work in Visual Arts at Brigham Young University, and is completing a certificate in teaching.

Lamborghinis, Sacs & the Captain of the Wilderness BrethrenThis 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.

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”.