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About 200 charitable art lovers wandered through the Tuscany restaurant gardens August 26, 2001 admiring the work of close to 40 invited Utah artists. Easels and tables encircling the gardens displayed a range and quality of art pieces that was impressive and enticing. All works were available for purchase as part of a silent aucton which concluded with the evening events. Art lovers were able to choose from a variety of technique and subject matter. Established as well as up-and-coming artists donated their pieces, ranging from abstract and landscape paintings to figurative photography, sculpture and multi-media works. Proceeds from the auction benefited The New Millennium Chapter of City of Hope which was pleased to raise over $15,000 to add to the annual 2001 goal of $50,000.

Guests were greeted by Utah's New Millennium Chapter of City of Hope chair and director Steve Whittaker; Karen Brey of Phoenix, fund-raising director for the western states, and event chair, Nance Thunell.

Take a look at http://www.cityofhope.org/donate/ and discover how simple it is to help advance the City of Hope's cause with a few mouse clicks. Also, contact Nance Thunell at 637.8970 for more information regarding this event.

Brooke Bradley
Patricia Kimball
Bill Patterson
Meri Ploetz
Pilar Pobil
Mary Qian
Bryan David Roberts
Shawn Rossiter
Steven Sheffield
Jennifer Worsley

. . . Not so quick, though. It's only fair to let you in on the extra. Present the evidence, as it were. The following is the full statement about the show:

In designing this collaborative show, we began to explore the idea of repetition and how it affects us as indivudals. All people experience reptition to some degree, whether by choice or by circumtance. We decided to isolate a reptitious event from our respective backgrounds -- bothersome habits, deliberate rituals, significant patterns, or mundane daily events-- that had some degree of influence on our personalities and character. We then analyzed how these experiences may have affected the deveopment and longevity of our own interpersonal relaitonships. Having indivually and collectively examined these repetitious incidents, we created correspoinding interpretations based on our own experiences, an image from each of the resulting six piecses was then selected and incroporated into six new works of art (collage and silk screen) represented by the collaborative exchange involved in two groups of three, three groups of two, and one group of all six artists. We surmised that through the philospohical layering of repetitive creation upon the idea of repetition itself, realtionships would be forged as a result of working symbiotically on various levels. We hoped that this unified effort would become a visual documentation of the process of forming relaitonships based on combining past experiences, habits, opionions, decisions, ideologies, etc. Whether or not the relationsihps will be lasting can be determined only through time; the works of art created in the endeavor, however, will remain timeless.

Wow. Go ahead, give it a second look, take it all in.

Ready? Here goes the ranting.
What are we doing here, a science experiment? We surmised that if we put elements X, Y, and Z together something really cool and profound would come out.
I can only guess that these students were fulfilling some assignment, with appropriate attempts at serious scholarship, to justify going to four years of school and receiving a bachelors degree. Or was it masters?
One of the questions this really poses is should artists even be going to Universities to get their educations? Why not simply attend an art school.
The only reason I can think of to attend a University in pursuit of an art education is the non-art instruction one might receive that might broaden one's talents. But if this is the result, I think it better to learn in a private studio.
After all, what do we have here but some statement about the art we are viewing which attempts to provide a level of seriousness and arthistoryworthiness to the works. These are serious artists?
What we've got here is some type of pseudo scientific experiment going on with watered-down philsophy in the form of jargon and buzz-words. The kind of stuff professors eat up.
These artists may never have even heard of people like Derrida,who provided the philosophical underpinnings of postmodern thought, or Barthes and Foucault who applied it to literature and culture; but they have been baptized by its trickeld down effect. Have learned that art can be made serious by adding the right jargon.
This project has everything. In the beginning the project seems to be about repetition. Fair enough topic. Certainly post-modernly chique enough. Well adapted for a visual medium (but have these artists really done anything with it that can compete with Warhol?). Next a pow-wow session. Group therapy. Lets talk about these things. Then they each paint a painting. Then they combine paintings in different ways.
Then we find out that this is all part of some type of hypotheses. A thesis statement followed by an experiement and the results.
The artists surmised that "through the philosophical layering of reptitive creation upon the idea of repetition itself, relationships would be forged as a result of working symbitiocially on various levels." It's starting to sound like the project is more about relationships than it is about repittion.
The language here may reveal the weakness of the thought. What is philosophical layering? The layering might be there, but calling it philosophical does not make it so. What type of relationships are formed? And what is the symbiosis on various levels? I don't think the artists themselves could answer the question.
Seems to me that all this is basically an attempt to make you feel like if you don't understand the relationships it's just because you don't get IT.
Mostly it is a lot of sound and fury. Signifying . . .
a case of logorrhea, an ailment too often found in the art world.

What it all comes down to are the two types of people who attend exhibits. There are those that read the artist statement, puzzle over what it all means, but who take the works more seriously for the difficult words surrounding them. Then there are those of us who don't even take a glance. If anything should do the talking it should be the paintings.

In and Out of Habit: A Collaboration ran from July7 - August 18, 2001 at Salt Lake's Atrium Gallery. Artists involved in the collaboration were: Shawn Bitters, Sunnie Bybee, Janelle Howington, Ashley Knudsen, Jared Latimer, Casey Smith.