Annie Kennedy images 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

While everything Kennedy exhibits is familiar, if not necessarily comfortable, each thing she makes is also new. She’s young, and has a lot of ideas, but her originality is not a search for novelty; rather, her invention wants to get past “high art” the way an anthropologist or a poet must get past the imperial language imposed on a population and learn the native language in order to truly understand and express a culture’s content. So the shortage of art supplies out on the frontier is no problem for Kennedy, but her liberation. There is nothing here that couldn’t be found in either the kitchen or the sewing table. One of her most ambitious works is a calendar, a variable work that adapts to both the time and the place it is shown. Laid out on the floor, it reproduces the familiar grid of weeks and months, with each day represented by a recycled sardine tin filled with wax: a rectangle on which the artist inscribes the day’s contents as one would note the past and anticipate the future. The repeating shape also invokes soap and the monotony of washing, but the varieties of wax expand the references to include beehives and industry, candles and time, canning jars and preparation. Inclusions, including small sheep and kernels of wheat arranged into traditional decorative motifs, transcribe the lifecycles of plants and animals across the scheme of human time. Encaustic colors produced by juices or milk recall the way events and emotions stain the days. Recycling the parts is also part of the point: after all, the modest economy of the prairie is nothing more than humble acknowledgment that the dust from which we come, and to which we must return, was another’s before it was ours and will be someone else’s yet again.

In its complete form Kennedy’s waxen calendar has 365 days, but for this occasion she chose to show only "October, November, and December." This could be read as a season, a prophecy spread out before the viewer, or as locating the exhibit in time in much the same way as the ashlar limestone walls of CUAC locate it in space. In other words, it both is and is not an installation. Kennedy pulls off such ambiguous tricks across the body of her work. Time is thematically part of all she does, but it is also implicated in her techniques. Apparently, she prefers drawing on baked paper, a process that reproduces the fragile, mottled quality of ancient documents. |1| Baking also integrates the surface of the paper with her chosen mediums: olive oil, condensed milk, grape juice.

"Angel Moroni" locates the title angel, drawn in oil, on a series of concentric, pencil-drawn rectangles that could read as a locating grid or as a perspective rendering of a tunnel into which the heavenly presence recedes. |0| Thus the inevitable history of a new idea: become rigid so as not to be lost. "Sacred Action," another paper work, presents a triptych of drawings on scorched paper cut in the profile of an ornamental tombstone.|2| Flanked by the ubiquitous image of Moroni sounding the end of the world, a hand drawn in grape juice alternates between two visual readings, a kind of animation drawing on and calling attention to the way minds process events.

Many of Kennedy’s motifs are personal. The profile of an heirloom mantle clock shows up in "Veil," a felt curtain blossoming with salt crystals.|3| It appears again in "Family Inheritance," a set of six paper objects representing Kennedy and her five brothers and sisters. The number six also turns up in "Pattern with Six, Sego Lily Honeycomb," and arguably in any number of shapes and guises.|4|

Although not as materially elaborate as her calendar, in the deceptively simple looking "Family Inheritance" Kennedy has created a complex and sophisticated meditation on fundamental questions. Hung on the wall like a gallery of portraits, yet close in feeling to topographical models, her six figures become sculptures without giving up their identity as drawings. Because each hand-drawn object is a separate piece of paper, as the artist penetrates to the heart of each image the individual layers multiply. DNA comes to mind, with its mindless replication of intelligence. But the hand remembers the texture of old wood abandoned in the desert where it never grew. It’s work that accepts every category and topic one can throw at it, seamlessly incorporating nature and identity, time and eternity, the bounded and the infinite. As portraits not of six faces, but of six existential predicaments, they recall Dylan Thomas in his poem, Twenty-four years:

In the final direction of the elementary town
I advance for as long as forever is.

All this is fascinating, but Kennedy is young and it remains to be seen whether she will settle into an easy complacency with her material innovations and be content to just nudge and tease her Mormon background, or whether she will push her critique into something that seriously challenges received cultural wisdom. For whatever reasons, and it’s likely a combination of things — the alienating experience of a community that met and overcame withering resistance from the society at large, combined with the conservatism common among immigrants — L.D.S. communities are among the most conservative in America, and their artistic expression rarely goes beyond the ethos expressed in their most popular hymn: “All is well.” It’s a formula for kitsch, and finds its expression in homes where the only art is a reproduction of a picture of Christ or a sculpted ensemble representing an ideal family. It’s hardly fair to indict one minority in a nation of philistines (how many American homes display art or, for that matter, books?), but it’s disturbing when the art that does occur so patently has nothing to do with the real lives of the saints who collect it. If Annie Kennedy can do no more than to bring home to themselves what her fellow religionists recognize as art she will have succeeded far beyond what most American artists ever achieve. She has her work cut out for her, and she’s just about to slip it into the oven.

Annie Kennedy:Stored Heritage continues at the Central Utah Art Center thru October 19th.