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Not, of course, that there was ever any danger that art would cease to be made. Since image making emerged over thirty thousand years ago, part of being human has been an indestructible urge to fashion beautiful things and endow them with personal meaning. But few cultures have shown as much interest in meaning as in ornament, and many of the characteristics of “fine” art are specific to a narrow window of place and time. The danger was, and may still be, that the intellectual justification for some art activities would be lost. While that may seem trivial, it might not prove as unimportant as it sounds; should the house of cards that is the art market collapse, along with the galleries, museums, and scholarly institutions it supports, artists in the future could return to the status they held before the Renaissance: artisans, servants of wealth and power with little discretion in their choice of work beyond that enjoyed by other skilled trades.

Until then, artists’ personal choices continue to distinguish fine art from, for example, industrial design. The difference is clear in the work of Sean Morello, who makes it so by working largely with recycled consumer products. In “What Art Is” these consist primarily of cast-off detergent bottles and cardboard containers, from which he cuts brightly colored geometric shapes that he arranges on squares of white polycarbonate. The results, which he calls “paintings” despite their lack of paint or the act of its application, briefly suggest the sort of color exercises that fill 2-D Design classes on their way to invoking symbolic references: stars, sewer grates, and the ghostly residue of mechanical production visible in textiles.

If his choice of found materials and visual references are essentially where Morello starts, what he believes transforms those quantities into art are his effort and his identification with the result, as shown when he places his name on a finished work. The effort, it must be said, is extraordinary, as is the skill evinced. In Street Grating, for example, legal pads provide three slightly differently colored sheets of otherwise identical cardboard. From the center of each Morello has precisely cut a number of rhomboid shapes. These are then swapped systematically between the three sources, until all three are once again whole, each now containing a familiar two-dimensional demonstration of the optical illusion of three-dimensional space. So precise is the technique that only the color change gives away that the image is collaged, rather than printed on. Yet because they are assembled, the thought comes to mind that they could be dismantled and returned almost perfectly to their original state. In another way of thinking it, the three could be added together and, in the design equivalent of the emergence of white light from separate wavelengths, they would cease to be.

In Street Grating, Morello has left in place the glue-and-paper evidence of his material’s source. In the cardboard stripes that comprise a number of pieces, each titled Abstract Painting, the texture of industrial-scale silkscreen color printing and the evenly spaced evidence of corrugation quietly give away the source. The most puzzling, and unexpectedly magical, are the Abstract Paintings made from detergent bottles. Here precision fit and exuberant interaction of color palettes seem to make impossible the artist’s assertion that the material comes from laundromat trash bins.

Not everything in “What Art Is” started out with found materials. Morello broadens his definition is a series of more conventional abstracts that, despite contrasting with the collaged works, show how they are connected in his mind to traditional painting. None of the larger works has a traditional subject; they refer instead to other abstract works by painters like Frank Stella. That, and a wall covered with cardboard squares that suggest Victor Vasarely sends the careless viewer back to find Ellsworth Kelly lurking in the collages. And why not: what better subject could there be for answering the question of art than other works of art? Painting a painting is, after all, no different than painting a building, a street scene, a park, a cosmetically enhanced visage, or any other product of human manipulation.

There is obviously an element of irony in how Morello gets where he wants to go, and there is much fun to be had along the way. But the playing must stop before the artist can achieve his purpose. Clearly, the detritus he uses is chosen more for its status, its societal significance, than out of necessity. If invoking Stella and Kelly seems ambitious, Morello has an even higher art saint in mind. In the 1990 exhibition Classic Modernisms, the Sidney Janis Gallery drew a line between Ellsworth Kelly and Piet Mondrian. It’s that line that Sean Morello wants us to follow.

For classic modernism, the connection was aesthetic, but for Morello it is more. Like Mondrian and his fellow painter Theo van Doesburg, who together founded De Stijl, Morello places the role of art inescapably in the area of Ethics. Instead of pleasure, he speaks of the artist’s responsibility to help others see. Mondrian and van Doesburg believed we would behave more properly if we surrounded ourselves with the proper colors and forms; Morello sets out “not to translate, not to communicate, but to take responsibility.”

This moral purpose energizes every level of this project. For him, the real point in using commercial byproducts to make art lies not in any reference to the objects his images evoke, but to the connection between color palettes and the different social strata that enjoy them. Even the artists he draws on for images come in for re-evaluation in the manner of Clement Greenberg. His stripe paintings are probably more ‘essentialist’ than Stella’s, because the way he applies the paint with a roller is appropriate to the medium, while the hard edges of the plastic or paper paintings reflect the nature of the process they require.

This sort of ideology, this however knowing or unknowingly retrospective justification of art as both process and product, is arguably just another product of the liberation of culture by Postmodernism. If artists are free from the tyranny of the perpetual avant-garde, free not only to explore the future of art but also to mine its past, so too they must be free to adopt whatever ideology supported past art, so long as it can still carry the weight. For Sean Morello, though, liberation has not solved all his problems. For one, he doesn’t seem to have realized that to define what art is he must also state what it is not. What if someone experiences image making as channeling a message from another level of existence: is that not art? For another, a public that has come to see the high status of the artist as a justification for bad behavior is not going to take readily to the idea that art requires personal responsibility. Then again, what if I reject Greenberg’s conviction that the exterior is all that counts because I choose to believe in the artwork’s interior? What, then, happens to abstraction? Even the details are open to question: at the opening, a young painter with a strong talent seemed to take offense at the idea that paint must ipso facto look like it was applied at all. There seemed no point in arguing with her.

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Coming from the San Francisco bay area with fifteen years of art experience under her belt, Julie Nester easily saw a niche to fill in Park City when she moved here in April of 2004. Nester wanted to represent artists from major art markets with styles that were both new and interesting, providing Park City with “art that is unusual yet accessible”

Moving from California to Park City to start the gallery was a natural step for Nester. Her husband Doug is originally from Utah, and has always felt it a great environment to raise their children, while enjoying the outdoor lifestyle. Employment at both the Dolby Chadwick and the Andrea Schwartz galleries, along with private art consulting, and her bachelor’s degree in Studio Arts from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, prepared Nester for her venture here in Utah.

For her Park City space, Nester desired an open gallery that allowed the viewer to enjoy the contemporary art without distraction. Nester explored different venues along Main Street, but found the areas to be small and the rent extremely high. But in the Iron Horse District, which is located North of Main Street, Nester found a warehouse closely located to restaurants, easily-accessible, and with plenty of parking. She envisioned this building of cinderblocks to be a spacious and modern gallery. Nester renovated by tearing out the low ceilings, raising them to 18 feet, installing lighting, replacing the floors, and painting the walls to create an ideal display area.

Walking through the gallery one sees an eclectic mix of styles, media, and sizes. “Our art encompasses a diversity of styles from landscapes to lyrical abstract,” say Nester. The gallery opened in December 2004 with a goal of showcasing the work of emerging and mid-career artists who had not had previous gallery representation in Utah. Nester originally opened with the work of fifteen artists primarily from the San Francisco Bay Area. In the past year, Julie Nester Gallery has doubled its artist roster bringing in additional artists from San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, Korea, and Santa Fe.

Response to the gallery over the past fourteen months has been very positive. “It’s been unbelievable the response we have had from just word-of-mouth,” Nester says. Part of this response was in 2005 when Salt Lake Magazine named Julie Nester Gallery the “best gallery in Utah.”

Shows at the gallery rotate on a monthly basis, featuring both solo and group shows. In March, Donna Mintz will be the featured solo artist. Mintz uses oil alkyd, dry pigment, and plaster on board, along with other various materials to create each piece. Her images of ferns, skies, and objects seem to tell a story. Mintz describes her work “The carefully chosen color and distillation of detail specifies a feeling but not necessarily a place. I paint from the written word and never from the literal image. A scene is always a remembered scene - what is left out is often as telling as what is included.” The opening reception for Donna Mintz will be Friday, March 3rd from 5:30-8:00pm. The show runs through March 26th.

After Donna Mintz’s show in March, Christopher Terry will be featured in April. Terry is originally from Utah but now resides in Philadelphia. His work consists of still life subject matter using oil, gouache, and mixed media. The artist considers his paintings to be “representational, but attempt[s] to avoid describing the kind of detail that would make the images seem “real”.” He focuses on the use of “light, its intensity, direction, and tonality.”

The Julie Nester Gallery succeeds in providing a taste of diverse and unique art. One will not be disappointed in the wide variety of styles, media, and subject matter. It’s the perfect place for both artists and clients searching for a contemporary gallery in the Park City area.

Gallery Hours are Tuesday-Friday 10-5pm, Saturday 11-4pm, and anytime by appointment. Julie Nester Gallery is located at1755 B. Bonanza Dr. Park City, Utah (next to the Windy Ridge Bakery).

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The Riptide is our new feature which culls the newest waves in Utah art on the internet. We are currently looking for an editor to manage this new feature, so if you would like to become involved in 15 Bytes and learn more about the web, now is your chance. Contact Shawn Rossiter at artistsofutah@netzero.net

:: Utah photographer and mixed-media artist Jim Frazer has recently launched a website at www.jimfrazer.com. The site features multiple bodies of work from the past five years. Frazer is exhibiting this month in a show at the Sandler-Hudson Gallery in Atlanta. His photo-based collages entitled "Botanical Dreams" are created from views of the Tropical Rotunda at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens as a wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities. The prints and boxes use the metaphor of dreaming to reveal hidden symmetries and analogies between art and the natural world.