Exhibition Review: Park City
Why the Web is Weak: Annie Kennedy and Mary Iverson @ the Kimball Art Center
by Shawn Rossiter
The notion of "aura" and its relation to the mechanical means of reproduction, introduced into critical thought over seventy years ago by Walter Benjamin, has proven to be one of the more fruitful analysis of its time. Its influence resonates through much of contemporary critical thought, even when some of Benjamin's predictions have proven to be wrong, as in the case of photography. A simplified version of Benjamin's thesis would be to say that with the increasing technical capacities for mechanical reproduction and the consequent availablity of reproductions, the "aura" of the "authentic" or original work would fade. This has certainly not proven to be the case with paintings or sculptures, and a look at recent auction house prices for photography proves that even with this, the most reproduceable art form, the aura of the authentic still holds sway.
Benjamin's predictions may not be as far off as appears to some critics, however, for although reproduced original works of art maintain an aura (and corresponding sticker price), it is a slightly different aura than the one described by Benjamin. The aura famous works of art take on in the age of mechanical reproduction is a fetshistic one; it is not the aura the work originally had but a new aura, pumped up by the hot air of cultural identity, corporate sponsorship and art historical turf battles.
The influence of the internet's rapid spread on this "aurafication" has been tremendous, making more and more images of art more and more available. Reproductions make the imperative to "see the original" more, well, imperious, but also more problematic; with a famous work of art, tourists and glass are not the only thing obstructing one's view and it is not always possible to look past one aura to see the other. With work by a lesser known artist, however, mechanical reproduction can actually serve to clarify one's perception of the original aura. This is what struck me when I visited the work of Annie Kennedy at the Kimball Art Center a few weeks ago.
Earlier this year, I designed a website for Annie (read here: disclosure of conflict of interest). Over the months I became very familiar with her work as I manipulated digital images, placed them in web pages, applied titles and added explanatory texts. But I had only actually seen two of her works in person -- one, her "Angel Moroni with Eleven" drawing, as Adam Bateman, director of the CUAC, pulled it out of his truck while I was visiting him in Ephraim. The other, her installation piece, "365 Days," I saw when it was on display at the Rio Gallery last year.
But when I stepped down to the Kimball's Badami Gallery and saw her current exhibit of work I was struck with one thought: the internet sucks. I say that with full knowledge of the statement's irony, considering that for the past two weeks I have been urging people to send donations to keep up this current internet project, Artists of Utah. In truth the internet is a fabulous tool, but what I mean to say is that despite its power as a tool, the internet still falls woefully short of conveying the "aura" of the original.
Mechanical (or in this case digital) reproduction creates an aura when it confronts a good work of art because it reminds the viewer, by means of comparison, of the qualities of art that make an original piece, well, original. "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be," Benjamin says. Which means that as long as the work has not become clouded by that other type of aura, the aura of the original will shine even brighter for being so much better than what was expected on the basis of a reproduction based on ones and zeros displayed on a monitor.
Kennedy's works are unique. She uses found objects, such as bandages, beef jerky, nail clippers and ribbon, to create a work like her "Family Quilt." Her process of baking paper stained with oils and other natural products make for particularly interesting pieces. And digital images reduces all these elements to one flattened surface. When you see the original, you realized that the olive oil has been baked into the paper in such a way that it doesn't seem so much a stain sitting on top of the paper (as one assumed) as it does a unified surface itself. On top of this substrata float a series of small blue ovals and the pencil marks that enclose them. Her works of torn and layered paper are particularly attractive in person, where you can see the edge and get a sense of how each fragment sits on the next. By reading the explanatory note on her site, you can know that in her installation piece, "Veil," Kennedy has encrusted felt with salt crystals, but until you see the actual encrusted salt, hanging from the felt and falling on to the floor, you are not truly experiencing the piece.
The work of M ary Iverson, on exhibit upstairs at the Kimball in the Garage Gallery, is completely different in effect from Annie's. Executed in flat layers of opaque color, washed pigments and thin straight pencil lines, there is very little tactile quality in these pieces that would be lost in reproduction. But Iverson is a marvelous colorist, and the balance of colors is something mechanical reproduction has yet to match in real art, whether it be the pricey coffee-table art books with widely varying color prints, or the images on the internet which, no matter how expertly they might have been manipulated to match the original on the designer's computer, are still susceptible to the vagaries of interpretation supplied by the variety of monitors and color settings.
I imagine that Iverson's attention to color comes largely from her work en plein air, a practice you would not readily assume by looking at her works at the Kimball; she reduces the Seattle dockyards into geometric diagrams of rectangular flat color laid out in strict lines of persepective. More Mondrian than Monet. Her fascination with the port of Seattle began with more naturalistic plein air studies of cranes, but while on the premises (another example of the importance of being there) she began to look closely at the shipping containers the cranes spent all day moving. Her best works in this exhibition are those where overt references to the port, such as cranes, bridges and large buildings, disappear and give way to an endless repetition and variation of her shipping crates. The planes of these are executed in a variety of ways (including a lack of execution) and Iverson's sometimes shifting perspectives can be vertiginous at times.
Iverson’s subject matter is perfect for our times. In a period of globalization, when companies are building cargo ships so large they will not fit through the Panama canal (and so are forcing its enlargement) and most sea cargo, with the exception of bulk commodities like grain and oil, travel in standard-size containers, there may be no better subject to depict the idea of a global network, and its standardizing effects, than Iverson's endlessly repeating and shifting cargo crates.
Part of the relevance of original art, its aura, is its refusal to completely accept this standardization. A visit to these two exhibits, at the Kimball Art Center through the end of November, will remind you of the power of the original (and the weakness of the reproduced). "What no examples of the work?" you ask. Well, considering the topic at hand, reproducing the images here would seem ironic to say the least. The message of course, is to see the originals but if you'd like a watered down (or monitored down) version to clarify your vision of the original, visit the artists' webistes: www.anniekennedy.net and www.maryiverson.com.
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Special Feature
The Meaning of Landscape
by Sue Martin
Eric Maisel, author and creativity coach, recently asked a group of painters to think about what their work means. "Why do you paint? What meaning are you making as a painter? Why do you choose the subjects you paint?" For an artist at my level, these were tough questions to ponder for I haven't yet settled on any particular subject, and my skill level…well, let's just say I have a long way to go to feel competent.
I can easily identify the meaning of certain series of paintings I've completed. But for my favorite subject -- landscapes -- I find myself unable to clearly articulate why I'm so compelled to paint them and what these paintings mean to me or, hopefully, to a viewer. So I decided to pose these questions to several landscape painters whose work I especially admire: Earl Jones, Hadley Rampton, Susan Gallacher, Shawn Rossiter and Richard Garland.
Earl Jones has been painting landscapes for the past 55 years.|0-2| At first he was attracted to the old farms and homesteads where his ancestors had settled. "They had charm for me," he says. But the old farms and barns have disappeared. Now, Jones finds his painting subjects in raw, undeveloped land. "It's the left over stuff we admire, the land that isn't used."
But, why, Earl? I probe. He suggests that he's looking for relief from the kind of development that we have to encounter every day in our ordinary lives. He confesses that he's a political news junkie and often finds himself thinking about current issues and problems. "Maybe I should paint tortured prisoners [in Iraq]," he says, "but I'm not really interested in doing that even though it's always on my mind."
Not only has Jones painted in many Utah locations, he now has a home near Reno, NV, and he enjoys painting the beautiful, undeveloped farm country of western Nevada and eastern California. He's always looking for new locations, too. He sketches and paints smaller canvases in plein air. For larger paintings, he takes photographs back to his studio and paints there.
While some painters paint those postcard-perfect scenes – the iconic views of American countryside, others find beauty in the ordinary. Jones says it’s the shapes, values, and color that suggest a painting for him. "It might be something that would ordinarily be overlooked, but framed properly it would be something worth looking at."
Jones’s work is on display at Phillips Gallery through mid-November.
Susan Gallacher paints landscapes because of the experience of being out in nature. Shes' attracted to the "colors, the disarray, and dishevelment of nature." She finds the overwhelming beauty of nature makes her want to capture that feeling, "not to replicate the scene," she says, "but to capture the feeling of it."
Though many of Gallacher's paintings are painted plein air in San Pete County, around her home and studio in Spring City, |3| she also paints urban scenes. She is attracted to commonplace subjects and feels, in fact, "it is our role and responsibility as artists to take the commonplace, that the average person wouldn’t even see, and show the beauty of it."
In her studio, Gallacher brings in bits of nature and paints still life subjects.|4| Finding beauty in the ordinary is sometimes taken to the extreme. She recently picked up a piece of mangled tail pipe in the parking lot of her studio and couldn't wait to include it in a painting. But why, Susan? I probe. "The way the ends of the tail pipe curl and get thinner is very graceful."
Susan Gallacher's work is always on display at her own studio and gallery – King's Gallery, 2233 South 700 East in Salt Lake City. Her work is also on display at Apple Frame in Bountiful and at Southam Gallery in Salt Lake City.
Richard Garland, whose landscape painting won Best of Show in the Utah Watercolor Society fall member show, gets up early every morning and paints at least one picture before going to work. His wet-in-wet landscapes are delicate and ethereal in mood.|5| He has photographed and painted the Wellsville mountainsso often, he knows them like the back of his hand. While inspired by his Cache Valley surroundings, Garland says he paints from memory the landscapes of his native North Dakota, which is not unlike the flat farmland of Cache Valley.|6|
When asked why he paints landscapes, he responds "I can't paint anything else." This, of course, is not really true. At last month’s Ogden Arts Festival, Garland's booth featured exquisite paintings of irises from his wife's garden.
Garland's prize winning landscape will be on display at the Michael Berry Gallery through Nov. 8. Garland's work is also available through The Magpie's Nest.
Shawn Rossiter, whose landscape paintings are shown at Utah Artist Hands, explains that he first chose to paint landscapes as an escape from heavier academic studies.|7| "When I first started painting I had just left a Masters program in Comparative Literature where I was studying Holocaust literature and a lot of critical thinking. Pretty heavy stuff. I think I turned to art as something direct, sensual, immediate; and the landscape (and abstracted sense of landscape which I've also done) seemed the best outlet for that. Also, I've lived in various places throughout my life and continue to travel a lot so I "look" a lot at the landscape and enjoy it. Even when I'm not actively painting landscapes I find myself doing them in my mind as I drive around."
Hadley Rampton, whose work is represented by Phillips Gallery, explains that what draws her to landscapes is "being out there" there’s a different energy to being outside rather than inside. In fact, she says, “It’s not so much wanting to paint a landscape, it’s more about being out there in it and the painting is a byproduct of being out there. I’m not trying to paint exactly what I see. It’s more abstracted. I let my senses take things in and then let things happen on the canvas. It’s difficult to be out in the mountains and not feel inspired.”
Most of Rampton’s work is plein air, start to finish, which is a bit surprising because often her canvases are quite large.|8| Then, too, her strokes are large, often applied with a palette knife, communicating to the viewer the physical energy that goes into her work.
Even her watercolors paintings of street scenes in Italian cities are done partly on site and later completed in her studio.|9|
Aside from those street scenes, trees figure prominently in Rampton’s work. “Why?” I probe. She hesitates then says, “It’s an interesting composition that catches my eye. Trees bring a vertical to an otherwise horizontal landscape. And I’m drawn to aspen trees because of the contrasting light bark against a darker background.” |10|
Rampton, as well as the other artists I interviewed for this article, seemed not particularly interested in analyzing their work and its meaning. I sensed an intuitive, rather than calculated, motivation for painting landscapes. Some “in-the-moment” response to nature prompts them to choose their subjects and unique ways of seeing and capturing what they see. Regardless of their differences in style, process, and painting medium, their work clearly demonstrates a loving, passionate response to their subjects – a valuable lesson for this developing artist.
As I complete this article, I am in the Georgia countryside, looking out on my sister’s backyard of pine trees, scrubby weeds, and a woodpile. The day is overcast and very windy. I’m attracted to the contrast between the gray sky and the colors in the trees, the power of the wind as evidenced by the motion of the weeds and tree tops. It’s nature at its most ordinary, yet it has a mood and majesty worth capturing. I get out my paints and start to work.
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