by
Ed Bateman || photograph by
Trish Empey
It is often easy (yet dangerous) to pigeonhole artists.
Amy Caron, winner of the Utah Arts Council's 2007 Fellowship Award, is an artist who defies easy categorization. She's a bit of a shape-shifter that pursues a variety of disciplines all linked to the physicality of her early years. With seemingly boundless energy, her past mirrors her work, attitudes, and play.
The Vermont native began as a figure skater who studied both ballet and gymnastics. But it was her interest in skiing and particularly ski jumping that lured Caron to Salt Lake to train and compete for the US Freestyle Ski Team at the age of nineteen. For eight years her energies were directed toward competitive skiing - but ideas of creativity were never far away. Dance has always been one of her passions and during this time she kept one foot (so to speak) in the dance world by enrolling in the modern dance program at the University of Utah, where she completed her Bachelors degree in 2001. That might have been enough for most people, but not for Caron. To pursue her passion for performance, Caron has worked as an actor, stuntwoman, and sports model. To recharge her creative batteries, she escapes into Utah's back-country to hike and explore the mountains.
A need for a few more credits hours during her last year of college led Caron to video and experimental animation classes. Her first video work, "Don't Blink," propelled her into the realms of dance/video (see page 3). In fact, that piece still has a life in the larger world... it will screen at the Joyce SoHo in New York this March.
Caron is currently working on her most ambitious project to date (for which she won the Utah Art Council's Fellowship). Titled "Waves of Mu: Watch and Learn," it promises to be a multi-media tour-de-force incorporating sculpture, large-scale digital prints, found objects, video installation (using a new projection technology involving two-way mirror glass), animation, and audio. It gets its name from the EEG frequencies generated when the mirror neuron system is activated.
Growing Pains: Gallery OneTen Turns One
by
Elizabeth Matthews
Provo’s
Gallery OneTen, a community gallery celebrating its one year anniversary this month, has spent the past year learning what it takes to create a non-profit art space. Gallery OneTen emerged a year ago, but its genesis stems back five years. That is when Raquel Smith Callis and some friends transformed a Provo warehouse into Art Front Community Space, and used it to present art exhibits and offer intensive summer art workshops for children. Five years later, this initial idea developed into Gallery OneTen through the help of two fortuitous connections.
