Less a critique than a tongue-in-cheek investigation of artifice, Taming the Myth enables Crane to synthesize an abundance of influences and memories. He attributes this particular body of work to his exposure to another cliché of the West: the county fair, where he encountered kitschy, though earnest, genre paintings in the mode of Charles Russell and Frederick Remington. "My first exposure to fine art was limited to garish oil paintings of cowboys in blue jeans, Indians and wolves, ponies galloping in fields of hay," he says. Raised in small-town Morgan, Utah, Crane does not lack for what might be labeled as credibility; his childhood diversion of playing cowboys and Indians was made all the more real by a general consciousness of the history and landscape of the region. There were also B-Westerns, graphic novels, and video gamesall are intermingled in his paintings to suggest that our collective memory of the West is in many ways a construct, one that is "exaggerated, romanticized, and false." Crane alludes to the knottiness of this construct in a poem that accompanies the show:
You can’t remember if it’s a movie,
a postcard, a painting at the county fair
or the opening lines of Louis L’Amour,
but it’s the Westthe only West
you have ever known.
"Taming the Myth," the large painting from which the exhibition takes its title, demonstrates the complexity of unweaving myth from memory.|1| Set in a barren landscape with an endless sky, the work presents an unlikely grouping of figures: a high-stepping, slightly elderly cowboy leers, while a Native American man of indeterminate tribal origin gallantly wields a forked implement at a crudely rendered dinosaur, which is in turn ridden bareback by a busty Annie-Oakley type. The fanciful proportions of these figures reference the style of the graphic novels Crane admires, while the absurdity of their interaction the result of his jumbling of these novels and other images and impressions. There is a rupture here, but not within the time of the painting; we can accept this interaction as long as it is confined to the realm of myth. The rupture is between the painting’s audacity and the viewer’s distrust of its sincerity.
The painting also demonstrates the complexity of Crane’s process. He begins with a ground of Pollock-esque splatters of acrylic, onto which he layers graphite, pencil, and oil paint. Instead of building up the figures, however, he builds up the spaces around them, making each a void that reveals the mottled ground, which the artist sees as ephemeral as that ever-changing construct of the West. As a result, the figures are actually absences, even as their surroundings assert a more noticeable material presence. Certain articles of clothingthe cowboy’s shirt and hat, the younger man’s loincloth, and the woman’s fringed getupare further articulated by layers of pale yellow oil paint, offering distraction from the uniformity of the figures’ bodies, faces, and hair and, more importantly, calling attention to the costume-like nature of their attire. Several isolated heart-shaped forms are seemingly carved from the heavy impasto near the center of the panel; these symbolize for Crane the “overly venerated nature” of representations of the West, portrayals that are “overloaded with sentimentality.”
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Crane makes an interesting connection between the game of bowling and these (mis)conceptions of the West. He began incorporating bowling pins into his paintings in what he describes as intuitive strategy. Looking back, Crane recognizes the significance of observing a group of fatigues-clad teenagers playing an arcade hunting game; as he watched them relish killing for sport, he thought of how disconnected this seemed from the act of purposeful huntingit was merely a romanticized echo of something real. Combining this event with his memories of those childhood games in which the cowboys always defeated the Indians, he began to see games, and specifically bowling, as a lens through which he could “exaggerate the story that’s been told to me,” an essentially ahistorical account narrated by Marlboro advertisements and John Wayne films.
Crane directly cites bowling with "10 Frames," a series of 22 small panels installed in two identical rows to suggest two lines on a bowling score card, with a rectangular panel for the player’s name followed by ten square panels, or frames, in which to record scores.|2| One of the rows is dedicated to images of cowboys, the other to Indians, making these two groups the “players” in the game. Many of the figures that populate the panels have been created via acrylic gel transfer: Crane takes an existing image, copied from old graphic novels and the how-to bowling manual he discovered at a thrift shop, flips it, then presses it into the wet surface of acrylic gel that has been applied to the panel. After the gel has picked up the ink and thus the image, he sands down its surface and continues to paint on and around it. The transfer technique is especially suited to this subject, for it produces images that are hazy around the edges and faded in spots, like the mythic West itself. As the last step in a rather complicated process, the painting's final coating of encaustic smoothes over any unevenness of surface, essentially suspending the figures in an impenetrable space out of time.
With his 1986 Cowboys and Indians series, Andy Warhol also drew attention to the inauthentic authenticity of figures like John Wayne and Geronimo. The twelve prints in the series continued his earlier photo-dependant work, in which Warhol used tabloid or newspaper photographs as stencils in order to reproduce the images through silkscreen on canvas. Both artists produce somewhat grotesque parodies of iconic figures, and grainy celebrity photographs are as ubiquitous as B-Westerns or bowling alleys, which are, as Crane points out, a small town-fixture. Unlike Warhol, however, Crane chooses to avoid the specific. His figures are clearly archetypes, rather than individuals; as such, they strangely resist the cult of originality that is often bound up in ever-problematic conceptions of a wild West.
Taming the Myth is Chad Crane’s MFA thesis exhibition and marks the end of his studies at the University of Utah. He earned a BFA from Utah State University. Palmers Gallery, part of the Salt Lake Gallery Association, is located at 378 West Broadway in Salt Lake City.
Chad Crane Reading his poem "The West"
Exhibition Spotlight: Salt Lake Video Art from Utah Utah X/1 on Main Street
As video projection technology becomes more sophisticated as well as less expensive, video screens are becoming ubiquitous in the urban landscape, serving principally as more versatile advertising spaces than the traditional still image on a billboard or shop window. In the hands of the right user, however, the same tecnology that makes our world more crass can be used to make it more creative.
In its Sidwalk Cinema series, the SLC Film Center uses video projection technology to push culture rather than commerce. With outdoor screens and speaker systems located outside its offices at 122 South Main, and down the street at 260 South Main, the Film Center is reaching outside the confines of indoor exhibition spaces to interact directly with the walkers, drivers and riders of our urban landscape.
Anne Watson, curator of UTAH X/1, is taking advantage of the Film Center's initiative to launch an investigation into contemporary video art being created in Utah. During April and May, UTAH X/1 will screen works six works by four video artists living in Utah: Brian Patterson, Peter Stempel, Amy Caron and Kerri Hopkins.
The videos can be viewed from the sidewalk, the street and the TRAX station platforms, and are being screened in the evening, when parking is free and the sky darker. The first four videos, by Patterson, Stempel and Hopkins, premiered during the March Gallery Stroll and continue to be screened every day from 6:00 - 6:30 pm and from 8:00 - 8:30 pm. The last two, by Patterson and Caron, will begin screening on April 17 and continue through May 15.
Though related in some respects, each video reveals a unique artistic sensibility. Patterson, who has created three works for UTAH X/I, is still pursuing his undergraduate studies at the University of Utah but already shows great promise according to Jill Dawsy, curator of modern and contemporary art at the University of Utah.
Peter Stempel, a Michigan native, lives and works as an artist and architect in Virgin, Utah. While his career has spanned the disciplines of ceramics, public art and photography, his current work is united by a concern for the physical experience of intangible things, space and time. His approach to video is painterly, and takes advantage of the temporal aspects of the medium.
Kerri Hopkins is an independent media artist originally from Buffalo, NY. She received her BA in Media Study form the University of Buffalo in 2003 and her MFA in Film Studies from the University of Utah in 2008. She shoots in both film and video and takes control of her work by using hands on image processing, often shooting one frame at a time.
In addition to the video art, the exhibition includes taped interviews with Jeff Lambson, the curator of contemporary art at BYU's Museum of Art and with Jill Dawsey, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the University of Utah's Utah Museum of Fine Arts., discussing video art generally and these works specifically.
Amy Caron was born in Vermont and lives and works in SLC. She is also a dancer and performance artist, and while you'll have to wait until April 17 to see her video, you can experience her performance piece, Waves of Mu, this weekend (see below).
In addition to the video art, the exhibition includes taped interviews with Jeff Lambson, the curator of contemporary art at BYU's Museum of Art and with Jill Dawsey, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the University of Utah's Utah Museum of Fine Arts. We suggest going to the 8pm screenings as the video screens are easier to see. While the noises of the city -- fluttering pigeons, construction cranes at the City Creek project and the passing TRAX trains -- can add to the viewing experience of some of the videos (especially Patterson's "Lights Out") they make the commentary difficult to understand. So, we've provided the commentary in the video clip below. For the videos themselves, though, you'll have to venture out of the house.
Event Spotlight Waves of Mu Hits Salt Lake
We've been following Amy Caron's developing Waves of Mu project ever since Ed Bateman profiled the artist in our March 2007 edition of 15 Bytes. Caron was still in the developmental stages of her installation/performance informed by the developing science of "mirror neurons" when Bateman wrote: "As Caron describes Waves of Mu, the performance aspect will incorporate a stealthy infusion of performed contagious behavior throughout the evening and theatre under the facade of a lecture demonstration. Audience members will participate in the performance consciously and unconsciously." The project has turned into a complex two-room installation-performance that promises to drive multidisciplinary art headlong into new territory.
Caron and her crew have taken the project to Vermont, Alaska (see a video of the installation in our November 2008 edition) and New York, and this weekend, April 3rd and 4th, they will be bringing it to Salt Lake City. The Waves of Mu experience offers a unique multidimensional education, demonstrating the scientific and empirical integrity of mirror neurons while presenting thought-provoking connections between mirror neuron deficiencies and autism spectrum disorders, thereby challenging our cultural concept of normality and its effect on human evolution.
The two performances will be at the Rose Wagner Black Box Theatre Friday and Saturday at 8 pm. Click here for ticket information.