Artist Profile: Salt Lake
Clarity in Chaos
The Life and Art of Connie Borup
by Shawn RossiterConnie Borup paints quiet images of meditative serenity, even when everything around her is crumbling into chaos. Her newest body of work, dominated by the interplay of water with the trees, leaves and other natural elements that have characterized her paintings for many years, will be on exhibit at Phillips Gallery beginning June 12. Borup's recent life has been beset by calamities both serious and tedious, but as this exhibit reveals she is a mature and determined artist on a quest to express her personal voice through the graceful lines she finds in nature.
Borup's most recent works were created in a variety of studios throughout the Rockwood building in Sugarhouse. Borup, who has had a studio at Rockwood for the past nineteen years, was the first artist in the building, back when the street-level space was a furniture store and the rest were office spaces. Over the past year she ended up squatting in various vacant studios after the ceiling in her own began crumbling down around her – a result of the tear down of the adjacent property -- owned by Craig Mecham -- now known as the Sugarhouse hole. After months of fleeing falling plaster and winter water gushing through what looked like open wounds in her ceiling, Borup was back in her studio this month, putting a few finishing touches on the paintings for the Phillips show. Except for the abundance of water imagery in them, you won’t find in these works any of the chaos that surrounded their creation.
Exhibition Review: Salt Lake
Modes of Seeing
An essay based on works by David Maestas
by Ehren Clark
The Classical and Romantic are often convenient labels applied to certain discourses of the cultural arts. When hearing the terms "classical" and "romantic," those who recall something of their University days will think of definite periods of time: the Romantics -- in art, music and literature -- of the early nineteenth century; and the Classical period of the Greeks and its revival in the 18th-century. But beyond their designation of specific historical periods, the romantic and classical are modes of aesthetic production and experience that can be applied to art of varying time periods, including our own.
|
|
Exhibition Review: Salt Lake City
Canning Culture
Shelf Life paints a portrait of a community, one jar at a time.
by Tiffini Porter Widansky || photos by James Stoddard
The specs are simple: take a wide-mouth canning jar—Kerr, Mason, or Ball brands are preferred, to create a sense of uniformity—and put whatever you like inside, which immediately takes that notion of uniformity and turns it on its head. That’s the basic recipe behind what mixed-media artist Trent Alvey has taken to calling, “the jar phenomenon.” When the common jars are lined up with their disparate contents, an interplay between diversity and cohesion develops, creating a conversation that seems to resonate with just about anyone who encounters the display. “Hopefully,” says Alvey, “most people don’t go to a lot of trouble to make a jar. It’s not something you want to spend too much time thinking about. The idea is that whatever you put into it becomes part of a greater communication.”
In the upcoming Art Access exhibition, Shelf Life: Preserving Artifacts, Alvey is continuing a wide-ranging dialogue that began back in 2007, around an oddly-situated closet that partially obstructed a hallway in the original 337 Project building. The closet was one of three areas in the building where Alvey worked side-by-side with other artists to create what became a massive piece of collective, ephemeral art. She covered the closet door with black and yellow hazard stripes and radioactive warning symbols, then set up shelves with rows of canning jars, partially filled with liquid and lit with an eerie blue glow. The closet was inspired by Alvey’s childhood memories of her elementary school teacher collecting vats of milk for radiation testing by the Atomic Energy Commission, during the years following open air nuclear testing in Nevada. Alvey recalls watching as visitors peered into the closet through a small window, some sharing stories about their experiences as down-winders. Watching people react so personally to her art opened her eyes to the possibility of a new level of accessibility in her work, and the overall feeling of camaraderie among the artists inspired her to pursue more collaborative projects.
 |
|
