Artist Profile: Ephraim
The More You Reduce the 3rd Dimension the More It Matters
Prints and sculptures by Adam Ned Larsen
by Geoff Wichert
In a ritual repeated countless times since its dedication in 1877 in the presence of Brigham Young, the Manti Temple serves as backdrop for the celebratory portrait of a newly wed couple. Emerging from the venerable Gothic and French Revival masterpiece in which they have just been sealed to each other for eternity, the bride and groom appear in the traditional wedding attire they will wear to meet the public. But first they stand together, with the solid battlements and towering mansard roofs looming behind them, and memorialize the moment in an image as full of otherworldly symbols as visual facts. It’s a formula that emerged over the years and has been thoroughly explored, making it a challenge to find a new twist. Except, that is, for Adam Ned Larsen, an artist who specializes in reconfiguring the most mundane, familiar, and routinely over-looked signs into fresh versions that demand attention and thought.
Exhibition Review: Salt LakeCity
Common to Us All
Why All Art Is In
by Ehren Clark
As Art Access celebrates its twenty-fifth year as a force in Utah's art community, they could pick no better show than their current one, Outside is In!, to highlight the aim of their exhibition space: as director Ruth Lubbers says, their two galleries are there to "provide a voice to relevant social issues, which can be discussed through the vehicle of art, to everyone.” Outside is In! addresses a type of art that pushes the limits of what can be accepted as fine art while addressing basic human elements of creativity, expression, and the need to belong. Individuals, like French artist Jean Dubuffet, and institutions, like the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, have advocated outsider art for decades as a viable art. Outsider art takes an egalitarian perspective on art making and extends the dynamic of artist and art indefinitely. It negates the necessity of training and includes forms and means of expression that might be atypical of what is generally accepted as fine art. The polish of its finish might not be as fine, but the relevance of outsider art is universal.
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Exhibition Spotlight: Salt Lake City
A Culture of Waiting
Ernesto Pujol in Conversation with Monty Paret
From sundown on April 8th to sunrise on April 9th, internationally known conceptual artist Ernesto Pujol will create a site-specific durational performance with a group of approximately forty collaborators along the South Steps of the Utah State Capitol building in Salt Lake City. Pujol, an instructor at Parsons' The New School for Design in New York City, is the first recipient of the John and Marva Warnock Visiting Artist Residency in the Department of Art and Art History of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Utah. One of his video pieces, as well as two video documentations of past performances, are currently on view at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. I sat down with Pujol recently to discuss his residency, his work, and the ambitious performance planned for Salt Lake this week. The following are excerpts from that conversation.
On your role as the first Warnock Artist-in-Residence at the University of Utah
The Warnocks had the wisdom of bringing in something that the Art and Art History Department didn't already have, at least to begin with; something that would contribute a missing element to the college. It is a visionary endowment. In my case, I specialize in site-specific durational performance because I am very interested in reclaiming urban space from clutter, noise, and speed. I am drawn to revisiting historical monumental architecture that has become invisible. I try to establish a new space within the older space for silence and solitude, conducive to meditation. I believe that reflection is a human right, particularly in a culture of entertainment; of distractions.
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