Up and Upcoming: To The North
Exhibition Listings in Northern Utah
PARK CITY
Gallery MAR UP: Natural Impressions, featuring Amy Ringholz, Lisa Lamoreaux, and Brad Stroman. UPCOMING: In Unmistakable Twist Fred Calleri returns to the gallery with a solo show of his iconic paintings infused with witty nostalgia and inspired by vintage reference photos and the live model. In this new body of work, Calleri has begun the evolution towards a smoother balance of the representational alongside his quirky distortion.|0| Opens Friday, February 25th at 6 pm.
Julie Nester Gallery UP: In Beyond Horizons San Francisco artist Stephen Foss returns to the gallery with twelve new paintings, each imbued with visually rich surfaces built up through various layers of paint. An emphasis on the horizon line gives these abstract works a natural feel.|1| Through February 23.
Meyer Gallery UP: In Brian Kershisnik's new body of work, Little Victories, you will recognize the unique blend of humor,
spirituality, and humanity that has made the artist one of Utah's best-known figurative painters.|2| The paintings are layered with subtle grace,
mystery, and a bit of comedy, inviting us to evaluate and observe ourselves with a compassionate
eye. Opening reception February 4th, 6-8pm.
Kimball Art Center UPCOMING: Emily King:Snow Driven focuses on Park City’s appeal to both its inhabitants and visitors - snow. Her simplified color forms cut from paper capture the many different winter scenes and sports of the popular resort community.|3| In the Garage Gallery. February 5 - April 10. AND: Rebecca Jacoby’s latest series, The Visitors, is about personal histories, the present moment and anticipated future. In larger-than-life paintings, Jacoby captures the poetic voices of visitors to her studio in fable-like narratives and symbolic images.|4| In the Basement Gallery. February 5 - April 10. AND: In the Main Gallery, The Perfect Fit: Shoes Tell Stories, a traveling exhibit from the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts explores the cultural meaning of shoes, presenting imaginative and provocative objects by 100 artists working in every size and medium from clay, metal and fabric to wood, glass and paper.|5| February 5 - April 10.
Mountain Trails Gallery UPCOMING: Krystii Melaine, painter of western and wildlife scenes.|6| February 17th - 23rd.
District Gallery UP: Sloane Bibb, a multi-media artist whose paintings are full of texture and assembled elements.
Montgomery Lee Fine Art UPCOMING: An exhibit of new work by Ogden landscape painter Steve Songer, the subject of our Artist Profile in February of 2008. Opens February 11,
6-9 pm. AND: Jared Sanders and Joseph Alleman (take a peek in Alleman's studio here). Opens February 25, 6-9 pm.
HEBER
UVU Wasatch Campus (3111 College Way,
Heber City, Utah) UP: Utah Valley University Art & Visual Communications faculty exhibit. Visitors can expect a wide range of artistic works from traditional
paintings, drawings, and prints to innovative digital pieces. Through February 28.
VERNAL
Western Heritage Art Museum UP: 2010 Utah Watercolor Society Juried Exhibit, a selection of works curated by the Uintah Arts Council Traveling Exhibit. Through February 26.
BOUNTIFUL
BDAC UP: The Palette Club of Ogden's Group Show, as well as work by Natalie Raevsky, Anthony Lott , Alessandra Sulpy. Sculpture by Dan Toone and Joshua Toone. Raevsky, a graduate of BYU, finds inspiration for her art in her home life as a wife and mother. Anthony Lott, featured in Artists of Utah' original 35 x 35 exhibit, currently teaches at CEU and works in oils and acrylics. Alessandra Sulpy's works manage a push and pull between the mundane and mysterious. The father and son Toone duo work out of the same studio and with the same found materials, but each has developed their own artistic vocabulary. You can see Karina Jones' photo essay of their studio here and a video interview with Joshua here. Through February 11. UPCOMING: Annual Statewide Competition,
one of the longest-running juried visual arts exhibitions in Utah. February 25 – April 1.
Opening reception: Friday, February 25, 7-9 pm.
BRIGHAM CITY
Brigham City Museum UP: Smithsonian Institution’s Earth from Space features images captured by high-tech satellites circling the globe. The 41 freestanding, color banners show such sights as the swirling arms of a massive hurricane, the triangular shadows cast by the Great Pyramids, and the 3,000-year-old lava flows in New Mexico.
A Magic Planet digital video globe with a sphere-shaped screen complements the traveling exhibition. The animations on the screen allow patrons to observe the global extent of images from orbiting satellites. Through March 27.
LOGAN
Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art UP: Uses of the Real: What's New Now? displaying 31 new works donated by the Kathryn C. Wanlass Foundation and Marie Eccles Caine Foundation. Through April. AND: EcoVisionaries: Designs for Living on Earth, an exhibit of socially engaged artists who seek out and propose radical concepts using unusual materials to create innovations that reduce the impact of humans or preserve environments. Through August 1.
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OGDEN AREA
Universe City UPCOMING: Little Hands / Big Art,
a fundraising exhibit of
art by children of WSU Nontraditional Students.
The exhibit of biddable art will include the children’s work, Chinese Art, art donated by local artists, Designer Cakes, jewelry, Valentine cards and other gifts. Bidding on other items continues during regular gallery hours and closes at 4 pm. on Saturday, February 19.
Union Station UPCOMING: Floral paintings by Daniel Ramjoue. Artist reception February 4th from 6 – 9 pm. Through March 3.
Eccles Community Art Center UPCOMING: Juried exhibit of two star/signature members of the Utah Watercolor Society, juried by Weber State professor of art Jim Jacobs. In the Carriage House Gallery, the work of Ryan Eugene Bouman. Artists' reception February 4, 6 to 9 pm. Through March 26.
Gallery 25 UPCOMING: Small Works, featuring works no larger than 9"x12" from members of the Palette Club of Ogden, an artist organization that has been around for more than sixty years and has over 100 members in Northern Utah. Opening reception February 4th, 6-9 pm. Through February.
WSU Shaw Gallery UP: Weber State Student Art Exhibition. Through February 11. Exhibit Reception and Awards Ceremony: Friday, February 4, 7–9 pm.
These listings only include fine art exhibitions. If you are looking for information on lectures, art talks, classes, workshops, calls for entries, employment opportunities and more, visit our forum.
Exhibition Review: Park City
Little Victories
Brian Kershisnik at Meyer Gallery
by Geoff Wichert
Painter Brian Kershisnik does not work from photographs. Nor from anatomical diagrams, or even, apparently, from life. His paintings are not copies of nature; they come about during a dialogue between the marks his hand makes and his eye’s response. Although the process may begin in his mind, with an impulse he calls a “hunch,” he knows better than to allow thought too great a part in what follows.
It’s often said that his subject matter is the human condition, but that’s too broad, too generous. His subject is the Kershisnik condition. He told me once that his wife rejects being identified with the women in his paintings. She’s right; they aren’t her, though they share her, and his, universe of possibilities. He paints in an intensely personal code only he understands, and that not always perfectly. But so what? Anyone who uses a symbol like love, perdition, or god refers to something just as personal, and yet we bring our own experience to bear and somehow it works: we perceive each other, often with astonishing accuracy.
We prefer to listen to the voice that touches us most deeply. For many, Brian Kershisnik’s paintbox is like the voice box of a diva. Renaissance painters discovered how to make paintings that looked like you could just walk into them. Kershisnik’s admirers want to stay there, the way everyone used to wish to be in heaven.
A good painting is about as close to heaven as I anticipate ever coming, and when I stand before a Kershisnik, the only immaterial elements I go for are metaphors. Some of his constructions are too theologically specific to work as paintings. One not in this show, called “Measurement From Memory,” shows a woman encountering the material world with the help of an immaterial being. But we remember nothing until we learn it, and the only way we have learned anything is by empirical measurement, so unless the angel symbolizes the rigor by which science tests hypotheses, it falls flat. On the other hand, “Swimmers,” which is here, captures the sensuous feeling rather than the look of traveling through water, which is as close as I have come while awake to my dreams of flying.|1|
Like Christ, Kershisnik speaks in parables . . . of a kind. His anecdotal visual narratives are inhabited by young, fit, sensuous, and attractive figures who convey a confidence in themselves we can only feign. They are the apotheosis of missionaries, who instead of black and white wear idealized nature, like the near figure in “Women Not Sleeping.”|2| Choosing to ignore anatomy also allows liberating her from its restrictions. Notice her arm, or that of the woman in “Perdita Quaerimus,” who points gracefully downward with her serpentine limb, unseen by two characteristically distracted men.|3| A far worse example of distraction shows up in “A Conversation Seldom Heard.”|0| She could choose to admire his impersonation, or criticize it, but chooses to engage him on an authentic level instead. It’s not seldom heard because it seldom happens; it’s seldom heard because most of us lack her candor.
The only listing I could find for “Perdita Quaerimus” referred to the painting. I get “Au Bord de la Mer,” but I’m not sure why this evocative image of standing on the brink needs a French title.|4| Someone may have told Kershisnik he’s too accessible, and he may be trying to become more challenging. But the difficulty in art shouldn’t lie in “getting it.” The little victories that count lie in bringing those insights home.
Little Victories, new work by Brian Kershisnik opens at Meyer Gallery in Park City on Friday, February 4.
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