What's Happening-- St. George
The Regional 2002 
The St. George Art Museum is pleased to present The Regional - 2002 Sixth Annual Juried Exhibition which opens on Friday, October 25th and continues through January 4, 2003. Visual artists representing Utah, Nevada, and Arizona are invited to participate in The Regional- an annual juried exhibition sponsored by the St. George Art Museum. Open to all media and styles of expression, the objective is a fine art presentation reflecting the current pursuits of regional artists.

A combined reception will be held 6-9 p.m. Friday, October 25th for "Regional" artists and for the recently opened Distance and Space: New Landscapes by Kate Starling. There will be an Awards Ceremony at 7:30 p.m. this same evening in which Guest Juror, James B. Pink will make the award presentations. The community is invited to spend a wonderful evening filled with art, artists, and light refreshment. The Museum is located at 47 East 200 North, St. George and, as always, admission is free to this event.

Gallery Stroll Preview-- Salt Lake City

Jason Jones, Steve Larson, Chris Miles, Nate Ronniger: Glendinning Gallery The Utah Art's Council's Glenndining presents recent works by four Salt Lake City painters.  Jason Jones and Steve Larson are both Poor Yorick artists who depict the urban landscape in a contemporary vein.  Chris Miles paints works that have a straight-forward, honest quality whether they be magic-realist creations or an ode to an eclair.

Patricia Kimball: Phillips Gallery presents a one-person show of Patty Kimball.  Kimball's recent works include a series of oil paintings depicting crowds at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.  Groups of figures, their blue shadows cast across a ground of white snow fill these works with an overall composition, giving equal attention to all the elements.

Anne Watson: The Artspace Forum Gallery presents "Language" a conceptual work by Anne Watson, who grew up in Salt Lake City and has worked as an artist in New York City for the past 18 years.  Language involves eight mediums of expression: oil painting, drawing, a book, a video, an installation piece, a game, small sculptural pieces and photographs.

Watson’s ambitious exhibition addresses the effects of September 11 on the artist’s life, explores the ability of line and/or gesture to relate meaning and incorporates interpretations of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's book, The Little Prince. Watson explains that “the drawings (acrylic, graphite and ink on paper), the game and the photographs (polaroids) all look at the ability of the line to communicate. They are limited to black and white. Many of the paintings are in reaction to the events of September 11, 2001 when I lived in the West Village in New York City. They are paintings of sorrow, of longing, of anger and of escape.” 

Jackie Skibine, who coordinates exhibitions for the Artspace Forum Gallery, emphasizes the uniqueness of this exhibition in the Salt Lake area. “Watson is creating an installation unlike anything the city has seen. The exhibition includes over 100 ceramic stars, walls of CD jewel cases painted with wax and pigment, a ceramic flower, wax planets and a little prince marionette. This exhibition is more than paintings on a wall; it is an edgy exploration bringing very diverse aspects of art and the artist’s personal life experiences together into one space.” 

Language opens with a reception from 6-9 at the Artspace Forum Gallery (511 West 200 South) on October 18 and runs through November 9. The gallery is open Wednesday – Saturday from noon to five, phone number 521-5999. 

Multi Media -- UAC & KRCL
Mark England Connects
On Monday October 21st, Laura Durahm of the Utah Arts Council will be interviewing Mark England about his earth art project "Connections." Tune in to the interview at 12:30PM Monday on KRCL 90.9 FM.

Speaking of earth art projects. Robert Smithson's monumental earthwork, Spiral Jetty, located near Promontory Utah, has resurfaced. Created in 1970, this massive earth sculpture has been submerged beneath the Great Salt Lake for most of its existence. This year, with low water levels, the Spiral has reemerged, but it won't last. Have you seen the jetty yet?  

 
Event Announcement -- Salt Lake City
Dia de los Muertos November 2nd - 23rd 
TRASA urban arts collective presents Offerings: a celebration of Día de los Muertos – a multi-media, interactive installation exploring the contemporary relevance of this traditional holiday.  Created by more than 100 artists, students, and community members, this unique installation provides a provocative exploration of loss and memory, community and ancestry, and life and death.  Combining the traditional with the contemporary and experimental, we create a new language for exploring and processing issues of mortality.

TRASA's upstairs gallery consists of performance-based installations created by established local artists working in mediums ranging from photography and graffiti art to modern dance, found-object sculpture, video, and sound art.  These installations carry the audience through landscapes of their past, surround them in the voices of the dying, and ask them to interact with buried memories in an attempt to find resolution and understanding.  Participating artists include Jenny Lord, Camilla Taylor, Trent Call, Alex Ferguson, Kristina Robb, Erin Winstead, Albert Wint, Derek Fonnesbeck, Alex Evans, Brandon Garcia, and Greg Parascenzo.  

In the downstairs gallery, TRASA presents the work of a broad spectrum of our local community, including members of Centro de la Familia de Utah, Westminster College, Bad Dog Rediscovers America, Jackson Elementary, MEChA (the University of Utah’s Chicano student organization), Beacon Heights Elementary, the Utah Aids Foundation, and Granite High School’s ESL program.  This collaborative element presents an artistic dialogue about death which spans cultures and generations, and which creates a new forum for processing some of our most profound experiences.

The upstairs (performance-based) gallery will be open from 8 – 11 pm, Thursday to Saturday with a sliding-scale admission of $5-10.  Gallery hours for the downstairs gallery will be from Tuesday to Saturday, 12 – 5 pm and during performances.  A special gala opening on November 2nd from 7:30 pm to midnight, will include performance, feasting, cacophony, merriment, and celebration of life, family, ancestry, and Día de los Muertos.  Tickets for the gala are available for a $15-20 donation (advance reservations required) and all proceeds will benefit TRASA urban arts collective and collaborating artists and organizations involved in this project..  A community reception on Saturday, November 9th, from 4 – 7 pm will be free and open to the public.  741 S. 400 W. (the Utah Pickle Company building).  Call 801.355.5850 for information and reservations.
 

Salt Lake City's Chroma Gallery of Salt Lake City is looking for artists to participate in an upcoming exhibition, SIZE MATTERS.  Running from November 29 until December 30th SIZE MATTERS will be the big and small boutique of art during the holiday season.  Each participating artist will be invited to exhibit a large piece and multiple small pieces.  Each large piece must measure at least 48 inches on each side.  The smaller pieces must measure less than 6 inches.  Interested artists must submit their artwork before November 10th.  Chroma Gallery is located at 1064 East and 2100 South.  Call 485-6020 for more details.

Letter from the Editor
To Hang or not to Hang
by Shawn Rossiter

Salt Lake City photographer Jamie Clyde had an exhibition recently.  Well, sort of.  Clyde’s photographs were hanging for a time at Angles Café and Gallery, which took the space at 5th West and 2nd South recently vacated by Mestizo gallery.  Midway through the exhibition, however, Clyde’s works were taken down.  Multiple visitors to the café were told that the works, photographs that depict Christ-figures, were taken down due to complaints about the works being anti-Christian.

David Erst, owner of Angles, says that though he did have complaints about the works, that is not why they were taken down.  He says that because the gallery was building a new wall, the works were taken down to protect them.  Clyde could have rehung the works after the remodeling was done, he explains, though only four days remained in the “exhibition.” 

Clyde, for her part says she was never told about the complaints.  She came in one day to find her works on the ground, near the remodeling.  The works, framed in glass, were near the remodeling, unprotected.  She was not comfortable with how the gallery was treating – or not treating – her works and so removed them.  It was only later that she heard others tell her the works had been taken down because someone complained that they were offensive.

It is one thing when a gallery chooses not to show work because they do not think their audience will appreciate it or it does not fit into the aesthetics of their gallery.  But it is a completely different matter to hang works and then to take them down.  If remodelling was planned then the artist should have been forewarned, given the opportunity to postpone the exhibition.  If the exhibition was taken down due to public commentary, then the gallery has done great harm to the artist.  A gallery must know what it is doing.  It must carefully choose works beforehand because to take down works may do much more harm than to never hang them at all.  To take works down because of – possibly misguided – personal interpretations of the works is to label the works while no longer allowing the public to make up their own minds.  It is one thing to never give works a label at all, and something else to give them a false label.

Jamie Clyde's Christ Figures
continued from page 3 

Lastly, and this is what I imagine was the real complaint about Clyde’s works are the wounds.  Clyde has prepared her model with very realistic wounds, something that might be disturbing to a delicate audience.  This attention to the wounds of Christ is nothing new. The Mormon culture tends to stay aways from depictions of the cross or the sufferings of Christ – “to concentrate on his triumph.  The Catholic and other Christian traditions, however,  have always used the sufferings as a point of meditation.  Matthias Grunewald’s gothic depiction of Christ on the cross is not pretty, but it is strongly Christian.  

To not hold to one specific Christian tradition’s aesthetic outlook does not make one non-Christian.

And I think the wounds are crucial to these pieces.  What is probably most startling about the wounds is their reality.  To paint a wound is one thing.  We know it is a fiction, a re-presentation.  But to present the Christ figure in a photograph is to make the image startlingly real, strikingly present. 

Photographs tell us about our lives today.  They are the medium through which we learn the news of sniper killings in Maryland or suicide bombers in Palestine.  And to see Christ, with wounds and all, before us, in a photograph is unfamiliar and can be uncomfortable.  But that is precisely what makes these works so exciting. 

In the modern mind, representations of Christ belong in art history books or else as impressionistic illustrations for religious manuals, but they rarely catch our eye.   Repetition can dull the mind and desensitize us to real consideration.  And so when Clyde presents the Christ figure in the realistic format of photography she shocks the viewer into considering.

Which is what someone who walked into Angles Cafe must have done.  Unfortunately, they may not have considered very well.  We live in a very religious, predominantly Christian community.  If an artist can take an icon of our community and make us reconsider it and ponder about it, then that artist has accomplished their job.