Anybody who finds Salt Lake City’s
art scene soporific will find a welcome reprieve at Central Utah Art Center
(abbreviated as CUAC, pronounced quack),
where a small but feisty group of artists exhibit some much-needed pluck in the
show Utah Ties. While the front
gallery displays more conventional works grounded in graphic languages, works
in the back gallery come alive with enough chutzpah to ruffle more than a few
mission suits.
Self-Sati
Maddison Colvin’s video ‘183rd Semiannual General
Conference 01 (Apostles, Prophets) layers video footage of speakers from
the Mormon ‘conference’, which brings thousands of faithful to congregate in
downtown Salt Lake City twice a year. Sound and visual footage from the
conference sermons are made near-transluscent, and superimposed onto one
another, creating a highly layered effect. While one face dissolves into
another, a visual consensus emerges. Absent of any racial, gender or
generational diversity, they signify a patriarchal monoculture, as they
dissolve into the same puppet-like mold. The result not only displays a
cumulative side to tradition, but the monolithic and inflexible aspects of LDS
church leadership.
Emily Fox’s King Panties pins twenty-three pairs of women’s underwear directly
onto the gallery wall. (Used but clean, we can only assume they come from Utah’s great emporium of objets trouvé, the Deseret Industries
Thrift Store.) The display brings to mind Pipilotti Rists’ Massachusetts Chandalier yet the
garments demonstrate a greater range in size, from the implausibly minute
(think Barbie) - to fully-figured. As the display charts the arc of a woman’s
expanding girth, the journey bridges juvenile fantasies of doll’s play to the
vicissitudes of real anatomy in physical space.
More art world references are
encountered in Tatiana Svrckova Larsen’s Ambit,
which vertically stacks four television sets to depict the head, chest, hands
and feet of an upright female subject. As such, memories of Nam June Paik are
unavoidable. In the top screen, a head (in profile) dribbles an ambiguous white
substance from her mouth, bringing to mind Bruce Nauman’s iconic Fountain. Curving around her chin, the
fluid continues its vertical path into the screen below. Glowing and white, the
liquid glows against a darkened background, flowing down into the next screen,
where it passes the subject’s chest. Arriving in the next monitor, it collects
in cupped hands, where it overflows into the final screen (bottom level) where
it splashes onto the floor and pools in the sandy ground. Here the fate of the
glistening fluid, be it cowsmilk, semen or paint, evokes the biblical parable
of spilling one’s seed, or seed falling on stony ground. Moreover, all four
videos are looped, giving the impression of a continuous flow from top to
bottom. As such, the effect oscillates between a commonplace garden feature and
the circuity of Duchamp’s Fountain.
Bodily fluids also intersect with
technology in Alexandra Reintjes performative installation ‘Sex Video’ which is experienced on a hand-held iPod and earphones.
Here, the subject is located at the center of a small, cube-shaped room and (we
assume) positioned on a fixed but spinning dolly. Equipped with both a film
projector and video recorder, the viewer’s position becomes synonymous with
that of the subject’s. As the dizzy rotation spins out of control, images of
modernist building facades (ubiquitous in Salt Lake City) are projected onto
the walls. The technological intensity of the arrangement is mediated by the
gentle panting of a female onanist, whose murmurs both activate and disarm the
architectural spectacle. A myriad of associations abound, from early
structuralist film (think Michael Snow), to Rebecca Horn’s sadomasochistic
performances and Vito Acconci’s Seedbed.
We are also reminded of Ballardian aesthetics, as the erotic machine whirls into
oblivion.
In a similar vein, Alex Stevens’ Everytime You Wish You Were Never Born Part
2 features an industrial garbage bin, once full with bread dough derived
from the artist’s family bakery. Teeming with yeast, the dough has expanded and
exploded over the edge of the bin into an excess of chthon, only to harden into
a leathery, solid crust. Underneath the bin, recordings of music hits dating
from 1986 repeat on a loop, referencing the year of the artist’s birth. This
biographical signpost posits the doughy explosion not as a gastronomic
catastrophe but as a giant, male ejaculation.
While the maturity of these works
merits its own commendation, the significance of their existence in the Beehive
State cannot be underestimated. Contemporary Art faces a plethora of challenges
in Salt Lake City, not least of which is a hegemonic propoganda machine which
discourages artistic and intellectual tenacity while advancing values of
conformity and submission. The works in Utah
Ties exist not because of local culture, but in spite of it. As such, they
meet these challenges head-on, demonstrating a willingness to experiment, an
openness to new media, an engagement with art world tropes and above all, a
much needed sense of humor.
Curated by Adam Gildar.
March 21, 2014 to April 11th, 2014 at Central Utah Art Center (CUAC) in Salt Lake City, UT.
