Four exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA) are set to close this weekend (Feb. 22). The museum will hold a closing reception for the quartet of shows on Friday, Feb. 21, from 6 to 9 p.m. In Memory, Milad Mozari: Language of Movement, Atis Rezistans | Ghetto Biennale, and Antra Sinha: The Elements: Fire, Earth, Water.
UMOCA also will offer that same evening a workshop led by Inez Garcia, a local tarot reader, artist, and UMOCA educator. Participants will learn about the symbolism associated with the Rider-Waite tarot deck and learn how to perform a basic three-card reading. Supplies also will be provided for participants to make their personal mixed media tarot card using collage materials, paint pens and ribbon.
Next month, UMOCA will be a key hub for one of the largest conferences for artists: the 59th annual National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) meeting, which will take place March 26-29 at the Salt Palace convention center in downtown Salt Lake City.
The Utah Review summarizes the four exhibitions set to close this weekend:
Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists)
In a 2013 interview published elsewhere, Haitian sculptor André Eugène, said. “I recycle iron and tires, both of which are very hard, and this reflects resistance for me. We have a proverb in Haiti that says, ’Iron doors do not fight with wooden doors.’ For example, when you put iron and wood together they create something with even greater strength.”
Those words resonate in the Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists) exhibition, which features art by 10 artists who work in the Grand Rue neighbourhood of downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The artworks epitomize a uniquely configured convergence of Haitian society, Vodou and Christianity, contemporary pop culture, music, performance poetry, photography, colonialism, post-colonialism and Western consumerism. The facility of how these disparate elements are composed and arranged in their works is striking for producing dense and tense harmonies that blend effectively in unfiltered themes. Haitian arts are very adept at telegraphing irony, satire, sexuality, fetishism and spiritual faith through their works. Another eye-popping observation: while many of the art pieces include castoffs and detritus from Western consumer markets, the most prominent components that come from Haiti are human skulls.
Mainstream news media coverage about Haiti always lapses into a dystopian frame that portrays the Caribbean nation as a “failed state.” But, the curated works in this show magnify the genuine resilience that embodies the Ghetto Biennale as an important institution of contemporary art. Eugène, collaborating with fellow Haitian artists, established Atis Rezistans, which first invited international artists to come to the Grand Rue neighborhood. A short documentary film is part of the exhibition, which succinctly encapsulates the Ghetto Biennale movement since it started in 2009. ”It’s usually always the bourgeoisie who own the galleries,” Eugène has explained. “But I wanted to have a gallery — not only a gallery, but it must be a museum. This is the reason why I have given the name ‘E Pluribus Unum’ Musee d’Art to my studio and yard.”
Antra Sinha: The Elements: Fire, Earth, Water. तत्वों : अग्नि, भूमि, जल।
Growing up in an industrial township in eastern India, with a steel plant nearby, Sinha recalled, via video, in an interview conducted elsewhere, observing the blast furnace “from where molten steel came gushing out into the channels to the steel melting shop. This image is of the slab rolling mill in the huge workshop where everything was mechanized and the ingot reheated was pressed between rollers for making it into the slab.” With that experience, she said that was how she made the “emotional connection to the transformative power of heat.”
The exhibition is an intricate, lucid testament to the symbiosis of these elements, the alchemy of ceramics and a holistic consciousness of natural sustainability, with Sinha’s language rendered in elegant fingerprints, geometry and textures. In this show, Sinha, who is on the art faculty for ceramics at Utah State University, demonstrates how those formative years have expanded, matured and evolved in her art: “Fire (tetrarc) transforms materials from one state to another, like clay into ceramic. Earth (rectangle) supports and sustains life. Water (sphere) embodies fluidity, evoking a meditative state.”
The pieces were fired in a wood-fueled kiln. Sinha’s cosmopolitan philosophy as a creator has cured, with the blessings of her interactions with artists from around the world. On her Instagram account, she quoted Kanjiro Kawai, a Japanese potter: “One can make a bowl with clay, make it round and smooth, but until it is fired it cannot be used. One can light the wood and make a fire, yet it is the fire itself that completes the bowl. The fire is more powerful and bigger than any human.”
In Memory
As noted in a review published last October at The Utah Review: “Curated around the themes of the document, remnant and ghost in our acts of memory, UMOCA’s current exhibition In Memory is a masterful contemporary art exploration of the artifact form. There are, for example, an oversized print of a love note written by hand on notebook paper; a René Magritte etching representing a man with his mind that has shattered into pieces scattered in all directions; polyester fabric recreations of intercoms, light fixtures, and fuse boxes from an artist’s former residences; a documentary film of figures of Taino goddess figures an artist carved into the limestone caves at a park in Cuba she made after returning to the country for the first time in many years; an elevated take on the family portrait painting but reproduced with photos found in estate and garage sales that are posed and reconfigured to create an idealized image of the blended family.”
To read the full review, see this link.
Milad Mozari: Language of Movement
As noted in a review published last October at The Utah Review:, UMOCA’s regular offerings of multidisciplinary exhibitions have pushed successfully through the boundaries of traditional genres and how we define them. Their longitudinal perspectives are especially valuable for encouraging the viewer to consider them through their personal experiences. While Milad Mozari is on the College of Architecture and Planning faculty at The University of Utah, he cogently applies the fundamentals of structure and layers in projects that traverse several forms of artistic expression and ties them together in unexpected ways. The longitudinal core of Language of Movement reveals splendidly the long interaction he has had with Ghaffar Pourazar, an Azerbaijani-Iranian computer animator who became a Beijing Opera artist.
Mozari documents Pourazar’s artistic transitions in a biographical way that embodies the experience with personal trips and events. Mozari introduces us to that life: an Iranian by birth, Pourazar went to a Cambridge boarding school in his teens and went on to become a professor in mime and animation. More than 30 years ago, after attending a Beijing Opera performance in London, he left teaching when he was in his mid-thirties and moved to China because he was enthralled by the production. Eventually, his training in his new interest led him to a limited-speaking role, which he continues to perform at the Beijing Opera. Mozari documents the transitions in archival photographs, video, and sound and Language of Movement is a perfect title for the migration and evolution of an artist who responded to the sparks in his creative spirit and journey.
Two other shows of note that will continue through at least part of the spring:
Maika Garnica‘s Rotate Orbit Whirl Shuffle Dial Twist
The latest video piece to grace UMOCA’s Codec Gallery once again emphasizes how this space has become an essential destination for developing a museum visitor’s skills for deep viewing and deep listening. Maika Garnica‘s Rotate Orbit Whirl Shuffle Dial Twist is a video performance piece, with the Antwerp artist playing ceramic instruments that she created, surrounding a natural landscape. The performance installation comprises two high-definition videos that are looped.
We are familiar with the quality, textures and hues of sounds produced by conventional instruments either made of wood or brass, but Garnica’s instruments produce sounds that do not connect to a specific or group of musical cultures and performance practices. While she fires these pieces they are not glazed so the multiple possibilities of sounds they can produce is contingent upon the clay mixtures she has used or the temperatures at which they were fired.
One should listen as closely as possible to the sounds in the surroundings that accompany the artist as she tries out the sounds on the instruments. Her breathing and air puffing patterns are noticeable, as well as the manner in which she holds the instruments, especially for how they are enhanced by the naturally occurring sounds with wind, trees and the grassland. It becomes music in its most pristine state.
The video installation is available through May 31.
Brooklynn Johnson, Messages from Fish
A Utah-based artist, Johnson presents a vivid example of a strong connection between art and science. As National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency scientists have explained, “red light has the lowest energy. In water, colors with lower energy, such as reds, oranges, and yellows are filtered out quickly. Because blue and violet light waves have more energy, they travel deeper through water.” In the deep sea, living organisms have adapted to low light that is up to more than 100 times more sensitive than what human eyesight is capable of achieving. As an NOAA fact sheet notes, “Red and black animals are common in the deep ocean. At this depth, few, if any, red light waves reflect back to one’s eye. Since there is no red light available, red animals here will appear gray or black, making them nearly invisible to other organisms. This helps them evade predators when there is nowhere to hide.”
This enthralling scientific foundation has inspired Johnson to create paintings that situate the human experience and emotions associated with loss and absence and the ways we try to sustain and preserve memories, especially as many parts of them will fade and perhaps disappear in our cognitive selves.
Many artists have depicted the interplay of light and water, but primarily on the surface: Claude Monet and David Hockney, most notably. Christy Lee Rogers has played with the science of light refraction through water, to create painterly works of Baroque-like imagery, by shooting above the water surface into a darkened pool. Similarly, Johnson’s paintings — emulating the science of color, light and refraction described above — give the viewer the opportunity to imagine that liberating sensation of being underwater where we can reflect wholly and unrestrictedly upon the cognitive and soulful essences of ourselves.
For more information about the museum, see the UMOCA website.