Two current exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA) point to substantial sociocultural epiphanies: Amanda Smith: Trust Issues (through May 3) and Holly Rios: I’d Like to Return this Body (through May 31). Visitors also are encouraged to visit the galleries for three shows featuring ceramic artists from the recent the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts.
Amanda Smith: Trust Issues
The arresting amount of detail in Amanda Smith’s fairy tale works of oil painted on ceramics immediately captures the viewer’s eyes in Trust Issues but, upon focused inspection, this deluge of visual stimulation lucidly brings out her exploration of our paradoxical relationships with selecting the facts that we trust to articulate the truths of our beliefs and faith.
Smith’s work is ecumenical and comprehensive in its immersion into the collective body of realms where we turn to for knowledge we deem as affirming the certainty of our beliefs. Fairy tales, morality plays, parables and biblical chronicles are part of that process.
The thematic substance in Smith’s works here is as complexly composed as the incredibly fine details in each piece. In a contemporary world of deepfakes, the lengthening shadows of AI,arguments that the Mandela Effect seems to be popping with greater frequency and videos asserting that we are unaware subjects in a giant simulation experiment, the questions of trust and truth are more contentious than ever. Do we eliminate the risks and uncertainties here by simply decoupling ourselves from the immersive convergence of our digital world?
Simplistic answers do not resolve the dilemma. We rely so heavily on the convenience of continuous digital connection yet for the sake of our mental well-being we decide periodically to silence alerts and notifications at specific times. We are wedded to social media apps and browser searches but we also feel more uncomfortable about how much personal data the digital overlords might have on us.
This emphasizes the two-headed figure of trust and distrust in our age. As Smith says, she likes data and faith is difficult. Whatever the case, we cannot allow ourselves to be desensitized to the harms or threats. As we have learned from every fairy tale, it is our individual responsibility to be aware and vigilant in resolving the sources of distrust that confound our maturing interactions with what we consider important in making our own foundations of trust, faith and belief.
Holly Rios: I’d Like to Return this Body
The appropriated imagery in her art is framed as a well-conceived sociological research study with a healthy dose of qualitative analysis and empirical primary source materials in Holly Rios’ I’d Like to Return this Body. The subject of this show comes from decades of content featuring female models who appeared in the pages of Playboy magazine, starting from the 1950s. Rios incorporates text referencing capitalism and technology into her work, which heightened the objectification of women and anchored perceptions about what constitutes ideal feminine beauty.
The scholarly literature is abundant in discussing these issues, with writers variously critiquing Playboy as “a pantheon to the sexual exploitation of women” and as a retailer of “casual misogyny.” At the height of its popularity, Playboy magazine regularly presented nude female models as examples of ‘young women next door,’ bypassing porn models for college students, popular celebrities, athletes and women who looked like they could have come from a close-knit neighborhood in any American town or city. Just a casual scan of the imagery Rios presents makes this point evident.
The question is why did Playboy and other enterprises that tried to emulate its success become so pervasive in pushing an aspirational project pitching consumers on the values of sexual luxury. Rios demonstrates how effectively Playboy fused hedonistic and glamorous concepts of sexuality and traditional free market values where the female models were portrayed simultaneously as objects and agents of consumerism. The models were ‘arm candy’ for men and consumer products that reified popular stereotypes of elements of masculine identity that allowed men to live sexually and financially satisfied.
For more information about exhibitions, see the UMOCA website.