EDITOR’S NOTE: For preview coverage of the 50th Utah Arts Festival, which runs June 18-21, The Utah Review is presenting individual or group profiles of artists, performers, entertainers and some newcomers to the event. The curtain raiser highlights the history of the Festival which is marking its golden anniversary. BANDALOOP, among the most prominent pioneers of vertical dance, returns to UAF for the fourth time, having appeared in 2005, 2013 and 2018. Once again, the Oakland-based arts company will perform on the 240-foot-high curving glass façade of the City Library, as part of a June tour in four cities featuring a work with ecological roots that will resonate with collective concerns about the Great Salt Lake’s ecological crisis, as the dance artists perform FLOCK while integrating company repertoire pieces including Downstream and its new creation, life || lines, all with an original score featuring music by four composers. Salt Lake Acting Company will appear for the second time at the festival, offering a sample from its upcoming summer show, The Gaslight Zone. Make-and-take opportunities will be among the most extensive in history, with Make Salt Lake as well as Secondhand Salamander which is bringing back the classic Mad Hatter project, and, of course, the Kids’ Art Yard. Urban Arts is offering its largest live graffiti mural installation featuring eight artists in four Festival campus locations, while a row of several other artists will be demonstrating their creative process in real time. Holdman Studios, based in Lehi with an international portfolio of commissions to create stained glass in religious and civic buildings, including a recent update to the Utah State Capitol rotunda, is offering an unprecedented series of free workshops for participants to create their own stained glass artwork. The City Library auditorium will be the home to the 23rd edition of the international Fear No Film program, with 84 short films on a slate of 15 programs, the second largest in the event’s history. Of course, dance, who wears the empress jewels in performing arts, will be represented by Repertory Dance Theatre, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Sock Opera Dance, and, of course, the ever-popular 1520 Arts, which will feature Trash Panda Drum Group and competitions featuring Sol Tribe as part of the Salt Open Styles Battle along with the Red Bull Dance Your Style battle and a collaboration with Utah Valley University’s ESPRIT in Rep Your Set Choreo Competition, with choreographers who specialize variously in hip hop, contemporary, salsa, reggaeton, afro, popping. Headliners this year include Digable Planets, well known among jazz musicians as well as hip hop artists (June 18); Yola, six-time Grammy-nominated artist, songwriter, and actor (June 19); Austin-based musician Alejandro Rose-Garcia, better known as Shakey Graves, who has been cited for creating new musical experiences tailored to each fan, ranging from Bandcamp-exclusive releases to hosting interactive scavenger hunts while on tour (June 20) and Rubblebucket, a band well known for its hybrid genre blend of psychedelia and electronic dance music (June 21). For tickets and more information, see the Utah Arts Festival website.
Arūnas Ošlapas
Many Utahns who have attended the Kimball Park City Art Festival might have recognized the artwork of Arūnas Ošlapas from Bellingham, Washington. Ošlapas, a Western Washington University professor of industrial design who recently retired after 33 years on the faculty, is making his first appearance in the Utah Arts Festival’s Artist Marketplace. When he wasn’t, as he described it, “torturing his students with solving the world’s problems,” he kept his ‘academic sanity’ in place during the summer breaks, by weaving metal baskets and piecing together metal quilts. For inspiration about which colors to use, he picks and keeps his wife’s prized fabric swatches in his studio.
TUR: How have you used art media forms in helping to create an holistic body of artistic work that searches for a more complete expression of your own innermost and most powerful states of emotion, inspiration, contemplation, and self-identity?
AO: Art is self-expression, even if it’s not conscious. As a first-generation child of immigrants, I sat around the dinner table, listening in awe, how my parents escaped from Lithuania when it was ruthlessly taken over by the Soviet Union. My Lithuanian heritage plays a big part in my color palette, rustic preferences, work ethic, and cultural nuances in my art. There are also parts of my American upbringing that surface in my work such as the Midwestern barns that I would sneak into with my friends or the Longhorn bulls, which I experienced on various ranches during my college years in Montana. These past experiences collectively make me who I am, and these themes often surface in my work. Due to the Great Depression, my parents saved everything and passed that on to me, and consequently I have incorporated many found materials in my work.
A wise veteran artist once told me that you don’t choose your medium; it chooses you. I tried various media, including found object sculpture and painting, but I kept returning to metalwork.
TUR: What is your training as an artist? Who do you consider your most significant influences and inspirations? Do these influences shift as you progress both in your work and life?
AO: I was formally trained and educated as a product designer, and the metalwork I create is self-taught. After six years of professional/corporate design experience, I began teaching product design at Western Washington University. With three children and three months off every summer, I needed extra income to provide soccer shoes, Barbie dolls, Boy Scout camps and keeping up with a relentless mortgage. It was during those summer months that I began weaving metal. With no instruction books or tutorials, I wove my first basket ever from metal pallet strapping discarded from the Home Depot lumber section. Little did I know that this first pathetic effort of rusted woven steel would lead to a profitable summer business for over two decades!
My inspiration comes from many directions and influences. As a product designer, I see trends in colors, materials, form, and finishes. As an artist, I am fascinated by how nature creates its patterns and colors. I use nature’s oxidation process and incorporate rust in much of my work. Like products, the metal baskets are functional, but at the same time, create an artistic statement. So, utility and artistic vision are fused, and both must be satisfied in my work.
TUR: Do you work full-time exclusively as an artist? Or, how do you augment your work as an artist?
AO: For the last two years, I have worked exclusively as an artist and rely on Social Security and savings to supplement my art sales.
TUR: Do you find it easy or difficult to start new work? And, typically, how do you prepare yourself to handle both the creative and physical demands of creating your art?
AO: I lie in bed at night dreaming of the next pieces I will make the following day. In the stillness of the night, the vision of the next piece becomes clear, and then it becomes a matter of executing that piece to match my vision. Physically, I start each day with a Tai Chi inspired regimen set to music, that prepares my body and mind for both creative and physical work.
TUR: With regard to participating in the Utah Arts Festival, please share your feelings about being a part of this enterprise? Have you been in other festivals and do you plan to explore other festival venues?
AO: The Utah Arts Festival is currently on my radar since my son and his family moved to Salt Lake City. Also, my LDS faith attracts me to the ‘motherland’ along with many friends who live in the Salt Lake Valley. I have participated in the Kimball Park City Art Festival for many years and I’m excited to add the Utah Arts Festival to my résumé!
