It would be a very easy task to find examples that counter the assertion of the existence of one truth. In the history of civilization, it often has been assumed that how we inscribe, connote or annotate every experience will lead to a single correct definition or interpretation, thereby negating every other possibility. For instance, even analyzing a clip of music does not lead to a single classifying interpretation of its emotional mood, expression or psychological impact. Many interpretations can be reasonable and the assumption of one correct interpretation is really a matter of opinion.
In the ascending age of artificial intelligence and the proliferation of large language models (LLMs), the most critical question hinges, as two researchers posed in a 2015 paper, “on whether or not they can accurately represent uncertainty over the correctness of their output.” The same researchers posed a new theory: crowd truth. They define it as, “reject[ing] the fallacy of a single truth for semantic interpretation, [and it is] based on the intuition that human interpretation is subjective and that measuring annotations on the same objects of interpretation… across a crowd will provide a useful representation of their subjectivity and the range of reasonable interpretations.”
Featuring the work of faculty in the University of Utah Department of Art and Art History, the current exhibition Relative Truths at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) is an intellectually invigorating exploration of this theoretical concept in more than 30 works. This show included notable examples of how some consider the implications of an AI-informed reality. Curated by Peter Hay, associate director of PROArtes México, this is the first University of Utah faculty exhibition in four years.
In 2021, as The Utah Review noted at the time, Space Maker, the last faculty exhibition, expanded our contemporary thinking about space, spaciousness, and the presence of personal boundaries and public distancing. That exhibition came on the heels of a turbulent period where not only the COVID-19 pandemic dominated but also the largest display of social protests, acute tensions in contemporary politics and the inevitable acknowledgment of climate change and its human-related impacts magnified the tenor of that theme. Just as urgent in its timing as Space Maker, the Relative Truths show excels in situating ourselves to contemplate the significance of crowd truth while we sort out the potential implications of the upsides and downsides of living in an AI-informed reality.
The overarching thread in the curated works reminds the exhibition visitor that while we exist and thrive principally in Utah, the underlying provenance in the curated works, which represent a broad spectrum of treatments in medium and form, is the ubiquitous experience of just how far social technologies have superseded geographic borders. These dynamics often ride atop algorithms that we now accept as routine and fundamental to making connections, regardless of proximity or distance.
If one expects consensus to emerge after viewing these works in this particular collective, it will not be manifested. But each artist’s interactions with and interpretations of uncertainty in a contemporary moment are equally reasonable and admissible to the conversation. If anything, AI’s visibility has awakened our minds to consider the history of human modes of inscription, annotation, description and classification that have figured in the myth of one truth pushed up against the more edifying subjective realities embodied in relative truths.
Viewers will definitely notice Zak Jensen’s large yellow-and-white vinyl banner with the phrase, “compared to what.” It becomes the logline for the entire entire exhibition because that phrase is essential to the statement of a relative truth and it signals that an assertion of a truth would not be complete without comparable context or perspective.
Carol Sogard’s Organic & Manmade Remains of a Former World is a brilliant extension of this sentiment, as we confront the dire effects of environmental degradation resulting from our human dominion over nature and climate change. Sogard based this particular cycle of works of archival pigment paper on the three-volume collection that James Parkinson (incidentally, the namesake for Parkinson’s disease) published in the early 1800s. Parkinson was a surgeon who was fascinated with, as the remainder of the published text’s title indicates, “mineralized remains of the vegetables and animals of the Antediluvian world; generally termed extraneous fossils.” He and his daughter created the illustrations for the text, which many paleontologists esteemed. Parkinson’s creation was a paean to, as he described it, the wisdom of the “Almighty Creator.”
Sogard flips the premise of the original in her work, by critically assessing our destructive habits as contemporary consumers and our disregard for our essential role as stewards of nature and the environment. For example, on one page of The Ashen Earth, we see a split plastic coffee lid positioned next to a burnt USB cable and a dried out banana peel. On the other, there is a poem by “A.I. Thoreau,” which includes the verse, “We buried our wisdom.” Sogard drives home the point in the cover of the book with its publication information: Salt Lake City, Utah, 2025.
Part of a body of work incorporating research emphases on climate change impacts on communities and elements of Chicano art aesthetics, V. Kim Martinez’s Tantalus-Blood Falls (2025) is striking. The wood-mounted canvas is rendered in flashe paint which is commonly used in theatrical set construction but also is dynamic for artists who look for intense color effects and a velvety finish. Blood falls references one of the most alarming changes witnessed in the climate, as scientists noted seawater that had been trapped underneath an Antarctica glacier started flowing out and its color is a result of iron oxide.
The importance of emancipating ourselves from the constricting filters of human perception, especially now, reverberates in two works by Eric Erekson: Nostalgia (2023, mixed media on wood panel) and Dangerous Games (2023, oil on panel). In fact, an excerpt from Erekson’s artistic statement at his website is prudent guidance for this particularly stressful time: “In turn what we see as identity of self and others is restricted by everything we learn. Much of this learned information carrying the baggage of archaic practices and thought. My paintings use a number of inspirational concepts including; the contemporary figure, appropriated imagery, social and political components, life experience as well as elements emphasizing my own narrowed vision of the world by the structures that have shaped and narrowed the human scope continually. Many of these illustrate the structures that impact how we make choices, and what we see as freedom.”
Also notable is Moses Williams’ Plunder My Side, (2024), which was featured last year when the artist presented his Parable Bodies show at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. Plunder My Side was one of five sculptural forms featured at the earlier show that are utterly realistic in their corporeal forms. As Williams notes about their surfaces, “they are not concrete, impenetrable barriers but rather porous, mutable, transitory skins clothing unique entities.” As The Utah Review noted at the time, “Instead of a grand cathedral, the traditional apotheosis of anthropocentric dominion over nature, Williams reimagines the spiritual place as a fascinating, humbling and incredibly calming reevaluation of the human relationship to the nonhuman bodies where we anchor our existence. Unlike the traditional Christian spiritual journey as marked in the Stations of the Cross and the accompanying prayers at each stop, Parable Bodies invited the viewer to its own mesmerizing and transfiguring experience of meditation. Thus, Plunder My Side heightens this perspective in its place for Relative Truths.
The mysteries of imaginative fictions in history and how they endure are captured in several works. Zhang Xi (张曦)’s acrylic painting Sophie’s World (2024) epitomizes two principal pairs of dualities, in the juxtapositions of East and West in the aesthetics of expression and the psychological burdens of joy and turbulence. The significance in the pigment print of Edward Bateman’s Anges et Filles (Angels and Girls), Paris 1860, 2025 lies in the reference to a poem from the 1860s by Charles Baudelaire whose writings regularly touched on themes of the dualism of love and beauty. Beth Krensky and her son Zev Gorfinkle turn box cars from antique model railroad sets into reliquaries that, in their words, become “spaces that hold and sanctify the presence of absence”: Final Wish, Last Glimpse of the Sky and Gathering Light from Hollows of Emptiness (2023).
A fitting companion to these reliquaries made from antique model railroad box cars is found in the trio of paper collages and mixed media on panels by Daniel Evans: Acclivity, Allowance and Exsufflate (2023) which portray the artist’s creative objective as he explains in his artistic statement. Evans writes, “Given the sheer ubiquity of stimuli in modern life, both sensory and conceptual, our survival hinges on the silent work of an internal editor that manages the input, shielding us from cognitive overload.” Rising above the “compressed [view of the physical world] into immaterial, two-dimensional form,” the artist adds, “What risks being interpreted as disengagement is effectively a form of concentration through visual abstraction.” Thus, we are untethered from the forces of inscription, annotation and connotation in order to let ourselves direct us to more compelling subjective expressions of relevant and reasonably relevant truths.
Politics and the regrettably omnipresent ignorance to learn from history and instead rely on discourses of lies and rhetoric that masquerade as legitimizing truths are found in several compelling examples. Henry Becker, a U.S. Army veteran who served for five years as a sniper team leader in the Iraq War, and Kevin Tomas documented two decades in American history, starting with the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and ending when the last of the U.S. military contingent left Afghanistan: 20/20 A Retrospective of Two Decades at War (2022). This series on newspaper print chronicles the transformation of security into political theater, revealing the unbroken thread of lies that cut across four presidential administrations. However, it also reinforces the question of why we persistently fail to learn from history and these experiences or war. Kabul stirred echoes of Saigon in 1975 and Baghdad in 2003.
In tandem, Martin Novak’s AI-assisted digital composition Same As It Never Was – Memory #1 (2024) underscores the acknowledgment of our failure to appropriate the lessons from history for a different outcome. Fences, 1 (2024), a 25-minute performance video that is one of five created by artist Jordan Layton, features the artist constructing vinyl fence sections in Utah’s West Desert. Again, the general epiphany is the persistent ignorance of history: this time, that of the dynamics of suburban sprawl and the failure to address what have been well-documented impacts of the practice, including environmental degradation and unresolved problems of providing adequate and sustainable housing for an ever-growing population in the state.
The exhibition continues through Jan. 4. For information, see the UMFA website.