Jared Lindsay Clark, Makia Sharp at CUAC

Another show you should check out at tonights gallery stroll...

CUAC Contemporary Art
175 E 200 S
Salt Lake City, Utah 84111
Today 6:00pm
 

Jared Lindsay Clark is one of Utah’s most successful contemporary artists.  He received a BFA in painting from BYU and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Sculpture.  He was featured in New American Painters earlier this year and is a recipient of the Utah Division of Arts and Museums’ Artist Fellowship.  He has exhibited his work multiple times in Los Angeles and New York City.

Clark’s exhibition Seer Screens is comprised of objects that blur the lines between painting and sculpture.  Taking pieces of found Styrofoam used to ship monitors and televisions, he fills their negative spaces with colored but transparent silicon resin.  The resulting compositions engage with the traditional tension between flatness and depth which has been explored throughout painting’s history as well as that same tension that is inherent to the ubiquitous computer and television screens that mitigate our contemporary life experience.  Laying on tables constructed for this purpose, they become like transparent pools of color for the viewer to see in and through, and to contemplate transcendence (at least of material).  These objects, at once paintings and sculptures are mystical Seer stones—Urim and Thummim—that speak to another kind of transcendence that is both a serious exploration of spirituality and belief and an ironic statement about the role television and computer monitors play in the creation of culture.

Makia Sharp is a recent BYU graduate with a BFA in Painting.  Her exhibition Passing is also an investigation of different modes of seeing and types of transcendence, both material and spiritual.  She uses lowbrow materials and images to reference cliché or kitsch examples of the sublime that is loosely based in landscape but truly rooted in minimal formalism.  She also uses screens and projections to explore light in the context of the painting tradition as well as how ideas of beauty and transcendence are expressed through the mining of popular imagery.  Hers is wrought with the existential angst that every passage in her work is a metaphor for death with only a glimmer of hope for something else.