Alec Monson, “Rooted Together”

The phrase “perennial avant-garde” may sound positive, but it’s actually a criticism of one of the primary characteristics of Postmodernism: the need of mainstream artists to continue demolishing the user-friendly accessibility of traditional forms in order to advance the task of making room for a revolutionary new art. To those critics, artists that go on frustrating efforts to appreciate their work just might be stuck in a rut—fighting a battle that was won long ago and preventing the cultural revival for which the avant-garde was meant to clear the way.

There is, of course, another way forward, and it’s the way art has always progressed. New artists stand on the shoulders of those who went before, including their teachers and even their contemporaries. A walk through the Spring Salon at the Springville Museum of Art will reveal a number of ways this progress is still being made every day.

Much recent landscape art has sounded the alarm about environmental degradation in the face of climate change. One artist who is building on this new consciousness is Alec Monson. In his gouache titled “Rooted Together” he seeks to heal the rift that has grown in the minds of many observers between the high country and the wetlands. The cycle by which water evaporates from lakes and marshes, falls as rain that then sculpts the rocks and mountains as it flows down to begin again has been damaged by those who only see a portion of it: those who ski, hike, farm, fish, and so many other activities that promote a fragment of the whole cycle, the elements of which are truly “rooted together.” Perhaps in response to the sense of peril and doom that pervades so much of our lives, he shows this scene as it verges on being lost, disappearing into night, but accompanied by the familiar promise of return. It’s a remarkable accomplishment to find a way to foreground that promise that doesn’t completely ignore the very real danger. Such metaphorical parallels are one of the ways art can break our hearts, and then set about healing them.

Perry Stewart, “I Am Only Passionately Curious” 

Perry Stewart’s portrait of Albert Einstein, titled with a quotation from the subject—“I Am Only Passionately Curious”—probably reminds many viewers of Illustration, the stepchild of fine art that fills posters, periodicals, advertisements, book jackets, and all those many gray areas where the content of the picture primarily yields to the content of the thing it’s printed on. But there’s another antecedent here, one of the most influential and important arts that might have been the earliest precursor of the avant-garde. The Comics, which were invented in the 18th century, deliberately combined descriptive drawing and narrative: telling stories in both words and pictures at the same time. The art from which Stewart’s painting descends also gave a start to motion pictures, animation, video and now AI. This whole sequence demonstrates how progress can happen without anything having to be destroyed.

Speaking of art that transcends traditional dimensions, Cynthia L Clark’s use of encaustic, a medium invented by the Greeks but reborn in the 20th century, in her “Chaos, Collapse, and a Constant: Can it Hold” uses the third dimension, in the form of a layer of wax, to elaborate on at least two of the many sides of gravity, which both holds together what humanity builds and yet eventually brings it down. This she places alongside nature, with its far more successful collaboration with gravity, but which she argues we need to confine less and study more if we are to see how the trick is accomplished.

Cynthia L. Clark, “Chaos, Collapse, and a Constant: Can it Hold”

Janell James, “Spring Time”

Leonardo applied layer after layer of translucent paint to build an effect akin to the way skin handles light. Five centuries later, Janell James floats layers of acrylic, typically painted on both sides, that effectively open up Leonardo’s collaborative construction to the viewer’s sight. “Spring Time” shows off ten layers of paint that the eye can view separately or combine: another way art can make magic, here by dissecting and then restoring the final effect.

Another way of looking to the future is through the remains of the past. 15 Bytes often foregrounds the assemblages of Frank McEntire, who is present in the Salon, but viewers should not overlook Reina Kropf and “She is Dear to Me,” in which the double entendre of the title is matched by the doubling of history, wherein the past makes the present possible. Her small assemblage sums up a major lesson of the entire Salon.

Reina Kropf, “She is Dear to Me”

101st Annual Spring Salon, Springville Museum of Art, Springville, through July 5.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.