| Exhibition Review: Salt Lake City Shawn Harris: The Best We've Got |
by Kasey Boone
Artists Of Utah
Web Site |
| Okay, here I go. I’m gonna lay it on the line. All my future critical
responses will be judged by this one utterance, this one assessment, this
giving of a 10 by which the 9s and 6s and 7s of future critical reviews
will be metered. I stand on the precipice . . .
I think Shawn Harris is the best artist we’ve got. Choose, if you will, to ignore my slight bravado. After all, I may not be too far out on a limb. I’m not the first to recognize this artist’s talent. Harris has appeared in a number of exhibitions the past couple of years and the Salt Lake Arts Council is currently giving him a show – the impetus for my assessment – which hangs until April 9th. At Artists of Utah’s 2002 35 x 35 (where I first saw his work) he garnered both a Juror’s Award, as well as the People’s Choice Award. He has also won a Traveling Exhibition Award from the Utah Arts Council. But I don’t think that any of this adequately sums up the strength and excitement of his work. So, I’ll say it once again, Shawn Harris is the best artist we’ve got. By we, I mean Utah, and more specifically the Salt Lake scene – which is mostly what I get to see. This, admittedly, is not exactly saying that Harris is ready to conquer an international biennial. But then again . . . Harris describes himself as a photographer, but as his eleven pieces at the Art Barn aptly demonstrate he is so much more. The central method of his work is photography, usually very large images, produced in multiple16 x 20 sections to create a full image. The photography is blended with oil paints, hand tinted, often projected both in 2 and 3 dimensions. Most importantly, the photographs don’t feel like photographs – which far too often leave a lot of viewers, including me, uninterested. Harris’s work has everything. It is sculpture, painting, photography, found object amalgamation, and I wouldn’t be surprised, due to the nature of the pieces – their built in architecture and projecting panels and pieces -- if it became installation art as well. Harris goes much beyond photography, but not by relying on Photoshops tricks and other digital wizardy to spice up his photographs. That's because his works really aren’t photographs. They use photographs but are something different entirely. Harris relies on a form of collage, with photography as one element, to create the interest of his pieces. He also uses found objects, carpentry, glass pieces and other three dimensional aspects. All to create what I call his “settings.” His works seem like still theatre, creating a space, a drama and a statement. And like theatre he is able to use his artwork as social commentary. By far one of the strongest pieces in the exhibit at the Finch Lane Gallery is actually one of the simplest. In “Seed Seller” we see a large photograph of a young vendor (a popcorn seller at a ball game maybe?) with the words “Preexistence” as the logo on his cap. From the frame of the photograph extends a rack with packs of seeds displayed. You can choose your gender, your race, even your occupation. The highest priced seed is a white female, which sells for $7.99. An Asian goes for $2.69 and a homosexual for $1.39. An African American female sells for $1.50 (you’ll have to pay an additional $6.49 to get that white skin). Her male counterpart costs an additional $.49. But a professional athlete (shown again as an African American male) sells for a whopping $5.99. The piece is an explosive commentary. The seed rack has the feel of an old general store, and the vendor hints at that bizarre populist arena of acceptance – the national sports industry – where everyday racists will forget the color of your skin as long as you can jump high or hit the ball over the fence. It also reaches out in a global context, a sci-fi comment on the future of genetic engineering. More poignant, it seems a local commentary, the “Preexistence” of the cap logo a purposeful code-word for the Mormon concept of pre-earthly existence and the extra-doctrinal interpretations in Mormon culture of people’s “placement” on earth (in bodies) dependant on their valiance in the pre-life. Harris is an equal-opportunity offender, not only relying on the local,
and admittedly easy, target of the Mormon culture. The national scandals
of the Catholic Church have no problem stepping into his work. In “Sell
Me a Papal Indulgence for My Bread of Heaven” the recent scandals
in the Catholic Church may be the medium, but the message is a reminder
about the evil and corruption that tends to invade organized religion.
Harris creates a stage set – literally. Theater seating is placed
in a Baroque church setting, and extends from the two-dimensional space
of the photograph into the three-dimensional world of the viewer. A
young boy, vulnerable behind his spectacles, holds out an unbroken loaf
of bread in an uncomfortable gesture somewhere between offering and
appeal. |
Take a look through the entirety of the show and you realize Harris
not a one-tune wonder. Political commentary is not the only thing he can
do. He can also make elegiac works, as in Operation 911. Think of some
of the recent “tributes” to 911, which over two years later
still dominates or societal psyche. There are the FBI agents, recently
exposed in the media, who took “souvenirs” from ground zero
and later gave them to friends, family and business associates. Or, of
course, the furor over the political prostitution of 911 images in the
ongoing presidential campaign (give it a few years and we’ll see
images of firefighters at ground zero used to sell trucks and the latest
country single). Then there is Harris’s piece: a long horizontal collage of images, both photograph and a super-imposed glass etching, of the interior of an airplane where ghostly figures can barely be seen walking or sitting. Beneath it all, subtle images of firefighters. For his tribute to 911, Harris has chosen not the fascinatingly lurid image of the passenger planes crashing into Manhattan’s towers, or the senseless rubble of the aftermath. His is a tribute to what 911 really showed. Yes, we are all vulnerable, and no matter how many wars we wage here or overseas we will remain vulnerable; but Harris reminds us of the heroism latent in the best of our souls. 911 is a bullet ricocheting in the soft spots of our conscious, but in Harris’s work it rends through the very best of us and reveals us to ourselves like an open wound. These images we are seeing are the heroes of 911: the “Let’s Do It” passengers of the fourth airplane, who prevented a greater tragedy in D.C.; and the firefighters who raced into the towers to save the lives of others only to die in the crumbling mass or live to clean up the remains of their fallen comrades. The tone of the piece is quietly honoring: no bravado, no brass bands. It is a visual moment of silence for the departed heroes. The singularly non-photographic work in the exhibit, “Single Downer,” is a powerful work in its simplicity. The rib cage of a single cow is encased in glass. It feels like a museum piece from some Museum of Natural (or Unnatural) History. What exactly would the placard read? “Single Downer leads to the spread of mad cow disease to entire North American cattle population, fast-food industry completely destroyed, world markets collapse, devastation by World War III.” Who knows? What the image represents is not some localized danger, but a reminder of exactly how closely we are all connected. Like Patient Zero, the promiscuous French-Canadian flight attendant to whom a fourth of the initial AIDS cases in North America have been connected. Despite our best attempt to find a hole in the sand big enough to hide our heads in, we can’t but face the hard reality that for evermore our world is connected and we are all one.
Sure, I may be wrong. I may be premature. I may be excited for the moment. But take a look for yourselves. He’s got breadth and he’s got depth. He’s got a voice and he’s got something to say. He’s my Bo Derek. He’s my 10. --Kasey Boone The works of Shawn Harris can be seen at the Finch Lane Gallery through April 9th. He also appears this month in the Rio Gallery's "Artist Grantees 2003 Exhibition." Harris can be contacted at: Read an article on the show in this week's City Weekly. |
Online article from the Artists of Utah web site.
February issue 2003 |
Figurative work played a dominant role in the exhibition
[35 under 35], though the form of the figuration varied greatly. Holly
Pendergast dissects the planes of her figures with her pencil before
applying sensitive swatches of color. Nathan Florence tackled a classical
theme in his "Annunciation." The largest
of the figure pieces, Shawn Harris's Succession of the Sacred Spirit,
was both a crowd pleaser and a jury pleaser. It won the People's Choice
Award as well as a Juror Cash Award. Jennifer Suflita won a cash
award for her piece, "Josh," a closely cropped vertical portrait
piece. Kim Riley, the third to receive a cash award, also won for a
figurative work, this time a photograph. |
Out of the Wall Shawn Harris leaps into Another dimension to Bring his art to life. |
BY BRIAN STAKER comments@slweekly.com The City Weekly |
| If you happened to receive the postcard Announcing the newest exhibit at the Art Barn, There's an entire other dimension to the work You wouldn't even realize from the photo. Shawn Harris' mixed-media works inhabit the world of Three-dimensional space, and they take their Places not just as artifacts but as objects familiar yet unusual. They are similar enough that we rec- ognize their iconic gestures, yet different enough that the comments they make on the landscape of our lives is suffused with irony. The conceptu- al dimension of his work required the ability to jump out from the wall at us in order to make the statements it was struggling to make. Harris came to mixed media from the dis- ciplines of drawing and painting in his studies at the University of Utah. "My requirements included printmak- ing, and I went from there to pho- tography. My interest was blurring the line between the two." It was- n't so much that he was finding the similarities-a kind of vanish- ing point between the two- and the other materials he uses in his pieces, to bring a third, hybrid quantity into being. This is most visible in "Unleashing the White Collared Marionette," where paint and print Merge in the telephone poles running into the distance behind the executive apparently baring his soul in the form of images from TV ads, President George W. Bush making a speech and other televised images. "I am really upset with the direction this country is heading," he says of "Marrionette." "Our culture panders to big busi- ness, but the business is not really in control either. His strings are being pulled, too." What you don't realize until you are there in the presence of this and other objects is the |
local image in the show, neon tubing encircles a large image of the Villa Theater marquee with a sign reading "Wal-Mart" covering it in this only slightly altered reality, viewing lenses like an observation deck protruding so force- fully that you will find yourself almost reach- ing for a coin to insert. "Seed Seller" looks like a cross between a ballpark hotdog vendor and door-to-door proselytizer, his packets labeled things like "octuplets" and "Homosexual At Birth" underscoring the point his hat labeled "Pre-existence" has to make about beliefs of a certain religious denomination. Harris describes his subject matter as coming from a mix of watching the news and listening to radio, though he says "it helps to look through images I've shot, looking for something that ties in." Images from St. Xavier Church outside Tucson worked nicely into a commentary on the Catholic Church in a piece "Sell Me A Papal Indulgence For My Bread of heaven," in which an alter boy offers a loaf of bread in the foreground. "The Controlled Offering of Nature's Essence" is both the most subtle work and the most dramatic. A woman's body morphs into a classi- cally-columned building around and through which circulate images of water. Copper tubes circumnavigate her; inside her midsection, seemingly her soul, rests a glass box containing a photograph of a fountain ("a manicured, manufactured product, showing the long, in some ways violent process it had to go through to create something we would perceive as beautiful"). Another remarkable thing about these pieces is the time it took to create the eleven in the show-from late August, about three weeks Apiece. Since the gallery required new works For the show, all the pieces are new except for one. A grant from the Utah Arts Council made these works possible, but it was the leap from two- to three-dimensions that makes them uniquely evocative works of art. CW |
| Exhibition Review:Orem Why Do We Hang? UAC's UTAH 2003, CRAFTS AND PHOTOGRAPHY by Jill MacAllister/photos courtesy UAC (Excerpt) ...The photograph of a pensive young man might also stir some thought. In Christo's Introspection , by Shawn Harris, the photo is covered by a piece of glass with a sketch of coin operated binoculars. The binoculars line up with the boy's eyes, and the whole piece is open for interpretations... Special Feature (Excerpt) Both articles can be found by following the links to the "Artists
of Utah" website |
| October 2003 Grant recipients
...Shawn Harris, Salt Lake City |