Art Happenings: Round-Up for April 16-22

By Adele Flail

Welcome back for another week of local arts events. Don’t forget: the Salt Lake Gallery Stroll is this Friday—and we have some highlights here—but you’ll want to plan a route ahead of time. Check out the galleries involved in this Stroll, go here. Which are you excited to visit?

Wednesday April 18

If you’re looking for something, well, completely different, Pioneer Craft House offers ongoing sessions on Wednesday nights devoted to creating bobbin lace. This intricate art has roots going back to the 16th century, and while yes, you may literally be creating delicate flowers in your work, practitioners have to be anything but. Lace-in-progress is tacked to a pillow and the threads managed by winding them to hanging bobbins, but even “simple” patterns may require 10+ pairs of bobbins, marshaled with mathematical precision. Not for the easily intimidated, or perhaps, those of us who aren’t star-spawn with thirty tentacles. $10 per session which includes one-on-one instruction, although those wishing to get started will need $86 to purchase a beginner’s kit. To register, call Elizabeth Peterson at 801-253-2060 or head here for more info.

 Pioneer Craft House, 3271 South 500 East, 6-8:30PM

 

Friday April 20


120416 Untitled2

The public reception for the fourth biannual  exhibition is being held this Friday at the Rio Gallery in collaboration with the Salt Lake Gallery Stroll and Utah Arts & Museums. For those unfamiliar with the exhibition, the name of the show gives away the common theme linking the work of the 30 artists selected: “We’ve got a great group of artists this year,” says curator Namon Bills. “They work in a wide range of styles and media, and it should be a lot of fun for the public to suggest titles for these pieces. The Untitled show will have something for everyone—except titles.” Visitors to the reception are invited to tackle the pile of blank tags accompanying each work and come up with their own title for the piece. The show at large asks viewers to consider how the title of a work of art influences the perception of that work—should art speak for itself, or is there value in commentary? Come up with your own answer this Friday: the event is free and open to the public; Untitled will be on-view through May 3.

Rio Gallery, 300 South Rio Grande Street, 6-9PM.

 

120416 Tarampi
120416 TeganThe reception for Margaret Tarampi’
and Shirley Tegan’s shows at the Art Access and the Access II galleries, respectively, also takes place Friday. Tarampi is a psychology PhD candidate in Cognition and Neural Science at the Univeristy of Utah. She brings her studies—researching the cognitive mechanisms that underlie spatial perception, a field which involves working with special populations from spatial experts like dancers and architects, to the visually impaired—to her art. Between her post graduate studies, and a bachelor’s in architecture, Tarampi brings a uniquely rigorous perspective to the goal of exploring “our collective humanity as a community of diverse individuals in Salt Lake.” We Are Salt Lake: Gestalt Portraits explores the Gestalt theory regarding how people organize the world perceptually. Her anamorphic images come into focus only when viewed from a certain angle, with a portrait of Mayor Corroon, for example, or lost boy of Sudan Dut Bior emerging from a work that appears abstract when viewed straight on— a metaphor for any attempt to understand the complexities of individual experience.

(Tarampi was also part of the winning team for the 337 Project’s Lawn Knomes Eat Your Heart Out exhibition, if you’ve been wondering where you’ve heard her name recently.)


Tegan’s work, on the other hand, speaks more to her personal struggles as an artist, although her work also plays with perception and illusion. Her sculptures, while made entirely from wood, often seem to be what they are not. Appearing to be assemblages that include metal and plastic component, Tegan says of her Chain series, “The chains and metal-looking parts express holding back, restraint and the interruption of the creative process.” This struggle is perhaps something that many emerging, or in Tegan’s case “re-emerging” artists, can related to, as they attempt to balance the call of the creative life against the demands of everyday responsibilities. Although Tegan received a BFA from the University of Utah and an art education degree certificate, her duties as a single parent led her to a 30-year career as a realtor, and while one wonders what the art world missed out on during that time, Tegan’s work shows that it is never too late to start again.

Art Access & Access II Gallery, 230 South 500 West #125, 6-9PM.


It’s a bit of a side-note, but my favorite not-your-standard-gallery offering has to be Cathedral Tattooing Company, which will be featuring new work by its in-house artists: Jake Miller, Tyler Densley and CJ Fishburn. You can see examples of their work on each artist’s personal site. As tattoos have become more and more accepted as both an art-form and a valid means of personal expression, it begs the question—what other fringe methods will we see entering “serious” art galleries in coming years? Check out Cathedral’s show, and tell us what you’d like to see treated as “real art” in the comments.

Cathedral Tattooing Company, 249 East 400 South, 6-9PM.

This article was originally published on April 16, 2012.