selected publications
Robert Smithson’s Experiments in Entropy
Hyperallergic. Smithson wasn’t interested in creating art that was picturesque, “but in his essay about ‘Spiral Jetty’,” says Hikmet Sidney Loe, author of The Spiral Jetty Encyclo, “it is about the sublime. It’s about the fear, and the awe, and the terror that can be seen within a landscape.’”
Great Salt Lake. Photo by Amie Tullius
How a 100-Year-Old House is Transforming L.A.’s Toughest Neighborhood
GOOD. “Ask him today and Jorge Nuño will tell you his motto is ‘Don’t move, improve.’ But he didn’t always feel that way. Nuño grew up in the heart of south central Los Angeles, where, he says, people used to prove their success by moving away.”
Photo by Amie Tullius
GROOVES 2.3
NOW-ID. Project blog for NOWHERE performance. We are animals who seek patterns. The up and down of the breath, the sun, the pulse of the moon, the seasons and their connected symbols. Even before we add meaning to the events of our lives, our bodies construct interlocking melodic units built of the rhythms of those events. “Rhythm is one of the most powerful pleasures,” says poet Mary Oliver, “and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter.” Our bodies long for this. Rhythm is one of the body’s nutrients…
Dancer Katherine Lawrence. Photo by Nathan Webster for NOWHERE
Looking for the Next Big Social Movement? Check the House Next Door.
GOOD. “There’s something powerful about inviting people with big ideas into our most intimate spaces. When we do, it’s about much more than getting people together. It’s about incubating a movement. Below, take a tour through a few notable homes that have served as community gathering spots over the last century.”
Mabel Dodge Luhan with Frieda Lawrence (middle) and Dorothy Brett (right; a British painter).
Colour Maisch: Artist Profile
15 Bytes: Utah's Art Magazine. “You have to allow the material to do what it will do,” she says. “Because you kind of can’t make it better than that. Like, allowing stuff to flow where it wants to flow, or fall where it wants to fall, or sag where it naturally wants to sag. It’s like a manmade tree versus a tree that exists in nature. You can’t…” she says, “…all of that imperfection? You can’t compete with it.”
Artist Colour Maisch in her studio. Photo by Zoe Rodriguez
Mountains & Temples 3.2
NOW-ID. Project blog for NOWHERE performance. Mountains are home to gods and they are gods. They are the mothers of gods. Mountains pierce the sky with their peaks, the outtie belly buttons of the earth. Their peaks represent enlightenment, their peaks poke holes in the universe and are the points around which the sun, moon, and stars revolve. Their summits are named after perfect meditative states. They are living entities, the incarnation of the earth spirit itself. Mountains are the home of the father of all humans as well as demi-gods, the dwelling of the wind goddess. Tombs for the dead and bestowers of fertility. Sites for sacrifice, enlightenment, and spiritual cleansing. Sacred borders to ancestral land, or center of history and cultural identity. Mountains too sacred to step upon, circumnavigated 32 times. 108 times. Summitted at dawn. Sites of revelation and repository for souls. Sacred water, sacred glaciers, sacred meadows.
Mountains of Taos. Photo by Amie Tullius
Extracting the Subject: A Profile of Josh Winegar
15 Bytes: Utah's Art Magazine. “The non-art part of the mid-life crisis work, he says, involved moving the family to Huntsville into a little log cabin built on what used to be Forest Service land… Josh, Peggy, their now 11-year-old, 8-year-old, and the family dog share the 600-square-foot cabin. The move wasn’t just about getting into the woods, he says, it was simplifying in general. “For the first year-and-a-half we were up there we didn’t have a TV,” he says. “I got rid of my Facebook. I just started purging and shedding all this stuff, and looking inward.” It strikes me that this is another kind of erasure…”
Artist Josh Winegar in front of the cabin. Photo by Emily Call
The Blankest of Blank Slates
NOW-ID. Project blog for FEAST performance. The expanse and austerity muffle meaning, absorb sound, and the stories that arise from the salt flats, the lake, quickly dissolve and slip into the distance. Without cultural ephemera to record its passing, time moves in larger increments than it does in the city. Here ephemera is a glacial imprint, the impression of an ancient body in a rock, a shoreline far above. Memories are held in the land: the ghost of a sea, extinct animals swimming above us, and the filmy outlines of partially remembered people whose impressions were too soft to fossilize. Stories turn to ghosts; already there are two ghosts of the Saltair layered under the first. Children and roller coasters no longer extant slide into the vastness.
Salt Flats with dancer Charlotte Boye-Christensen. Photo by Nathan Webster
Stephen Goldsmith: The Ontolotor of Bonneville Basin
Artists of Utah publication Utah’s 15: The State’s Most Influential Artists. Nowadays Stephen Goldsmith’s creative medium is culture itself – helping culture to flow in a way that is natural and aesthetically pleasing. Not unlike the work he’s done with water. The structures he builds for culture to flow through are less tangible, but the impact is profound.
Salt Lake City from the Bonneville Shoreline. Photo by Amie Tullius
The Red Book
Catalyst Magazine. A mythless person, Carl Jung wrote, “is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.” Jung also wrote that, “I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: ‘what is the myth you are living?’ I found no answer to this question, and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust.”
A page from Carl Jung’s Red Book in Catalyst Magazine
Awaiting.
Catalyst Magazine. On Thursday April 8th in the late afternoon, over 40 people dressed in white will begin silently walking from various locations all over Salt Lake. They will head through the city streets, crowds, and rush hour traffic to Capitol Hill where they will gather for a moment of stillness, and then as the sun sets they will begin ascending and descending the south steps. The ritual/performance will last for 12 hours, from sunset to sunrise with walkers moving silently up and down the steps until 7 a.m., when the participants disperse back into the city.
Performance artist Ernesto Pujol looking toward the Utah State Capitol
The Deep Tracks
For a more comprehensive list of publications…