At The Kayo Gallery ...

"The artists in this month’s exhibit at the Kayo Gallery present us with some of the most common ingredients of life, all deconstructed by space, approach or gaze.

-Brian Patterson, a multi-media artist native to Salt Lake City, presents a portion of his University of Utah honors thesis, “Born Witness.” The installation examines the idolatry of suburbia, erasing the lines between the objects that children play with and the objects the mature adorn their homes with by looking at what they share in common— sex, war, the untamed beast, and the adoration of the infant. The work presents a hypothetical answer to the question,“What might we believe if we threw all of our idols together?” and what it might look like if we were to romanticize it. The installation, comprised of hundreds of found objects, wood, and approximately 125 gallons of house paint, is an exciting culmination of Patterson’s work over the past few years.

-RISD-educated Utah native Wren Ross has, of late, been interested in a kind of “seeing.” Reading a medical anthropology study on cataract operations performed at the turn of the 20th century, Ross adopts the approach of the newly sighted person, with a pure visual perception of the world unadulterated by knowledge: “seeing without knowing.” She uses the resulting, new visual language to present her viewers with a lexicon of narrative without necessarily directing the viewer to a consequence. Inspired by the “very small, the very plain and the very overlooked: bones, smooth stones, the sound of dry grass knocking in the wind, small birds in big tangles, paperclips on the sidewalk, brown butter and kale of all kinds,”—Ross’ works delight and inspire close examination of both the work and the ideas behind it.

-Raised on a farm in rural Missouri, Sandy resident and figurative artist Stephanie Toland captures the emotions and feelings connected with two aspects of being a woman in the early- to mid- Twentieth century: beauty rituals and motherhood. Symbolic references abound in her realistic paintings; wallpaper alludes to ideas of continuity, objects represent a mother’s thoughts. A narrative of commonality runs through both series presented in this show—common cultural expectations, common hopes and frustrations, common ideals and stereotypes. These windows into the most mundane, yet intrinsic, parts of a woman’s life show both the vulnerability and strength of their subjects."
~Kayo Gallery