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Show 4 Your independent student source for music, film and the arts dux Thursday, September 20,2007 ; Going out for a Gallery Stroll Artists, businesses join together for monthly Salt Lake staple Cat Palmer to showcase her revolutionary photography Christopher Wallace Adam Fifield REDUX WRITER No event on the local art scene is more significant than the Salt Lake City Gallery Stroll. For the uninitiated, the stroll is the visual arts' equivalent of a potluck dinner. On the third Friday of every month, participants move through local galleries within downtown Salt Lake City to view the various exhibits that interest them. This month 23 galleries and businesses will open their doors to the public, who can view the exhibits and galleries free of charge. The number of spectators and the amount of artwork on display make the Gallery Stroll an unparalleled opportunity for emerging local artists to gain exposure and acceptance within Salt Lake City's art community. A different gallery hosts the stroll each month. The Utah Arts Council, part of the Division of Arts and Museums within the Utah Department of Community and Culture, will present September's stroll, which will feature the work of some of Utah's strongest young artists, said Kristine Robb, president and executive director of Gallery StroU. Some of the most highly touted exhibits this month include the "A" Gallery's exhibit of new sculptures by Washington artist Brian Berman; the Rio Gallery's exhibit UT '07: "Mixed Media and Works on Paper;" and the Salt Lake Pickle Company's exhibit, "The Evolving West Side," curated by local artists Jason Wheatley and Sri Whipple. The "A" Gallery is one of Salt Lake City's premier fine art galleries and displays abstract, landscape and figurative paintings by local, regional and international artists. In addition to the Berman exhibit, the "A" Gallery will host a retrospective of the paintings of mixed-media collage painter Michael Souter beginning Sept. 28. The Rio Gallery is located in the former Rio Grande Railroad Depot next to the Gateway mall. The Rio Gallery's exhibit of the Statewide Annual Competition for local artists who work in mixed media and paper opens Sept. 21, the day of the stroll. The Pickle Company is a multidisciplinary art studio that provides opportunity, equipment, funding and exhibition, and performance space for ambitious local artists who specialize in artwork that deals with contemporary sociopolitical issues. In conjunction with the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the Pickle Co.'s exhibit in this month's gallery stroll features the work of young, up-and-coming west-side artists. But these are just a few of the compelling exhibits that will constitute this month's gallery stroll. Others include Nobrow Coffee and Tea Company, a local coffeehouse that hosts the Free Form Film Festival, which will feature new work by Spencer Barton. Home Fine Art will display new additions to their "A Walk in the Park" exhibit of paintings of local neighborhoods, including street scenes, parks and restaurants. The Salt Lake Art Center will open its doors to their ongoing exhibit "Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection." This exhibit features the work of seven contemporary painters from Leipzig, Germany, a collection of broad interpretations of social-realist figure painting, which closes Sept. 29. The first annual shoe show and benefit, "If The Shoe Fits," held by the Evergreen Framing Co. and Gallery, Inc. will feature eight local artists' interpretations of shoes. There will be a reception with live music on the evening of the gallery stroll. Partial proceeds from the event will go to The Shoe Fairy, a local non-profit that works with many schools in the Jordan, Salt Lake and Alpine school districts to provide shoes to children in need. Modern8 is a brand design agency which contains a gallery that is currently host to the work of photographer-collagist Anthony Siciliano, Academic,Mentor at Western Governors University and Adjunct Faculty Instructor at Westminster College and Salt Lake Community College, and Utah designer and collagist Mark Biddie, co-coordinator of the program in visual communication at Weber State University. The Phillips Gallery, the oldest commercial gallery in the intermountain west, will participate in Friday's stroll with two exhibits. The first, located in their main gallery, is titled "L'eau et La Femme," paintings and drawings by See STROLL Page 8 REDUX WRITER Local photographer Cat Palmer discovered that people are more likely to buy photographs with strong anti-war sentiment than prettyflowers.This encouraged her because she would rather make art that impacts and shocks than art that appeals to aesthetics. "I thought people would throw tomatoes at me," Palmer said about the first display of her politically-charged photographs at the Utah Arts Festival, "I really hesitated the day before and I brought a ton of flowers and trees photos," Palmer said, but at the end of the day nature shots were all she had left, as her political photos sold out. "That gunned me up," Palmer said, and inspired her to put together even more politically charged exhibits for the future. Palmer's current exhibit at Tin Angel Cafe (365 W. 400 South) features three sisters posed wearing gas masks with words and phrases drawn onto their skin in black marker. She chose the words from song lyrics and cultural references but also claims inspiration from her dreams. Each aspect of her photos carries a deep, personal significance. The words seem to bleed out onto the surface of the sisters' skin, representing a hidden identity—one that resists an identity prescribed by society. In a touching way, the sisters appear to be releasing little intimacies, with phrases like "I believe in me," and "I am not a Republican, I am not a Democrat, I am Human." However, they carry an apocalyptic warning, "Black Clouds," "Regression to Ignorance," which both symbolically and overtly point toward the photograph's overall message—that the innocence and beauty of youth is being corroded by war. "(The three sisters') dad had just shipped out to Iraq," said Palmer and admitted that their situation with their family in part inspired her to take on the project in the first place. Their youth and personalities touched her the most. "They reminded me of flower children, like girls who would be sticking flowers in the ends of rifles," Palmer said. The background behind the sisters' photographs gives insight into Palm- er's creative process, and also into the photographic medium. She approaches her models genuinely interested in their plight and humanity. This intimacy evokes a special relationship between the three sisters and their photographer—even though they are meticulously posed and choreographed, they don't merely represent an abstract concept or some product Their collective resemblance as sisters, their singular and piercing gaze, and a simple hand gesture, a peace sign, all convey more meaning than the words etched onto their youthful skin. The camera catches all these aspects, and with her lens, Palmer invites the Casual observer to participate in the relationship, bringing their own experiences and beliefs into the equation. For Jerry Liedtke, head chef and co-owner of Tin Angel Cafe, Palmer's paintings have drawn debate, some disgust and overall interest from un-expected people. And that, for Liedtke, is the point in transforming a restaurant space into a gallery for fine art. One time, Liedtke said, an elderly lady liked a small, anti-war photograph of a child wearing pilot goggles framed on a ragged piece of steel. She eventually bought it, saying it would go perfectly in one of her rooms. Textures and raw materials are an important recurring industrialized motif in Palmer's work as a whole, she said. The frame of the photograph always extends onto the wall and surrounding habitat. She pastes her photos on large plates of steel gathered from odd places such as recycling yards. One picture is framed with jagged piping and wire. Inside the photos themselves, Palmer places her models in unconventional settings. For example, military equipment provides the background for a portrait of a child with spiky hair, and a diverse group of women dressed in white, wearing surgical masks, line up at the salt flats. These tools of conception add up to a common theme: an appreciation for the worn, crumbling and decentralized aspects of society. As a teenager growing up in Orange County, Palmer first used her camera to try to capture the degenerates See PHOTOGRAPHY Page 8 |