Bug Wisdom: Bianca Velasquez’s Beaded Bestiary at BDAC

by genevieve vahl

Read the published version for 15 Bytes here.

On a river trip, Bianca Velasquez used the solitary quiet of the desert float as a meditation on her current show’s topic. The water bugs caught her attention and a fellow mate on the trip—unbeknownst to her at the time, a wildlife biologist specializing in bears, well-versed in fauna and insects across the spectrum—told her about their different mating patterns and quirks of the many bugs’ often brief existences on this planet. The power dynamics of the insects, Velasquez realized, were radical. The feminine power actualized in the primal nature of these queens of the pest world reminds us the patriarchy is a human construct. Or how parasitic relationships make food and home of the weak. Velasquez made these scientific phenomena humanly relevant.

In Survival Instincts, on view through June 22, six of Velasquez’s hand beaded pieces occupy the front gallery at Bountiful Davis Art Center. The Salt Lake City artist’s beading practice started six years ago when she ripped a canvas and used an old beading kit from her tween years to patch the hole. It has evolved in the current show into a refined practice of painting with gradated micro beads and gems and colored pearls, swirling and shaping the bugs and their primal dances like brushstrokes on a canvas, or a pixelated photo that comes into focus when stepping back.

In her artist statement, Velasquez notes: “These bugs and insects’ visceral processes of reproduction and evolution hit hard against human stories of love, power and control.” Her witty placards, jokes, and ironic questions relate these bugs’ existences to our own lives, we fellow fleeting beings on this planet. The horror or irony or creepy crawly nature is quelled by her feisty, gorgeous and clever presentations of the bugs.

The beadwork is stylized, almost graphically, taking the bugs out of their habitats and placing them in chromatically complementary displays that highlight the raw and at times microscopic beauty. Starting from sketches, Velasquez bead maps the composition. There is a contemporary play on traditional Indigenous bead working (Velasquez is of Honduran ancestry), using colors and the practice in and of itself to showcase traditional underappreciated craft often by women that bring an ode to the earth and her offerings, while recontextualizing the medium as figurative compositions. The beadwork makes us look closer, to learn what these bugs have to teach us.

A male black widow is half the size of a female. In courting a female, he will arrive at her web and pluck a vibratory song and dance on the silk. Making his way to second base he taps her body, and conception proceeds. Often, females will eat their males after conception, hence their name. “Guess it depends on the song he plays,” Velasquez wits.

On the contrary, Strepsiptera are insect parasites in which the winged and agile male injects the female’s body with larvae that go on to eat her from the inside out. Taking her artistic license, Velasquez gives her female Strepsiptera wings and the power to abort such a heinous mission.

Tarantula hawks are a wasp that injects its namesake arachnid with its progeny, killing the tarantula, making it home and food for the babies. The artist asks, “Can we think of others who advance themselves off of the backs of the defenseless?”

Velasquez captures the evolutionary spontaneity of these fleeting beauties with contours and iridescence and texture hard to capture in other mediums. The beads brought a tedium back to these fleeting beings we often never give the time of day under our annoyance or horror. The beadwork will make us reconsider what we think of scary or gross or annoying. These bugs were made gorgeous and glamorous, and their evolutionary prowess made wisdom for us to learn from.

This collection would make an amazing companion show to the Bug World Exhibit at the Natural History Museum — both endow grace and iridescent enchantment to insects while showcasing their intriguing, heavy-metal nature, and a sequential afternoon of insect mania would reward the curious.

Velasquez’s thoughtful subject matter, refined display, and evident adoration for these bugs remind us how beautiful creation can be, even at the small, fleeting scale of insects — creatures worth fighting for, whose evolutionary prowess is remarkable and to be cherished. It is art like hers that brings these minutiae to the surface, their intricate beauty rescued from screeches and annoyed swats. Velasquez is on a tear, with several more beadwork shows on the docket.

Where Frida Kahlo Meets Pink Floyd: Susan Kirby’s Impossible Gatherings

by genevieve vahl

Read the published version for 15 Bytes here.

Salt Lake City legend and prolific painter Susan Kirby is showing both old and new works in There Is Nothing More Shocking Than Joy, a show that crosses timelines, from ethereal dreamscapes into realities that bend the narrative of history. Rendered in what Kirby herself admits is a naive, visionary style, the paintings play with timelines and historical references to imagine new scenes where characters hang out on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, at the Spiral Jetty, in Mexico, and in the valleys of prehistoric high desert. She blends reality with fantasy, folklore and history into scenes of what if.

Kirby’s older pieces showcase large, regal self-portraits, the artist sitting with her signature silver blunt-cut bob and bangs in thrones adorned with her feline companions. The portraits are feisty, almost Cruella De Ville-esque—without the animal-killing part, just the girl-boss, intense bad-bitch energy the puppy villain embodied. Gaudy pattern clashing and an intensive use of the cheetah print, in proper early-aughts fashion, stamp these pieces as prime examples of fads of an era. Rhinestones pock her canvases while her cats sit languorously around her like royalty on her throne.

Some of Kirby’s more refined works are deeply rooted in elements of Mexicana, influenced by her time living in San Miguel de Allende, “a magic town” and World Heritage Site where cars from the ‘60s still putter down the streets and town squares are bustling with third-space vigor. The place has a historic essence that transports tourists and locals alike to another time outside of the 21st century. The architecture and traditional rural Mexican culture remain so intact, it’s impossible not to feel the magic coursing through the cobblestone streets. And that magic Kirby certainly fell under the spell of. The pieces can teeter on cultural appropriation—at what point is an artist inspired versus making a white-woman career off the visual effects of an entire culture?—but they create dreamscapes in such admiration to the culture and land of the place, rather than copping without credit, that the works remain inspired.

Frida Kahlo is a frequent character in Kirby’s cast. After experiencing a horrific bus accident that left her disabled and in immense pain for the rest of her life, Frida Kahlo painted as a respite, as a way to express her grief, her pain, to experience her body in a way she no longer physically could. Kahlo frequently painted the heart, the corazón, anatomically rendered to symbolically represent her experience. In a parallel experience, Susan Kirby had heart surgery while living in Mexico, where she too turned to her painting as a manifestation of the tango in her heart and her experience recovering and the pain endured during her own experience of recovery.

The sun and warmth and beauty of the rich Mexican heritage contrast with her more current works of the Western high desert, where she uses more blues and grays and sages. The dinosaurs of Utah’s Jurassic history create scenes of what this place used to look like before human eyes ever caught a glimpse. Bringing the fossils and ancient artifacts of this place to some form of visual reality, imagining when T.rex tromped along the shores of the lake looking for their next prey, and pterodactyls soared overhead in the wetlands. Like the Natural History Museum’s way of putting visitors in the timeline of Utah’s loaded paleontological past, Kirby gets viewers imagining what if – what if these creatures still roamed, what would our landscapes look like. She also uses iconic images of Utah’s land art, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels as backdrops and playgrounds for figures from pop culture and art history.

Kirby’s works all have a curiosity about the past, an obsession with the strangely possible. What would it look like if Pope Francis and Pink Floyd and Frida Kahlo all had dinner on the shores of the Great Salt Lake—and what kind of story would they tell once they got there?

Beeswax and Bones: Hannah Vaughn’s Structures Breathe with Memory

by genevieve vahl

Read the published version for 15Bytes here.

Reliquaries, a show by Hannah Vaughn, billowed on the air’s breath as viewers passed through the western-facing gallery at Finch Lane. The sunlight pouring in at golden hour during the Gallery Stroll opening cast shadows on the structures hanging by threads. Her pieces breathe, like I imagine Georgia O’Keefe experienced New Mexico, with a quiet stillness that rings loud in their omnipresence in the space.

Both a teacher and practitioner of architecture, Vaughn blends the precision of construction with the artistry of experimentation. Playing with structures of traditional craft items, like kayaks and fish baskets and kites, Vaughn weaves nostalgia and history into her intricately built structures.

Her childhood in the sticks with her siblings included putting sheets of metal to their backs and jumping into pits to catch air to pass the days. She weaves these memories into the architectural kite on display. It is clear she has made many a prototype, showing a precision that allows for a freedom to play in her builds.

“Momma” is a hanging basket of sorts, resembling a traditional fish basket used by Native Americans as a method of passive fishing. It had an internal structure that you would not want to fall on; wooden daggers support the steam bent wood that her boat-building friend helped her construct. The frame is wrapped in ripped pieces of Mulberry paper that have been lathered in beeswax, inspired by her bee-keeping brother—another nod to family while adding structural integrity. The Mulberry paper does not quite wrap around the entire structure, leaving a fissure, a crevasse that, with a title like “Momma,” elicits a sense of birth, of a protected sanctuary of the womb, organic and wrapped, but ready to turn violent to protect her kin. The piece is like a basket that carried the baby down the river. Or caught the fish for dinner.

Her “Clarified Body,” No. 1 and 2, include bones of a large bovine set in bricks of linen and cotton pulp almost like in metal cast. Vaughn collected the bones across her jaunts in nature—conjuring for the viewer an image of coming across the unlucky creature that got stuck in a ravine, its bones laid to rest along the creek. Vaughn has cut the bone into a cross section, showing the capillary action inside, integrating an architectural tone to natural materials. In this piece and others across the show, the artist uses natural fibers that blend the natural materials of a landscape with the humans that have used the land and its resources for their survival long before settlers arrived.

Other hanging pieces are porcelain, seemingly thrown on a clay wheel, with indents and wonk that would perhaps disqualify them from a potter’s collection. Vaughn took those pieces and in an experiment with pine resin, dunked corners of the former into the latter, coating them in the amber glaze that dripped like honey from the wand. They feel frozen in time, the carafes about to pour guests their libation for the evening, bent slightly forward, the spout ready to pour the imaginary liquid into a stoneware mug.

In “Imprint Study,” sheets of porcelain hang in a cascade of rhythmic staccato. Like sheets of paper flying on the wind or music notes dancing across a page, there is a musicality to this piece, even in its silence. The mini loose leafs are pressed into a body, leaving relief contours of ambiguous sinuousity. Ripples like cloth turn this hard material soft and gentle, caressing and warm. The shadows produced from the western facing windows create a fluttering effect, the staccato, a dance of light and darkness—shape and form beyond the physical piece of work Vaughn produced, leaving the spontaneity of the moment a freedom to express itself.

Even Vaughn’s ink studies on Mylar sheet bring a sense of airiness and movement through her two dimensional work. Layers like those seen in Utah’s canyon country—the land’s history written in cross section—stack textures and patterns atop one another in a terrain of compaction and erosion. Feathers create a layer of levity among the denser, more topographical marks, tracing contours of motion like a black-and-white film still.

There is no “slightly off” in architecture. Not without risking the integrity of structures, the foundation that can be brought to rubble by a single miscalculation. Hannah Vaughn demonstrates that precision of craft, then carries it into materials and structures with perhaps less at stake, where play and personal history are free to surface. Her pieces are as sound as any prototype, adding a sense of quiet nostalgia to the industrious tact of the show. You can hear the croaks along the riverbank beside the canoe, the whoosh of air lifting the kite. The feathers settle. The bones rest in remembrance of lives lived.

Exhibition Reviews: Voices & Votes at Utah Cultural Celebration Center

A traveling exhibition combines with local stories to celebrate the ongoing demands of democracy

by genevieve vahl

Read the published version for Salt Lake City Weekly here.

Democracy can be an abstract concept, but every town, city or village has its own story within the national context of American democracy. West Valley City, for example, only 46 years ago demonstrated its own act of local democracy after a back-and-forth battle to get the city officially incorporated. In February 1980, by a mere 72 vote margin, West Valley City was born—now Utah’s second largest city, and its only minority-majority municipality.

That story is just one example of the power in civic engagement, and how we can all work to bring our dreams for our communities to life. On March 28, the Smithsonian Institute and Utah Humanities opened the Voices & Votes: Democracy in America exhibit as a part of their Museum on Main Street traveling program at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center, in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the United States. Unique local companion exhibits are presented alongside Voices & Votes to “provide a catalyst for host communities to collect, celebrate, and showcase their unique local history and traditions as part of the national exhibition theme,” said Deena Pyle, communications director for Utah Humanities. “Each host site creates at least one local exhibition in connection with the Smithsonian tour that is aligned with their community history. The local exhibitions often remain part of the host site long after the Smithsonian tour has finished.”

West Valley’s own iteration, 72 Voices | 72 Votes, told the story of West Valley City’s genesis, through art, ephemera and text boards in an example that makes politics more tangible, more approachable and more relatable for the host community through its own stories. Although the local exhibit is small, the community action involved in West Valley City’s incorporation offers a modern, local example of the power in civic engagement.

“This exhibition is especially meaningful for our diverse West Valley City, because it invites every resident to see themselves in the ongoing story of American democracy. As Utah’s second-largest city, built through determination and civic participation, we understand the power of showing up and being heard,” said Michael Christensen, Division of Arts & Culture Visual & Performing Arts Manager at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center in an email interview. “We are proud to launch Utah’s tour of Voices & Votes, which allows us to reflect on how local voices shape local history, and how our community’s story connects to our broader national history.”

The second local companion exhibit displays trophy cases of political buttons. At the opening event on March 28, a dad explained to his pre-teen sons, “Before there was TikTok, before there was Instagram, people wore buttons to show what candidate they supported.” The collection came from former West Valley City Mayor Mike Winder, who has been collecting the buttons since high school. Some start as early 1896 with Theodore Roosevelt and chronologically move into more contemporary Kamala Harris and Donald Trump buttons, with everything in between in all shapes, sizes and ironies. In the opening speeches, Christensen thanked the individuals who had the foresight to keep these ephemera that they knew would mean something one day.

Voices & Votes reads as a very idealized presentation of the capitalism-driven democracy we have hobbled our way through since the first Europeans took that “great leap of faith” in starting a new government. From the first spark of resistance to monarchy, through the process of declaring independence and amending that document as the democracy has shifted over time, the exhibit takes viewers through an evolutionary timeline of our national democracy.

“Over the two and a half centuries since 1776, our democracy has continued to evolve beyond the experiences and predictions of its framers,” Pyle remarked. “One thing has been constant—the inherent tension caused by the push and pull, vision and revision that democracy requires as Americans continue to debate how to shape our country.”

America was founded on the idea of resisting monarchy and aristocracy through collective action. “If they could unite with one another,” reads one of the text boards, “‘the common people,’ of the colonies might form a more equal society and government. From boycotts, to a declaration of independence, to armed resistance, the people made their voices heard.” The sentiment, in the current political climate, warrants consideration when it is again necessary to resist tyranny.

“This exhibition reminds us that democracy demands participation as Americans continue to question how to shape our country. Civic engagement is not a passive experience. It requires participation not only in voting, but in using our voices in effective ways,” said Pyle.

“This exhibition reminds us that democracy demands participation as Americans continue to question how to shape our country. Civic engagement is not a passive experience. It requires participation not only in voting, but in using our voices in effective ways,” said Pyle.

“Each generation faces new challenges and opportunities, and we re-shape our country when we each use our voices at the ballot box, in meeting houses, and everywhere decisions are made that affect our communities,” Pyle said. “How will you use your voice?”

Voices & Votes: Democracy in America
Utah Cultural Celebration Center
1355 W. 3100 South, West Valley City
March 28 – May 31
Free during operating hours

Flour to the People! The business and science behind one bakery’s breads

by genevieve vahl

Read the published version for City Journals here.

One could call it listening to your gut. And that’s what Todd Bradley did when his gut was not happy, when it became upset after gluten and dairy entered his system. So Bradley gave up some of his favorite foods.

And one of those foods was bread. He really missed bread. Luckily, while working at Hell’s Backbone Grill in Boulder, Utah, his coworker enlightened him to the wonders of sourdough.

“And I was hooked,” he said.

He says 100% sourdough with a 20-hour ferment activates naturally occurring enzymes in the wheat that break it down, becoming digestible for the more sensitive or intolerant of stomachs.

“So when you give enzymes time to break things down, they break down proteins and they break down starches. When you add water to wheat and you give it time, it’s going to make it more digestible,” Bradley said.

Along his baker career path, Bradley took over Bread Riot Bakehouse in Salt Lake City, their tagline being “biohacking biology for deliciousness.”

Bradley rebranded Bread Riot to Leavity Bread & Coffee, a witty mashup of the bread word “leavened” with the light and humorous “levity.” The bakery and cafe sits in a strip mall on Main Street and 1000 South, making upward of 300 loaves a day, with 30 contracts mostly around Salt Lake City, including Caputo’s and the Rose Establishment, as well as selling at the farmers market year round every Saturday.

“It’s so easy to get people to come together over bread. Breaking bread with people lightens the mood, it speaks to everyone, bread is comforting,” Bradley said.

As much as it’s about the process of fermentation and food science, Bradley stresses the importance of how the wheat is grown and processed, which plays a big role in how it reacts in our bodies. 

“From the field, to the silo, to how it’s processed in this facility, countless things will affect the product,” Bradley said. “I think organic matters a lot of the time, but I think it’s mandatory for flour.” 

“Some of those reasons include protections for the soil, they have to have a crop rotation plan, they can’t just keep pumping the soil full of inorganic fertilizers…so it’s a huge part of sustainability,” he said.

Otherwise, conventional mono-commodity crops like wheat and oats go through a process called pre-crop desiccation, using glyphosate formerly known as Roundup, as a way to expedite the natural processes of a crop slowly dying and drying in the field.

Although the glyphosate pre-crop desiccation process offers farmers some economic benefits and securities, it leaves the crops in storage covered in glyphosate. Numerous lawsuits against the maker of Roundup, Monsanto (now owned by Bayer AG), contend that glyphosate causes cancer.

“For us, the flour in the bread has to be organic and then we focus more on whole grain. We use white flour as our base and then everything gets some combination of high extraction flours,” Bradley explained. “If you think of flour as a spectrum, there is type 50, type 70, up to 110.”

Focusing on the higher numbers, “we do this for flavor, for nutrition, so we can use more of the whole wheat.” Whereas white bread, for example, is stripped of all nutritional value down to a basic starch, instead of using flour’s rich depths of germ, proteins and oils.

Bradley prioritizes sourcing from local mills.

“Central Milling is a great company that’s based in Utah, they’ve been around for about 60 years. We also use a small mill called Hillside out of Idaho,” Bradley said. “We don’t need to be using flour coming from anywhere else in the world. There is a lot of great wheat grown here and a lot of great organic wheat.”

Leavity is also getting a small mill of their own. “I want to mill more whole grain, to do the things we love to do, to learn how to be bakers in different ways. Introducing new styles of bread that keeps us curious and like we’re growing.” He encourages bakers to test new recipes. “I want to continue to make our bread better and better,” he said.

Although not all of Leavity’s products are organic, like fruits and nuts, they are working on that transition while balancing costs and ethics and mainly focusing on local. The cafe serves Kings Peak Coffee. Ritual Chocolate is on the shelves. Beehive Cheese and Mountain Born Creamery butter from Ogden are in the fridge. Snuck Farms greens from Lehi are on sandwiches. The sodas are Taproot, another Utah company.

Although not all of Leavity’s products are organic, like fruits and nuts, they are working on that transition while balancing costs and ethics and mainly focusing on local. The cafe serves Kings Peak Coffee. Ritual Chocolate is on the shelves. Beehive Cheese and Mountain Born Creamery butter from Ogden are in the fridge. Snuck Farms greens from Lehi are on sandwiches. The sodas are Taproot, another Utah company.

“Can we do some local, organically grown food subsidies so it’s more approachable and affordable for all?” Bradley asked. Instead, he said, of subsidizing corn and oil that are harming the environment and the health of our communities on the government’s dollar.

If his ethos wasn’t notable enough, cafes to Bradley offer the final cherry on top as places to gather and connect, where you see the same neighbors several days a week. “There is something so wholesome about that,” he said. Bradley wants to use the space to bring community centered, earth-first mentality into the business ecosystem.

“How can this be an act of doing things in a way that is good for the environment, for the people. How can we support things that people are doing with our space,” Bradley said. “If it helps people come together, we’ll send bread. That’s what our coffee shop is about.”

A guided cupping experience at Leavity (1000 S. Main St., Suite 101) with Ceremony Coffee Roasters will be held April 11; spots are limited. Sign up online here. On the last Wednesday of every month is Art Cafe, open late to create, 5-8 p.m., bring your own craft to co-work.

Between Tension and Stillness at Phillips Gallery

by genevieve vahl

Read the published version for 15 Bytes here.

Josanne Glass and Paul Vincent Bernard’s works are nestled among each other on the walls of Phillips Gallery this month, bringing out their best qualities through contrast. Bernard’s anxious, restless line moves between attentive examinations of the landscape and, at times, darker glimpses of a world under strain, while Glass’ work returns us to the quiet rhythms of the natural world. Barbed wire and eerie, mysterious doors in the dark are set against the simple calm Glass captures in the aspen forests of Utah.

Bernard uses drypoint on aluminum to etch in his scratchy gestures, which are perfectly imperfect—wobbly but intentional, erratic but stylized—with paint filling in the etching marks to create color play and highlights. Many of his works read as straightforward examinations of the landscape, built up through dense, repetitive marks that map barren hillsides, fields, and ridgelines with a patient, almost meditative attention. A piece titled “Fallow Field” speaks to my agricultural background—peaceful and pastoral, quiet and plain. But elsewhere, that same language shifts register: the shadowy silhouette of industrial sites in “Södermalm” elicits those extractors keeping their sinister ways secret and in the background, behind closed doors, nothing to see here. It is in these moments that the work takes on a more charged edge, holding such presences in view as an art of accountability.

Glass’ paintings have a print quality to them even though they are acrylic on paper, with a paint-roller effect to the textures and the precision that stenciling gives. It is as if she uses tape to mark off the precisely sharp, abstracted aspen forests. Her simple compositions allow the viewer to experience her fascination with the aspen groves, seeing the repetitive undulation of their subterranean connection in her interpretations of the understory—trunks repeating, patterns emerging, a solace found in their connection.

Her strongest paintings are a pair titled “At Day Break” and “At Sunset.” The former is a more rigid collection of precisely diagonal stripes, with layers delineated and sharp, like the start to a new day after a cup of coffee. The latter hums like a sunset, those same layers blurred into a gradient at the end of the day. The weight of the day has softened the rigidity of those once perky lines and melted them down into a blur of relaxation.

Like the stacked stone cairns guiding travelers on their journeys in the backcountry of Utah, Josanne’s soft sculptures—a new expansion of her practice—wrap around the gallery, leading viewers through Bernard’s darker passages and back toward the forests and horizons of her paintings. Merino wool, Māori wool, and silk sari coalesce into directional pieces, their strand structures recalling the testing of staple length for spinning, creating blends that appear both soft and deliberate. The strongest of these wool pieces are suspended from the purple ceiling and orange beam, their gentle sway responding to the movement of passersby, like a soft aspen breeze in the fall. Thin, skipping-stone-like wool forms hang on nearly invisible wires, sandwiched between wood beads, introducing an ethereal element—a levity, a breath of fresh air among the darker tones.

Jenna von Benedikt Finds Time to Paint – and the Sacred – in the Natural World

by genevieve vahl

Read the published version for 15 Bytes here.

For years, Jenna von Benedikt painted wherever she could find room—on the kitchen counter, at the table, between preparing lunch and dinner as four young children raced through the house at the speed of light. She carved out creative time in fragments. “Was it an hour? Was it 20 minutes?” von Benedikt recalls of those early makeshift studios. “I knew I wanted to do art, but I also knew I wanted to have a family and I felt like the two blended really well. Sometimes people do creative stuff when they have young kids, sometimes it doesn’t happen. But I felt like I always needed to pursue it.”

Raised outside of London, von Benedikt moved with her family to the States when she was 16, landing in Utah where they had good friends from their LDS Church community. She graduated with a BFA from Brigham Young University. She studied abroad in Italy, which left a mark on her practice, from painting en plein air every day to learning printmaking techniques with layering and colors. “The whole artistic atmosphere and the fact that we were seeing so much, both modern and ancient, you really started to see how color and textures and all these beautiful techniques blended together and you could put modern elements in with something very old,” she says. “Art wasn’t a separate element, it was a part of daily life. I don’t think I had ever been so overdosed on museums.”

In Los Angeles, where she and her husband moved after she graduated, she continued to dose herself with museums. “I didn’t have a ton of room to create, so I would constantly go to the Getty Museum and art shows to tap into that connection with the art world,” von Benedikt says.

But it wasn’t until the family moved to Peoria, Illinois that the idea of pursuing art as a full-time career began to take shape. After entering an art guild show there—and doing well—von Benedikt felt newly energized to return to painting. “That was really a spark for me to start creating again,” she says. By that point she had three children under the age of ten, and had to make art wherever she could.

When the family moved back to the West to be closer to family and the outdoors, they settled up a canyon in Idaho. They built a specific space off the garage for her studio. “Because I have this separate space now, it’s much easier to make things. To just let things be. I paint while my kids are gone at school. I have a lot more time during the day now to focus on longer painting periods. But my time is with my kids when they come home.”

Von Benedikt paints on panels rather than canvas. Lying flat rather than upright, the panels give her a level of control she prefers to working on canvas at an easel. “I can move paint around with different tools to get different texturing and things appearing that I didn’t necessarily do,” von Benedikt says. “I love planks of wood. I love scrapers. I love big, industrial painting tools or metal rollers.”

“Rembrandt’s work was always about texture to me, not just coloring,” she says of one of her inspirations. “The texturing and the glazing, there’s something magical for me in that. It is very ethereal. Mystical. So although my work is typically very flat, even though I use lots of layers, there’s something about bringing something underneath that shows the magic of paint itself.”

It’s what the tools bring to the fore, what the blending of paints and the layering and texturing reveals in her play on panel that directs her next stroke. Using multiple layers in her backgrounds and organic abstraction, von Benedikt harnesses the spontaneity to create atmospheres to place her subjects amongst.

“The abstract side of my paintings where the fun is for me because there’s color, there’s textures, you get to wipe away some things, you get to keep some other things that you think are really neat. It’s a game of hide-and-seek, pulling and taking away and covering up. That’s really the fun bit for me is creating these atmospheres but then I put a subject in or an ornament. And the backgrounds determine that.”

For going on a decade now, with hundreds of paintings in the series, von Benedikt established her #SaintedSeries, using her faith as a guide and her reflections of those teachings to inspire her subject matter. “I believe there’s something higher, something holier in what I’m painting. Something spiritual and very faith-based about why I wanted to start creating this work,” she says. “It’s a way to honor and praise different parts of creation.”

Drawing on an interpretation of her name as meaning “little bird,” von Benedikt began the #SaintedBirds series. The hummingbirds function as a mechanism of self-reflection and portraiture that viewers can resonate with too. “It was a way to ask myself what kind of saint am I? What am I doing to be a good influence or to reflect something beautiful in the world,” she says. “The hummingbird’s spiritual connections and moments of magic in the outdoors make them feel like we’re really part of something amazing here. We should be doing good things, but it doesn’t have to be big. These little pollinators do the most amazing work for creation.”

Regardless of one’s own faith background, the #SaintedBirds have struck a chord with many viewers, offering a visual solace to heartache and grief of lost loved ones. “I cannot tell you how many stories I hear saying, Oh, my mother, my grandmother, my son—whoever it was—that passed away, I saw a hummingbird and I felt like it was them and your painting reminds me that they’re still with me,” she says. “Unless you believe that kind of thing, it sounds a little quirky, but to people who believe there is a connection with nature and the spirit and another life, these paintings touch people, and I don’t know that when I’m making them.”

Yet, von Benedikt can recognize that not everyone resonates with the soft, gentle nature of hummingbirds. Someone like her husband, a rugged outdoor writer, resonates more with the big game of the West, further inspiring her adjunct series, #SaintedBeasts. Creatures like bison and foxes and horses become the modes of honoring. “They’re so iconic to America, especially the bison and the history behind them, so my paintings are a way to turn them into something more sacred and precious to the history and the culture of the US,” she says. “The entire #SaintedSeries was there to honour the creator and this amazing world that we live in because no matter where we go, no matter where we’ve been, we’ve found it’s been amazing.”

Jenna has elaborated on the literal and symbolic nature of light and dark, whether naturally occurring in day and night or the lightness and darkness that ebbs and flows through our inner peace. The colors she uses and the atmospheres she creates emanate a sanctuary, a peace, a quiet that feels indelible to the natural world. “I believe that places you go and the colors you see and what you’re surrounded with absolutely influences the mood you portray,” she says. “I think there’s just as much good about the abstract, raw side of nature and the dark colors, as well as the bright and bubbly side, that I get to paint in that too.”

The “JvB Classic,” as she calls her signature style, has evolved over time but remains rooted in her favorite combinations of metallics, light blues and creams alongside dark teal blues and whites that evoke a sense of light and darkness. What once relied on a brighter palette has shifted toward more muted, earth-toned colors that she now hand-mixes, while her backgrounds have grown more organic than their earlier geometric foundations. Beyond these stylistic shifts, von Benedikt has begun blending elements of the #Birds and #Beasts series and exploring the possibility of incorporating human figures into the work. “Combining the different series makes it a bit more of a playful interaction,” she says. “The creation story evolves into people in the end. So I think it’s a natural direction to go. I don’t think I’ll ever be a true landscape artist nor a true figurative artist. I enjoy the experimentation and the abstract.”

Now there’s rarely a day when von Benedikt is not in the studio, planning, experimenting, or painting. “Whereas before I worked on maybe one or two paintings here and there and took long breaks without worrying about it,” she says. “Now I’m at the point where if I’m not painting, it almost feels wrong.”

The newest works in the #SaintedSeries—alongside earlier pieces—are currently on view at Meyer Gallery in Park City. Von Benedikt is also represented at galleries across the West, including Santa Fe, Scottsdale, Edmonds, Washington, and Jackson Hole.

For von Benedikt, though, the act of making the work remains its own reward. “The pure creating part to me doesn’t feel like work,” she says. “It’s exciting, it’s fun. And I think if you go into it feeling that rather than, I have to do this, it reflects in the work.”

“The whole series is about the blessing of the world,” she adds. “And that’s exactly what this whole painting business is about: to bring you joy and light and make you feel good.”

Denise Kaafi Honors Pacific Island Traditions at the Chase Home Museum

by genevieve vahl

Read the published version for 15Bytes here.

The coos of the birds from their nests at the Tracy Aviary echo into the warmly lit entry gallery at Chase Home Museum of Utah Folk Arts, now showing Denise Kaafi’s Polynesian fashion garments flaunted with feathers and shells, fusing modern visions with her traditional roots. The ‘Ilisapesi Collection pays tribute to the artist’s grandmother, Elizabeth, otherwise known as ‘Ilisapesi in Tongan, for inspiring the artist’s own journey in fashion design starting when she was a young girl.

Born in New Zealand and raised in Tonga, the artist roots her work in her traditional Māori and Tongan ancestry, using traditional materials and methods to create one-of-a-kind gowns, costumes, and and traditional garments. When she was young, Kaafi performed in traditional garments designed by her grandmother and by the age of 14, she had started designing her own pieces, learning the ways of her grandmother and the skills passed down through her family. The garments at the Chase Home Museum embody her culture through fashion and materials, using elements unique to the Pacific Islands like feathers, shells, tapa cloth and specialized inks.

The feathers used display a brightness comparable to a peacock, yet spanning the color wheel beyond the ceruleans and iridescent emeralds. Fucshia, cochineal red, taxicab yellow and earth tones of browns, oranges and creams are arranged by Kaafi’s discerning eye for color coordination, both monochromatically and complementary. As seen in Kaafi’s garments, traditional Tongan clothing is often made with plants woven into sashes or mats, resembling a less flexible burlap, making up the bodies of some garments. Folded into pleats or wrapped with fraying ends, the material surely elicits the tropical nature of her home, the ocean wind blowing, the rainforests and all their fibers and creatures. Shells that would be found from the beaches pock the collars, laid amongst the feathers like amulets. The feather collars lay across the contours of collarbones, the heart of the piece sitting at the sternum holding a sense of power in its majesty.

Tapa cloth is a traditional Pacific Island fabric made from thin sheets of bark typically from mulberry and fig trees. The bark is softened through soaking and beating, becoming soft yet still sturdy enough to be used for common household items like floor mats and clothing, as well as used for special events like weddings or funerals. Hanging in the gallery is a large scroll, like a  projector screen but instead of a white sheet, it is an earthy scroll of fibrous paper with traditional designs painted on in a hue and effect not dissimilar to Native American painted pictographs we see here on the vermilion walls of Southern Utah. It was a subtle overlap of indigenous people’s record-keeping and tradition across geographies and cultures.

Among the most regal and intricate of the garments in the collection is Kaafi’s “Traditional Special Occasion Attire,” created this year, using tapa cloth, feathers and shells. The tapa cloth is sewn to form a low-cut mermaid dress, while a second whiter sheet is used as a cape shawl to wrap around her majesty’s shoulders, reaching merely to the length of the mermaid’s flare just below the knee. Iridescent oranges and brown feathers like those of pheasants are arranged in circular plumes, lying like roof tiles over one another around the collar of the shawl. The main body has an even pattern of feather clusters across the back, with more feathers lacing the trim to bring it all together in an ornate outfit for a celebration of deep honor. To top it off, quite literally, the headpiece towers two feet above in a tri-prong piece of regal feathery that requires nothing less of our full attention. This set has a natural beauty in its earth tones that coalesces its materials and inspirations into Kaafi’s most sophisticated example of her craft.

The garments would benefit from being pulled away from the walls—at the very least the Special Occasion outfit—so viewers could circle the garment in its entirety. The details that span the outfit, from front to back and side to side, cannot be fully appreciated when craning around the mannequin before your head meets the wall. Still, Kaafi’s aim is clear: to inspire in others the same confidence and beauty her grandmother inspired in her. The sound of neighboring birds drifts through the gallery in this show, now on view through May 9.

Organic Farming Summit + recapping the Utah Farm & Food Conference in Cedar City

A link to a recap post I wrote for Utah Food Coalition on the Utah Farm & Food Conference back in January hosted by Red Acre Center in Cedar City.

https://open.substack.com/pub/utahfoodcoalition/p/organic-farming-summit-recapping?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Elodie Blanchard’s Textile Play Turns Scraps Into Wonder

Read the published version for 15Bytes here.

By genevieve vahl

Walking into the airy Julie Nester Gallery in Park City right now, you’ll encounter a scene of monochromatic calm assembled from a frenzy of material play. In Mending Joy, Elodie Blanchard transforms scraps of fabric and clothing into layered tapestries, freestanding textile urns, and basketball-player-tall stuffed trees that invite viewers into a whimsical landscape of wonky trunks and purple portals. She collects material scraps and clothing to guide her process, building each piece like an artist builds a palette, the synergy between the scraps guiding the end form.

Born in Grenoble, France in 1976, Blanchard was designing clothes and putting on fashion shows in her teens before moving to Paris to study sculpture at l’École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, fashion at l’École Duperré, and eventually performance at CalArts. She now lives in Brooklyn, teaching at Parson’s School of Design and shows her work across the country and abroad. Blanchard had early fashion success, selling her eponymous clothing line at La Redoute in France. She went on to establish her own design studio in 2005 specializing in textile design and fabrication, from anything like large-scale custom draperies to site-specific installations, soft furniture and home accessories. Blanchard has even collaborated with architects to bring textiles beyond our bodies and windows to our built environments.

Blanchard’s personal practice grows directly from these professional pursuits. The scraps left behind in textile production become the raw material for her ethereal, Dr. Seuss–like sweater forests, frenetic tapestries, and regal urns. Using her technical mastery as a starting point for play, she sketches with thread and paints with fabric that might otherwise end up in a landfill, giving discarded materials a new epilogue. In this way, Blanchard constructs what she calls “an alternative universe of all the stuff not needed in our society of overconsumption.”

Each of Blanchard’s trees is distinct yet connected to the others. Constructed from Poly-fil, metal rods, concrete, and fabric sourced from her own and her partner’s closets, they stand like a small community of characters. Each tree bears the name of someone special in the artist’s life—Louise, Rio, Rox—its layered textiles embodying individuality while remaining rooted in the collective presence of the forest.

The surrounding tapestries create windows into different scenes to peer into from the safety of our enchanted forest. “Black Silver Sun” feels like an agrarian scene. Emerging from black night, the sun rises over the green-striped pastures—an intentional moment of straight lines—and reflects off dew particles making for an iridescent sunray to open the day. “Purple Portal” lures us into the velveteen abyss with its cheetah glimpses and shiny pink collar. “Lavender Lake” again uses the calming repetition of a quilt stitch around the lavender palette to set a tranquil tone on the shores of a flat-plane lagoon, the droplets rippling outward in fleeting procession.

Several works incorporate crinkled metallic fabric whose iridescent surfaces are traced with neon thread that vibrates against the monochrome palette. “Red Play” pairs the metallic material with a Betty Boop red of an almost cochineal intensity, while neon pink stitching winds through the folds like seams running through a canyon. Her stitches vary in the piece: a grid stitch secures a patch of suede, while a piece of lace is attached with a back-and-forth motion reminiscent of mending worn work pants.

As the name of the show would suggest, Blanchard uses mending techniques of backing and attaching and close striations of stitches to bring a structural integrity to the pieces. She uses both machine sewing and hand sewing. The former creates the frenetic energy of sketching lines and attaching things securely while the latter brings humanity and craft into the practice. The urns, constructed in panels and stitched together by hand, accumulate so many layers of fabric and thread that they stand upright on their own. Blanchard’s access to industrial-grade supplies allows for niche materials to appear in her work—like the thick metallic silver cord she hand stitches to close the seams of “Urn 19 Blue.” The stitching is painterly, creating swirling movement reminiscent of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, as navy threads gather into swirls and bubbles like the wind wrapping through a night sky.

These pieces rarely lie flat. Blanchard intentionally sews in gaps, bumps, and stuffed sections—choices that might be considered faux pas in the trade—to create topographical tapestries that ripple across the “landscape” in a work like “White Topography.” Elsewhere, her “bouquet” compositions resemble arrangements of tropical flora from a Costa Rican jungle, their feathery forms suggesting the tail plumes of macaws hanging from branches.

Blanchard’s practice shifts attention away from the authority of retail art supplies and back toward the imagination. Realizing an afterlife for materials, Mending Joy is a testament to the power of play. Blanchard does not let her deep professional experience in textile design stymy her sense of play as she fabricates an enchanted, immersive universe for the viewer.

Mending Joy, Julie Nester Gallery, Park City, March 20