Exhibition Announcement!
Carper Contemporary presents:
featuring…
Amanda Lee
Anna Laurie Mackay
Elise Wehle
Lydia Gravis
Ya’el Pedroza
Exhibition Opening: August 7th, 5-8pm (face masks required)
Location: The Argo House, 529 25th Street, Ogden UT
Show Dates: August 7 - October 31
Hours: Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm weekends/evenings by appointment, please call 540-290-4930 or email kelly@carpercontemporary.com to schedule a showing.
This August, Carper Contemporary presents Paper Projects, a group exhibition featuring five artists who each use the intimate material of paper as their primary medium. Exhibited artwork reflects the scope of this material through distinct female voices from Utah’s contemporary art scene including Amanda Lee, Anna Laurie Mackay, Elise Wehle, Lydia Gravis and Ya’el Pedroza. Exhibiting artists hail from Ogden, Logan, Orem, and Salt Lake City. Paper Projects opens with an artist reception on August 7th from 5-8pm at The Argo House, held in conjunction with Ogden’s First Friday Art Stroll. All CDC guidelines and regulations will be followed for the opening event and face masks are required.
Seemingly fragile or impermanent, works on paper are often undervalued in the art world or overlooked by collectors, who give more clout to canvas and oil paint than paper and pencil. But this genre has become an art mode of its own, going beyond studies and studio experiments to encompass a variety of methods including painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, printmaking and beyond. The intimate and immediate practice of working with paper cultivates freedom and innovation, as the artist may feel more allowances to experiment with this moldable material. Paper processes can also tend toward the meticulous, evidenced in Paper Projects by Elise Wehle and Anna Laurie Mackay’s hand cut compositions, or Lydia Gravis’ complex abstraction. Amanda Lee introduces the processes of screen-printing and lithography, while Ya’el Pedroza incorporates airbrush, acrylic paint and plastic in pieces that deal with the interplay of humans and nature. Linking the artists’ work is the collective desire to present ephemeral moments, liminal spaces and felt experience through physical processes that are often meditative or repetitious. The all-female roster also speaks to the evolution of women in the art world, who, similarly to the presented medium, were long undervalued or overlooked in mainstream gallery and museum scenes and who are finally taking their place in the public eye through solo exhibitions or female-focused shows.
Amanda Lee
Amanda Lee is a multi-media artist and a poetic printmaking activist who is fascinated with the possibilities that exist in the space that fills a pause, the thing in between, be it emotional or physical, the space that many of us overlook on our way there from here. Originally from Seattle, Lee received an MFA in printmaking from Indiana University in Bloomington and spent a decade in art education at Penland School of Crafts and Pilchuck Glass School. Lee is currently assistant professor and area head of printmaking for Utah State University in Logan.
“The moments, spaces and objects I depict are a collection of my own intuitive knowledge: moments of play, service, reverence of nature, nurturing etc. They are a collection of the ephemeral made repeatable and durable through pictorial multiplicity, repetition of form, image, and looping. I have assimilated mechanical reproduction and digital media not as industrialization but an intuitive mediated mark.”
Anna Laurie Mackay
Anna Laurie Mackay was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she currently works as a mixed media artist. She graduated with a BFA in printmaking from Brigham Young University, and received her MFA in printmaking from The Ohio State University. She is a proponent of creating opportunities for women within the arts and has served on the Board for Artist: Interrupted, A Women’s Art Collective, and has organized and curated multiple shows for women artists.
“I am interested in perceptions of place, memories of place, as well as the reality of place. My work involves very slow and very deliberate marks and movements. Making these marks becomes a ritual. The marks, cuts, folds, weavings and sewing allow my hands to come to know, understand, or remember a place. My hands have a memory. It is through making these works that I come to understand how I exist, how I dwell, and how I inhabit space.”
Elise Wehle
Elise Wehle’s intensive paper cutting process allows her to manipulate portraits and landscapes into new creations inspired by a variety of sources including cathedrals, illuminated manuscripts and patterns of all shapes and sizes. The unifying thread that runs through all her work is the interference of the image by geometric design. Originally from California, Wehle studied art at Brigham Young University and has spent time in southern Europe living in Andalucía, Spain, which inspired her artistic direction towards the intricacy of design. She now exhibits her work nationally and internationally, most notably at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design. She is currently based in Orem, Utah.
“My artwork revolves around the time-intensive act of cutting intricate patterns using a utility knife. As I cut out each shape and line by hand, my creative process transforms into a meditative act as my hands perform the repetitive motions…I’m fascinated by the concepts of revelation, visions, and how spiritual experiences intersect with our physical environment...Despite the patterns’ clearly defined edges, they are comprised of negative space and ultimately invisible, like the experiences they represent.”
Lydia Gravis
Lydia Gravis uses physical mark-making as an empathic response to the intangible human experiences of everyday life. Currently based in Ogden, Utah, she earned her B.A. in painting and drawing from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina and her MFA in visual art from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. She has worked as Gallery Director of the Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery within the Department of Visual Art and Design at Weber State University since 2014.
“The art I make often stems from a deep, empathic desire to respond to situations that I, or others, feel, but don’t necessarily understand; situations that may seem senseless, or tragic, but that connect us to our collective experience of being human. I’m fascinated by psychological spaces of human experience that aren’t easily defined, but that are undoubtedly felt.”
Ya'el Pedroza
Ya'el Pedroza is an artist and adjunct professor at Weber State University in Ogden. She received her M.F.A. at California State University at Long Beach, and B.F.A. at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village, Nevada. Her art has been exhibited nationally in California, New York, Florida, Washington, Nevada, Oregon, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and internationally in Italy, and Denmark at the Roennebaeksholm Arts and Culture Center. She recently had a solo exhibition at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City.
"Although my work often time deals with the interplay of humans and nature, and what may occur as a response, in my most recent works I have been transitioning into exploring my relationship with nature in a more spiritual, emotional, and subconscious way. It has always been the beauty, strength, and complexities of nature that have drawn me to it as a major theme in my work. I find myself conveying nature not as the victim of human interaction but as a capable and prevailing entity."