Modern West’s mission is to offer a variety of artistic perspectives, which in varied and compelling ways help create thoughtful dialogue and reframe our understanding of the West. We are excited to announce The Modern West, a show highlighting artists whose practice embodies our mission. Each of these artists, all currently residing or having lived in Utah, create works that speak to their identity and have influenced the next generation of creatives.
This exhibition features works by Fidalis Buehler, Rebecca Campbell, Angela Ellsworth, Moana Palelei Iose, Jiyoun Lee-Lodge, Mitch Mantle, Kim Martinez, Antra Sinha, Eugene Tapahe and Xi Zhang, and will be on display from July 21 to September 30, 2023.
Our upstairs gallery will emphasize the works of Fidalis Buehler, an artist who has epitomized the spirit of The Modern West through exhibiting his work, teaching, and connecting artists and their communities. Buehler’s personal process of working in a variety of mediums has been integrated into his pedagogy, challenging his students to discover new methods of expression. In honor of Buehler’s influence, we will be featuring a selection of prints by his MFA students alongside his own work.
Fidalis Buehler is an artist living in Utah. His work is a blend of both Euro-American and Pacific Island cultures and manifests identity through personal narratives of fear, anxiety, mythology, dreams, revelations, magic, mysticism and ritual. Buehler is a professor of painting and drawing at Brigham Young University in Provo.
Rebecca Campbell was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and is now based in Los Angeles. The youngest of seven children, Campbell was raised in a traditional Mormon family. Her works cross the blurred boundary between memory and imagination, focusing on the comparison of perspectives in personal and familial experiences. Campbell is an assistant professor of drawing and painting at California State University, Fullerton.
Angela Ellsworth grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and now resides in both Arizona and New Mexico. She is a multidisciplinary artist traversing disciplines of drawing, sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Her work embraces identity through a wide-range of subjects including illness, physical fitness, endurance, Mormon tradition and social ritual. She is a professor of art at Arizona State University.
Moana Palelei Iose is a Pacific Islander artist based in Salt Lake City, Utah and Las Vegas, Nevada. Iose embraces storytelling inspired by her experience as an Indigenous woman raised in the Western region of the United States. She is the owner and curator of Lost Eden, a gallery space for American Western Indigenous collections, visual media, material culture and art.
Jiyoun Lee-Lodge is a Korean-born, Salt Lake City, Utah-based artist. Her work represents her shifting identity as a woman and immigrant in our hybrid world of social media. She makes paintings, drawings, installations and public art, all influenced by surrealism and animation.
Mitch Mantle is from St. George, Utah and is now based in Arizona as a professor of studio art at Glendale Community College. His large-scale dreamlike paintings utilize figurative and mythical narratives through vibrant colors and shapes. His work uses figures, animals and buildings as tools for both autobiographical and universal storytelling.
V. Kim Martinez is a Salt Lake native and a professor of painting and drawing at the University of Utah. Martinez's work investigates the political, social and psychological norms of power, executed through vibrant, characteristic portraits. Martinez also facilitates large, community-based murals and is committed to public engagement through the arts.
Antra Sinha is an artist, educator, curator and gallery coordinator from India, now based in Logan, Utah. She is fascinated by the richness and diversity of our planet earth and human culture. In her creative work she utilizes wheel-throwing, hand-building, coiling and slip cast in mold to make sculptural pieces representing the geometric forms of nature.
Eugene Tapahe is a Diné artist from Window Rock, Arizona who now resides in Provo, Utah. He portrays his love for nature and culture through land installation and fine art photography. In his recent body of work ‘Art Heals: The Jingle Dress Project,’ Tapahe highlights the healing power of the Ojibwe jingle dress dance, bringing attention to Native American issues.
Xi Zhang was born in Kaifeng, China and now lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. Zhang’s paintings manifest the psychological weight of turmoil and tribulation. Combining styles and techniques of the East and West, Zhang’s brushstrokes recall both the water-colored mountains of antique Chinese scrolls and the staining of American abstract expressionists. He is a professor of painting and drawing at the University of Utah.
The artists included in The Modern West portray unique approaches and representations around the concept of identity in our contemporary Western landscape. Their practices question and challenge many standing traditions and create platforms for open dialogue and critique between the artists, their communities and the broader general public.