salt (noun):
salt is an annual solo exhibition series that showcases work by regional, national, and international contemporary artists who are actively shaping the global landscape of contemporary art and engaging with the most urgent themes of our time.
The salt series prioritizes collaboration with artists early in their careers—the exhibitions are often their first in a major museum, in the American West, or in the United States. Each exhibition is accompanied by a short publication, which extends critical scholarship and supports the artist’s ongoing practice.
Through salt, the UMFA supports the work of contemporary artists who share the Museum’s mission to inspire critical dialogue and illuminate the role of art in our lives.
Adama Delphine Fawundu embodies ancestral
memory across space and time. She reconnects
places, objects, plants, animals, and spirits of
the global African diaspora in a process she calls “kpoto patchwok”—a combination of the Mende word for gathering fruits and nuts for communal nourishment (kpoto) and the Krio word for piecing together textiles (patchwok)
Arleene Correa Valencia is interested in
migration, family, and the visibility/invisibility
of undocumented people in the United States.
Born in Michoacán, Mexico, Correa Valencia
fled with her family to the United States at age
three and grew up in Napa Valley. The prolonged experience of separation when her father left to find work made a profound impact on Correa Valencia’s childhood and outlook.
Horacio Rodriguez is fascinated by the manmade concept and physical structure of the U.S.-Mexico border. In this exhibition, he considers how the border relates to the landscape and how people and things—past and present—pass through it
Yang Yongliang (Chinese, born Shanghai 1980)
presents the ancient tradition of Chinese landscape painting (shan shui) through a twenty-first-century photographic lens. Yang adheres to traditional formal requirements for depicting humans among mountains, water, and meandering pathways and, also in keeping with shan shui concepts, creates images of what he thinks about nature, not what he
has seen.
Katie Paterson thinks big. She reaches across time and space to relate human and cosmic scales. She collaborates deeply with biochemists, engineers, and astrophysicists but ultimately looks beyond the framework of mathematics and language to describe the unseeable, to communicate the unfathomable, and to imagine the unknown.
Over the past ten years, Brian Bress has created
countless characters and eccentric weirdos out of makeup and wigs, pencil and paper, scissors and glue, upholstery foam and paint, and canvas and camera. His fictional anthropomorphic characters are bizarre and slightly off-kilter. But, they are also friendly. They are perplexing yet endearing, relatable yet unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
Linklater, who is Omaskêko Cree from Moose Cree First Nation in present day Ontario and has a degree in Native Studies in addition to his art degrees, repeatedly addresses the ongoing legacy of colonialism in his multidisciplinary work, whether he is appropriating offensive racial slurs from Jay Z’s song lyrics or calling attention to under-recognized American Indian artists.
For his salt exhibition, Conrad Bakker debuts Untitled Project: Robert Smithson’s Library and Book Club, an ongoing artwork consisting of over 300 books on tables and shelves at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. The books are culled from the oft-cited catalogue of Robert Smithson’s (American, 1938-1973) personal library and span a range of topics that interested the artist before his untimely death at the age of thirty-five.
At the entrance to her salt 9 exhibition, a digitally edited version of Mayer’s analog birth video depicts the artist giving birth to her self, to her virtual identity. A framed script displayed next to the video positions the event as premeditated and rehearsed.
In 2002, Shigeyuki Kihara performed Taualuga: The Last Dance at the 4th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia. Since then, Kihara, who was born in Samoa in 1975, has continually revisited this performance, shaping it into a poignant social commentary that weaves together past and present colonialism, the subjectivity of native women, and the present and future consequences of humanity’s impact on the earth.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints people, but not real ones. Instead of focusing on the needs of a living subject, she partners with paint, respecting and responding to its formal qualities to elicit a rendering of the world she sees and experiences.
As an artist, Hüner travels between mediums and genres and geographies. Born in Istanbul and now based in Berlin, his practice encompasses drawing, animation, video, film, sculpture, installation, and occasionally printmaking. These diverse media are vehicles for ideas connected to dense constellations of literary, filmic, artistic, and scientific reference points.
Daniel Everett’s work often depicts a certain kind of anonymous architecture: security booths, surveillance towers, airports, and various passageways, like elevators and corridors with moving walkways. These are places defined primarily by what lies beyond them; places that serve to channel or control those who pass through or past them.
The figures we encounter in Xaviera Simmons’s photographs are often on their way to someplace else. We catch them in transit: travelers, wanderers, migrants, and nomads. Some appear as expeditionists and explorers; others may be pilgrims, or gypsies, or drifters. All seem to inhabit a space somewhere between departure and arrival.
In the shaky opening shots of Cyprien Gaillard’s 16 mm film Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009), we encounter a group of American teenagers—or perhaps they are a bit older, frat boy and sorority girl types—on spring break in Cancun. Against a backdrop of palm trees and a hotel resort designed to imitate an ancient Mayan pyramid, they walk toward the camera, clad in swim trunks and bikinis.
Sophie Whettnall, whose artistic practice encompasses photography, video, performance, and site-specific installation, began her career as a painter. She eventually abandoned painting for a practical reason: she wanted to move around.
In this inaugural installment of the UMFA’s salt exhibition series, Mexico City-based artist Adriana Lara takes the exhibition format itself as an object of inquiry, arranging unexpected objects in unexpected, sometimes humorous configurations that foreground and dismantle the conventions of displaying and looking at art.
