Pinnacle Performance: New Topographies, Altered Landscapes and Other Identities

Artistic representations of landscape exist in a space somewhere in between the physical world and the artist’s experience of it. In the exhibit New Topographies, Altered Landscapes & Other Identities, five artists’ separate visions of landscape, and what it means, direct us toward a cultural progression and the possibility of reshaping our relationship with it.

These five artists each have their own unique perspective on the land. The sculptures of Adam Bateman, founder of the Central Utah Art Center, impose themselves on the viewer through the sheer physicality of unlikely media, like walls of books. Leah Moses’ drawings frame the world as a kind of haven, while Mary Toscano’s emphasize the tension between the human and animal (detail of her “Lines Drawn” is pictured). Found sculptures in the photographs of Jared Steffenson, curator of education at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, call into question the nature of art in the natural world. Steven Larson’s paintings emphasize the fragility of the physical world, and the human impact upon it. These various attempts at mapping always include the orientation of the human in the physical domain, even as the human presence has an effect on that environment.

An unlikely art space, Pinnacle Performance is a facility for manual physical therapy and “intelligent movement,” where art is utilized as a part of the healing process. The metaphor of healing could extend to our relationship with the landscape as well. (Brian Staker)