Kimball Art Center to unveil three new exhibitions in October

The fall exhibitions at the Kimball Art Center will explore contemporary views of our urban and natural landscapes. Photo: Kimball Art Center

PARK CITY, Utah — The Kimball Art Center will unveil three new exhibitions on Friday, October 1, with works from Claire Sherman, David Hartt, and Cara Despain.

A public opening will be held on October 1 from 6 pm to 7:30 pm. Artists David Hartt and Cara Despain will be onsite. A cash bar with beer and wine will be available, along with complimentary snacks.

On Saturday, October 2, the Kimball Art Center education team will host an Open Studio Sampler from 6 pm to 8:30 pm. The evening will include art projects and drinks. Attendees will participate in two different 30-minute classes that are assigned at random. Tickets are $50.

“For this next round of exhibitions, we wanted to share artists addressing diverse concepts of representation giving our audiences in Park City multiple references for conversation. Our new space at the Yard allows us to display multiple shows at once. We are very excited to welcome the work of Claire Sherman, David Hartt and Cara Despain to Park City,” said Aldy Milliken, executive director of the Kimball Art Center.

Proof of COVID-19 vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test will be required for entry at the exhibition opening events. Masks are required in Kimball Art Center studios.

Exhibitions Include:

Claire Sherman: Here Now

Claire Sherman’s work engages with landscape archetypes and Romantic conceptions of nature, including the sublime. Distorting scale and perspective, her oversize paintings of forests, caves, rockets, and trees evoke both specific locations and abstracted, ubiquitous environments. Vivid color and robust mark-making structure these dynamic and unsettling landscapes.

It is important to Sherman that each painting takes shape over the course of just one day in the studio. She achieves surfaces imbued with a sense of ease and speed that reflect an openness to imperfections. Yet sustained research, reading, travel, and photography inform her response to the history of art and our contemporary visual culture. In early work, Sherman based compositions on found imagery from sources like travel books, postcards, and films in order to maintain a degree of distance from her subject matter. In more recent paintings, she tempers this approach by drawing on her direct experience of nature and personal snapshots that mediate her memory of place. Sherman also finds inspiration in American literature, studies of ecology, and nineteenth-century expedition narratives.

David Hartt: On Exactitude in Science (Watts)

David Hartt: On Exactitude in Science (Watts) presents the artist’s most recent film with a selection of related photographs. Asked to consider the notion of Black space during a recent Museum of Modern Art commission, Hartt looked to Charles Burnett’s seminal 1978 film, Killer of Sheep, which took place in Los Angeles’ historically Black neighborhood of Watts. Hartt powerfully juxtaposes Burnett’s anecdotal memories of the neighborhood with an almost clinical examination of spatial archetypes, part of the artist’s ongoing analysis of the ideologies embedded within our built environment.

In Memoriam: Carbon Paintings by Cara Despain

For In Memoriam, Cara Despain presents large-scale ‘paintings’ of pure carbon that serve as markers of our changing climate. Despain has been collecting burnt debris from western wildfires for the past three years, using it as a drawing tool to create new ways of depicting the American West. Smelling of smoke and shedding ash, these works eschew the idealization or romanticism that has defined landscape painting for so long. Instead, they become a visualization of large-scale systems change, reflecting the consequences of human habitation on the planet.