Artists

Valerie Atkisson lived all over the United States while growing up. When asked where she was from she would reply, “Everywhere.” As an artist she realized that she did not have a location that she was from, but she knew a great deal about whom she was from. Thus was born a body of work that explored her identity. This exploration took her back 2000 years in time, across continents and discovery of forgotten stories, dates and people. Her work has been shown at numerous museums and galleries all over the country. She lived in New York City for ten years after graduating from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) with her Masters of Fine Arts. She currently lives in Utah and loves it.

BRIAN CHRISTENSEN is an art professor and sculptor whose work ranges from formal outdoor public works to figurative and narrative sculptures. He has a passion for materials and produces work by tradi￾tional methods, such as bronze casting and ceramics. But he also incorporates more unconventional methods and materials, such as steel fabrication and synthetic materials, when required to support his art concept. Much of his work walks a line between formalism and narrative approaches. Christensen grew up in San Diego and currently teaches at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. He lives with his wife and two children in Springville, Utah where his home studio is located. Christensen has exhibited extensively nationally and abroad and continues to engage his passion for teaching and contemporary art.

Mary Toscano grew up in Salt Lake City and received a BFA in Printmaking and Photography from the University of Utah. Toscano works in drawing, printmaking, installation, and works on and with paper. She has shown her work locally and nationally. Toscano is an Artist-in-Residence at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. She works as the Exhibitions Coordinator for the J. Willard Marriott Library and Book Arts Program at the University of Utah.

THOMAS D. AARON {www.thomasdaaron.com} lives in Salt Lake City with his wife, Michael, and daughter. He sees his abstract paintings as having roots and perhaps a destination in the land￾scape of the Southwest and comments: “I am searching for a way to move toward my experience of homecoming—not as a corporeal matter but a conscious one. Raised in the West, I was given the privileges, experience, and baggage that comes from the western ethos. Themes of conquest, brutality, reinvention, self-determina￾tion, triumph, and redemption are interleafed in the western myth, yet underlying it all is a narrative of land—of space. “My conscious wanderings have always led to me to desire lands and spaces far from my home; but recently, I have felt an ir￾resistible pull toward the land—not a simulacrum of pretty views but an investigation into the unsympathetic disconnected pat￾terns and layers of people on the land, viewed as an expression of time. I articulate those patterns as the vastness of space constantly interrupted by our hand—as layer over layer, a palimpsest, as use and reuse, cultivation and fallowing. This new awareness of the land and my place in it was a threshold experience, propelling me into a new sphere. “My artistic process is not dissimilar to my content. I reference papers on mathematical theory in urban planning, old city plats, found photographs, thousands of aerial images culled from our vast media universe as well as time spent in the landscape observ￾ing the patterns and underlying structure of human involvement on the land. Beyond traditional painting and drawing mediums, I incorporate raw materials: sand, coal, salt, iron, copper, and sil￾ver. My approach is intuitive. I just start—make a move, not unlike the surrealist notion of automatic drawing that begins a back-and￾forth of layers, responses to former movements and obliteration of others. Eventually the automatic is left behind for more precise formalist conventions of abstraction.”

John Sproul grew up in Simi Valley, California, and Orem, Utah, and studied art at the University of Utah and Brigham Young University. John and his wife, Emily, who is also an artist, lived for many years in Los Angeles before recently moving to Salt Lake City. They now live in the Sugarhouse neighborhood with their three sons where John serves as high priests’ group leader and chairs the community council’s Arts and Culture Committee. John begins his pictures by finding the desired expressive gesture and body language, but the surfaces of his paintings and drawings are as intriguing as the subject. He builds layers of acrylic paint onto paper or canvas to create a richly textured surface. The colors vary greatly in value and intensity but are layered in such a way as to create a vibrance and a sense of history—as if the surface has been used for many years. The sense of history contin￾ues in how John draws and paints, leaving early blocking in and gestural drawings in place as he establishes the final position and gesture of the figure. John’s drawings and paintings are centered around the human figure, which he uses to explore personal and universal themes. Referring to his work as “a dialogue of thought, both conscious and subconscious, realized in paint,” he believes that “one can come to know the spirit or self through the body and by exten￾sion the universal through the individual, the infinite through the finite.” In his work, John uses the figure and body language to reveal individual characteristics but also seeks to resonate with viewers on a larger level, as fellow human beings. As viewers, we bring an instinctual understanding of body language and the subtle cues of facial expression and gesture to our understanding of the work and a communication is established. We identify with the figures in a way that, as John says, “we are aware of, but never able to define.” More of John’s work can be seen on his website: www. johnsproul.com.

In my earlier drawings I focused on line and the wealth of information it could convey. Now I am working through the challenges of color and value in the context of issues I have continued to explore for the past twenty years. The American landscape is cloaked in cultural opacities and cluttered with human debris. I contend that no one with a twentieth-century eye can see through the layers of artificial meaning and histories we have imposed onto this finally impenetrable continent. So, rather than trying for that ever-elusive glimpse of a landscape or history in its purity, I choose to draw the perceptions and impositions between us and a place we cannot know. In my paintings of America, I am far more concerned with repre￾senting and questioning cultural and visual expectations than with illus￾trating a scene. In a sense, my paintings and drawings are anthropologi￾cal; in them, I often dwell on the values, activities, and events of ancient and contemporary cultures, “tracing” the traces they left behind. I am es￾pecially intrigued by the events through time that tie seemingly unre￾lated people and events together in broad cycles: ancient sea voyages, a people migrating to a refuge in the desert, epic battles, a promised land inhabited by many self-chosen peoples that either prosper or suffer be￾cause of their activities on the land. All of my work, in some way or another, is about landscape and how we see ourselves through it and impose our values on it. My paintings are both referential and highly interpretive, depicting panoramic views of specific locations. They deal with our perceptions of time, social and en￾vironmental history, and tend to look like maps, but my “maps” are not accurate according to cartographic expectations. These are maps of time, culture, dreams, perceptions, the future, and how we wish to see ourselves and our history. They invite the viewer to become lost in them and then to make conscious and intuitive sense of the perceptual envi￾ronment. I twist perspective, visually and historically. Because of the jux￾taposing of unrelated buildings and events, each scene could be hun￾dreds of years in the past, or in the process of being constructed, or in the future after everything has been torn down, destroyed, or worn away. All things—time, history, memory, and perceptions—are present in these paintings.

Ricky Allman was born in Provo, Utah, and studied art at Utah Valley University, Massachusetts College of Art, Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. He now teaches painting and drawing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Lee Udall Bennion and her husband, Joseph Bennion, both descend from a long line of pioneers. They live in Spring City, a Utah village, where Lee paints and Joe makes pottery, which he fires in a wood-burning kiln. They call their dual artistic endeavor Horseshoe Mountain Pottery {http://HorseshoeMountainPottery.com/}. They have three daughters, who share their passion for gardening, riding horses, hiking in the nearby mountains, and rafting on wild rivers. Lee’s paintings have appeared in many group and individual exhibi￾tions and have achieved a number of awards. Over a hundred images dat￾ing from 1983 to 2008 are available for viewing on their joint website. All her paintings are in frames that Lee has hand-carved and painted. Her subjects are domestic, local, and familial. She predominantly chooses to portray people. However, she insists that “portraiture is not my main con￾cern. My painting deals with form, color, and feelings foremost.” There are also landscapes and still life paintings which, she says, “tell more how I feel about a place or a set of objects than what they actually look like.” In￾variably, her subjects appear in simple, sparse settings. Often they merge into symbols. For example, a painting of 1993, Divine Meditation, shows a woman (likely Lee herself) whose head and elongated neck are suffused by an aura of light. The painting on the back cover of the present issue of Dia￾logue portrays a child—perhaps Lee’s grandchild—with wings and a spotted dog. In such paintings, the ordinary and commonplace mingle with the transcendent and divine. Although her Mormonism is rarely explicit in her paintings, her faith underlies all of them. “I hope my love for God’s creation and my fellow human beings shows through,” she said in a recent interview. “Everything I do reflects my religion.”

Sharon Alderman has been weaving cloth by hand since 1969, specializ￾ing in apparel fabrics, upholstery, and color studies. Her work has won many awards, and she lectures, gives keynote addresses, acts as a juror, and leads workshops for guilds, art centers, colleges, and state, regional, and na￾tional conferences. Her writing and work have appeared in Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot, Interweave, Textile Artists’ Newsletter, and Handwoven, and her books include Handwoven, Tailormade, A Handweaver’s Notebook, and Mas￾tering Weave Structures, all published by Interweave Press, Inc. She lives in Salt Lake City where her fabrics are on exhibit at Phillips Gallery. More in￾formation is available at http://www.sharonalderman.com/.