Artists

ROBERT DE GROFF {[email protected]} is a Spring City, Utah artist. He is a master mezzotintist, producing immaculate and stunningly complex images in open print editions.

Lane Twitchell is a New York based artist, born in Murray, Utah and raised in Ogden. An early interest in landscape painting has resulted in a working process and style which incorporates intricately cut paper into kaleidoscopic “landscapes” whose richly textured patterns form endlessly iterative combinations of the visual ephemera of the American unconscious, his own personal biography, and something like cosmic narrative contours not unrelated to the Rocky Mountain Mormonism of his upbringing. Lane Twitchell holds a B.F.A. from The University of Utah, which he attended on A Special Departmental Scholarship and an M.F.A. from The School of Visual Arts, New York. He is a two time New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow, in Drawing and Craft; a recipient of The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant; and a P.S.1/ MoMA National Studio Grant participant. In 2008 his work was the subject of a regional touring survey curated by Thomas Piche Jr. The artist’s work is included in public collections such as The Baltimore Museum, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art and notable private collections such as Sammlung Goetz, Munich DE, and The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, Texas. His work is viewable at www.lanetwitchell.com.

Born and raised in northern Utah, Anderson earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s of fine arts from Utah State University. As a transgender woman who was raised in an orthodox Mormon home and was married for twenty years to a woman with whom she shares two children, Anderson is—in her own words—“embarking on the second half of her life reinventing nearly every aspect of who she is.”

After 25 years working nationally and internationally as a documentary and fine-art photographer and 10 years as a university lecturer, Anderson earned a master’s in counseling psychology from the University of San Francisco.

Maddison Colvin {[email protected]} is a five-year resident of Utah, previously from Washington State. She teaches at Brigham Young University as an adjunct professor and spends her mornings working with 4th-8th graders at Alianza Academy in Salt Lake City. Her work is interested in the intersection of knowledge￾gathering systems represented in the respective fields of science and religion. While these systems’ structures are based on very different types of information (empirical versus phenomenologi￾cal, communicable versus personal), the way these knowledges are used in the mind is a much more loosely structured combination of both. It is this idea of overlapping, of the scientific becoming singular and the religious becoming ordered, that drives this work.

Rebecca Sorge {[email protected]} graduated from Brigham Young University with a BFA in illustration in December of 2013. She currently lives and works in Provo, Utah. “Spring￾ing Up” was part of a series of works inspired by the Book of Mormon, and how this text acts as a compass, map, and manual for our mortal existence. This piece draws from Alma 32:41: “But if ye will nourish the word, yea, nourish the tree as it beginneth to grow, by your faith with great diligence, and with patience, looking forward to the fruit thereof, it shall take root; and behold it shall be a tree springing up unto everlasting life.” While not originally intended to be a reference to our Heavenly Mother (“I saw the female figure behind kneeling woman as a more general angel or spirit of nurturing and revelation”) many people have interpreted the piece that way. “I’m glad that they’ve made that connection and feel strongly that our Heavenly Mother is a nurturing and loving influence in our lives.”

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.”