By Lane Wright
The BYU Museum of Art staff — everybody from directors to custodians — put in hours of work to bring an unfamiliar type of modern art to students in an exhibit that opened last week. The staff is hoping to attract people who are curious about contemporary art.
The exhibit, “Outside Inside: Fragments in Place,” is an elaborate example of installation art. Seven artists from Australia spent about eight days in Utah visiting prominent sites and getting to know the culture.
The artists took their impressions of the state and culture and mixed them with their own interests to create their works of art.
“These artists do that very well,” said Anastasia Rees, co-curator at the museum. “[The exhibit] is a combination of their own interests with a particular location.”
Installation art is contemporary form of art where the artist specializes in creating visual interpretations of cultures and societies. Installation art is site specific and deals with a particular space at a particular time.
“Installation art is dismantled when it”s over. That”s it,” Rees said. “Its strength is that it has responded to a particular site. If you take it out of that site, it looses its meaning.”
“Installation art shows a different perspective of art practices,” Rees said. “We want the students to become familiar with installation art. Also, an outsider”s view of the community is important to us.”
Installation art requires the viewer to be a participant.
“You walk into the art work, it surrounds you and you become part of it,” said Cheryl May, museum educator. “Many artists feel art is incomplete without you in it.”
This type of conceptual art uses a series of objects and symbols. Each element of installation represents something that adds to a main message or theme.
“Part of what you”re doing is trying to read the code,” May said. “What message is the artist sending?”
Rees said that the exhibition could be seen as a confrontation for students with the unfamiliar or the foreign, and also as a confrontation for the artists with Utah”s culture.
The exhibit required the efforts of many MOA staff members because of the amount of materials needed beforehand. At least 30 dozen eggs were blown out to fill pods. Artists set up TV screens to show live feeds of Y Mountain and previously recorded images of the Salt Flats. They also used speakers to broadcast live chatter of pilots flying overhead.
“It”s really quite an ambitious project to bring seven installation artists to one location,” Rees said.
The MOA paid for the materials the artists needed to do the project. The artists do get a small fee for all of the work they do for the exhibit, Rees said
If you put all of their hours together and divided it by how much the received, it would be about minimum wage, Rees said.
Unlike BYU, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints doesn”t fund the MOA. Money comes from several fundraising efforts and private donations.
The title of the exhibit, “Outside Inside: Fragments in Place,” suggests an outsiders look inside a culture. The artists came from outside Utah”s culture to take a look inside and show what they saw.
The title could also suggest that what sometimes appears on the outside does not always match what the inner reality is, May said.
One of the original ideas for naming the exhibit was “Fragments of Place,” which later evolved into “Fragments in Place.” The former communicates an incomplete view of the place and the latter sends a more ambiguous message, leaving the interpretation up to the viewer.
The exhibit is aimed at students and faculty and will have an obvious interest for those in art history and humanities majors, but all are invited to experience it.
