Artist Talk: Jedidiah Caesar @ Utah Museum of Fine Arts (SLC: April 4)

Contacts:

—Mindy Wilson, 801.581.7328

 mindy.wilson@umfa.utah.edu

—Whitney Tassie, 801.585.3475

whitney.tassie@umfa.utah.edu

Artist Talk: Jedediah Caesar

April 4, 2013

Left and right: Jedediah Caesar (b. 1973). *|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_,” 2011. Remnants, polyurethane, pigments, stone.

19 1/8  X 13 1/8 X 13 inches, comprised of twnety panels. Purchased with funds from the UMFA Young Benefactors. UMFA2012.10.1A. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, California; photo credit Robert Wedemeyer.

Salt Lake City – Los Angeles-based artist Jedediah Caesar will give an artist talk April 4 at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), which recently acquired one of Caesar’s pieces for the Museum’s permanent collection. Caesar will discuss his current work, including “*|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_,” a sculpture the UMFA’s Friends of Contemporary Art (FoCA) selected for purchase last fall. The free public talk, sponsored by A Gallery, will be held at 6 p.m. in the Katherine W. and Ezekiel R. Dumke Jr. Auditorium in the UMFA’s Marcia and John Price Museum Building at the University of Utah. “*|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_” will be on view in the UMFA’s Phyllis Cannon Wattis Gallery for Twentieth Century Art through July.

Caesar works with found materials, natural and man-made, recontextualizing and transforming them by fusing the disparate parts into a distinct new object. He assembles the materials he’s gathered, sets them in resin, and then slices the hardened blocks to reveal the embedded components. The resulting sculpture represents a reorganization of time and place that blurs the lines between abstract and real, painting and sculpture, old and new, inside and out. Some of his pieces, including “*|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_,” have flexible installation formats, meaning they can be displayed in a number of ways—as a single piece or in various arrangements of individual parts.

“We are thrilled with FoCA’s decision to bring Jed’s piece into the permanent collection, in part because it continues a number of art historical threads already represented in our holdings,” said Whitney Tassie, the UMFA’s curator of modern and contemporary art. “The formal lines and colors of each slice of “*|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_” nod to the legacy of abstract expressionism and works like Helen Frankenthaler’s 1963 Wizard. When stacked in its cubed form, Jed’s sculpture references the geometric, hard-edged minimalist tradition, exemplified by Carl Andre’s 1977 Fermator. Perhaps even more relevant is this sculpture’s connection to Robert Smithson’s non-site sculptures, in which encased debris from removed outdoor locations is exhibited in bins placed directly on the gallery floor.”

Caesar’s process is influenced by and extends Land art strategies of bringing the outside in and blurring boundaries of place by connecting seemingly unrelated sites. Northern Utah is the site for two important examples of Land art, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76).

Each year since 2005 FoCA (originally called Young Benefactors) has acquired a new contemporary artwork for the Museum’s permanent collection. Artists and pieces are nominated by the Museum’s curator of contemporary art and members of FoCA’s executive committee, and FoCA Council-level members gather at a black-tie dinner to vote to acquire one of three finalists. Caesar’s work was selected in November.

Caesar has a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include the De Cordova Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, and the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin. His work was included in the 2012 Venice Beach Biennial and the 2008 Whitney Biennial, as well as in group exhibitions at Saatchi Gallery in London, Orange County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, Fundament Foundation in the Netherlands, and Bloomberg SPACE gallery in London.

The talk is free and open to the public. A private reception for FoCA members and their guests will follow at 7 p.m. For more information about the reception or about FoCA, please contact Kate Ithurralde, the UMFA’s manager of annual giving, at 801-585-0464.

Free Public Program:
Artist Talk: Jedediah Caesar
Thursday, April 4, at 6 pm
UMFA Katherine W. and Ezekiel R. Dumke Jr. Auditorium