Art Installations

Garrett Harmsen, a visionary outdoor photographer rooted in Salt Lake City, finds his muse in the intricate patterns of nature, the exhilarating sensation of traversing diverse terrains, and the cherished companions who journey alongside him.

As a passionate skier, climber, biker, and lover of camping beneath the stars, he often wanders far from the confines of civilization in the majestic Mountain West, in pursuit of elusive moments where light, scenery, and the mountain’s enchantment harmoniously converge.

His heart beats in rhythm with the snow, captivated by the delicate textures of winter. Much of his artistry captures the dance between snow and the land, light and shadow, as well as the adventurous souls who navigate its depths. This profound fascination with snow permeates his existence beyond the lens, as he dedicates his engineering skills to crafting tools that measure snow and forecast avalanche risks at Propagation Labs.

German painter Bernard Lokai uses the historical vernacular of painting – including the gestural brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism and the spray paint of graffiti – to simultaneously absorb and disrupt traditions of landscape and abstract painting, and to explore the question of how to make a picture.

His “Landscape Blocks,” multi-paneled grids composed of eighteen 12 by 16 inch panels, each present an isolated ‘moment’ that individually appears entirely abstract. Lokai paints the small panels on an ongoing basis in the studio, without a plan for where each will fit in the overall grid. At some point he gathers all of the small canvases and chooses which to combine into a set of eighteen. He thinks of each small painting as akin to a brushstroke, such that the overall final piece is thus ‘painted’ by paintings. Though each panel is strikingly distinct and sometimes wildly colorful, together they coalesce into an impression of landscape.

While the landscape grids explore a different idea on each panel, the larger individual abstract paintings combine multiple concepts on the same surface, wrestling with the meaning of painting today. Each painting evolves in a reactionary process, whereby the previous brushstroke and color influence the next. The works are pluralistically composed of elements and forms that reference the historical building blocks of a century of painting conventions. The most successful pieces, in Lokai’s mind, are the ones that surprise him, that arrive at a place he never imagined could exist. His purpose is neither to express emotion nor reference any particular subject. They are what they are – color, brushstroke, form, composition. Their mood may be discordant or harmonious or both. They are visceral, trans-lingual and endlessly probing.

Bernard Lokai was born in 1960 in Bohumin, Czechoslovakia. After his parents escaped from the former Czechoslovakia Lokai grew up in Duren, Germany. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Gerhard Richter and now resides in Düsseldorf and Berlin.

Crystal Liu transforms elements of nature – the night, stars, clouds, fleshy mountains, willow trees, blood, water, owls, octopuses, and flowers – into a lexicon of characters that enact extraordinary tales based on her private joys and sorrows.

Liu’s drawings can be likened to Chinese landscape painting, in which every stroke and image is layered with meaning. But she subverts the serenity of these traditional scenes with violent forces. Her choice of materials, including fabric, gold leaf, felt, and textured paper, provides a subtle balance between seduction, humor and the macabre.