DE | MARCATION
A Survey of Contemporary Photography in Utah
On view through January 12, 2020
Utah Museum of Fine Arts/University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah
www.umfa.utah.edu
Since its invention, photography has played a role in constructing and projecting Utah’s identity. Yet the most prominent images often reflect government and corporate interests, from the nineteenth-century promotion of Manifest Destiny to today’s marketing of the outdoor recreation industry. While our beloved landscapes¬¬¬—unique, vast, and varied—are a deep source of pride, they represent only part of what Utah is as a place and people.
DE | MARCATION, a limited-edition portfolio surveying the work of Utah contemporary photographers, challenges traditional notions of the West and highlights the state’s complexity. Produced in 2018, the portfolio reflects Utah’s increasing cultural diversity with the majority of its twenty contributing photographers being born outside of Utah, and five outside the United States. Utah’s remarkable and often photographed landscape does resonate in the works, but it plays a supporting role to gender and power studies, to the investigation of the built environment, and to documentary and conceptual performance practices—all aspects of recent global photographic inquiry.
Image: Karalee Kuchar American, born 1983 Bearing Weight, 2015 Pigment print Purchased with funds from the Paul L. and Phyllis C. Wattis Fund, UMFA2018.19.1.1
