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As anyone who spends even a small amount of time in Utah knows, the Beehive State is more than the powder snow, redrock, desert, a humongous salty lake or even its unique religious heritage.
Utah is also a cultural web, spun of history, legend, myth, ritual and memory — accurate, half-forgotten and embroidered — to which people cling.
But how would an outsider perceive this mystique, the Utah of the mind and heart that some call Zion?
A new exhibit at the Salt Lake Art Center will explore that question. Los Angeles-based artist Robert Fontenot exposed himself to impressions of the state — in the broadest possible sense — and converted them into bread-dough sculptures. Then he photographed these doughy works for a video and a book, An Introduction to the Glorious State of Utah (with a foreword by Salt Lake Tribune editorial cartoonist Pat Bagley).
To make it even stranger, Fontenot has visited Utah just once, briefly, 15 years ago. Most of his impressions of the state were culled from browsing the Internet, that assemblage of the world's collective, if unreliable, memory.
The center's chief curator, Michol Hebron, pitched the idea to Fontenot after seeing other fine art he has produced using so-called domestic arts media, including sewing, embroidery and bread dough.
"He uses these unassuming and friendly materials, but the content is very complex and serious with layers and layers [of meaning]," Hebron says. "He examines the ways we perceive a culture or a history or an identity and the way we choose to remember it."
Fontenot's more than 100 dough works, which are reproduced in the video installation "The Place This Is," capture a quirky gamut of Utah icons, including the Salt Lake Temple, Bear Lake Monster, the LDS Church's underground storage caves, the Duces Wild strip bar, the hangar of the nuclear bomber Enola Gay, the Thistle flood, the Bar-X, Brigham Young's pistol, giant Snelgrove ice-cream-cone sculpture, a sacred salamander, B-movies filmed in the state, and a whale that was supposedly released into the Great Salt Lake in the 1890s.
"It's really a fascinating state and I've always been interested in history," Fontenot says. "And Utah has a history separate from the rest of the nation."
In addition to the video and the book, Fontenot is going to mount a 9-foot-high frieze at the Art Center that will depict a cultural and visual landmark that dominates the Salt Lake Valley — the Kennecott cooper smelter smokestack.
It's the oddball stuff that sticks in people's minds, the artist believes. "That sort of thing is the impression that lasts," Fontenot says. "It's the small eccentric things."
The Place This Is
Los Angeles artist Robert Fontenot's exhibit of Utah icons opens April 1.
Where • Salt Lake Art Center, 20 S. West Temple, Salt Lake City
Hours • Tuesday-Thursday and Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Friday, 11 am.-9 p.m.
Info • http://www.slartcenter.org