Utah has been shaped for generations by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often called the Mormon church. Also shaped by the LDS church is the work of three artists, which Utah-based writer Scotti Hill highlighted.
Artists Angela Ellsworth, Stephanie Leitch and Nancy Rivera all use “materially obsessive processes” that reflect this mythos, like Ellsworth’s intricately woven bonnets or Rivera’s almost photo realistic cross-stitches, according to Hill.
Their mediums are their messages, Hill wrote in her latest piece for Southwest Contemporary. She joined The Show to talk more about it, starting with Arizona's Ellsworth.
Full conversation
SCOTTI HILL: I have been fascinated by Angela's work for, actually years. What really drew me to it was the very exhaustive process that appears apparent at first glance when looking at her work, just the sort of mesmerizingly complicated amount of work that it feels that goes into it.
So on kind of a formal level, but also a thematic level, I'm really interested in these themes that she's using the physical or formal process to articulate.
GILGER: Right. So she is a professor here at Arizona State University. Folks here might have seen her work at the Lisa Sette Gallery, and she comes from sort of a long Mormon lineage.
And her work often, the work I thought of when I saw her name, right, is of these bonnets, right? Like bonnets that you might think of when you think of like LDS pioneers.
HILL: Absolutely. But what's fascinating about that is that the imagery of the bonnet, while it does conjure those associations of LDS pioneer women, there is so much richness that kind of takes the viewer by surprise when they see these works.
They're not the utilitarian cloth bonnets that you would imagine pioneer women to have, but instead they are really richly inlaid with the pearl corsage pins. They have in some of the works that I highlighted in this piece, you know, some spiky needle-like elements inside. And so it's sort of toying, I would say, with the familiar attributes that you would associate with this, but forcing a closer look.
GILGER: So let me ask you then about the second artist that you profile here. Stephanie Leitch. Her work has also been seen here in Arizona. She has a 2024 exhibition that was at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum called Materializing Mormonism. This is a little more, I guess, multidimensional. There are many mediums she's using here.
HILL: Yes, absolutely. She's very meticulous about individual elements comprising a sort of dizzying and awe-inspiring whole. And the materials that she uses for her work are super-deliberate, and they come from some purpose that resonates with her, whether it's the medical discs that she uses, these sort of cylindrical discs that resonate from her being raised as the daughter of a, a father in the medical supply industry, to also linking that sort of familial or sentimental connotation to a utilitarian one, where that cylindrical shape is also the optimal kind of receptacle for text that's lasered on top of it.
Everything is so meticulous, but also so thoughtfully considered, which I just find so fascinating about her work.
GILGER: Meticulous is definitely the word for it. Let me ask you, lastly, to describe for us the work then of the final artist that you're profiling here, Nancy Rivera, who is basically doing cross-stitch, but in this very interesting and sort of political way almost.
HILL: Yes, I think what drew me to Nancy's work was seeing an exhibition that featured this series in person in Utah. It was really kind of spectacular to see the small scale of these individual family portraits that are cross-stitches of her and her family as kind of replicas of their passport photos.
And this series of work discusses and kind of reveals through the medium, the larger allegory of how painstaking and meticulous the immigration process is. And so I thought that duality between the process and the message was lovely here, but also I was just kind of floored by how, how lifelike and how incredible the rendering was, despite how difficult the work and the labor was to create these works.
GILGER: Right, they're almost photorealistic, but they're made using cross-stitch. There's even like a Social Security card in here, right?
HILL: Yes.
GILGER: So let's talk then, Scotti, about how it is that these artists are tied together for you. Like, you talk about the mediums that they use, the materials that they're using, the ways in which they're manipulating those materials in this sort of almost obsessive process, right. Like, that you think it sounds like really reflects the LDS, the Mormon culture that each of them is coming from.
HILL: Yes. What I was curious about in this piece was thinking about obsession as both a formal quality, in other words, artists who harness this extremely labor-intensive, time-consuming process, but that also translate that really labor-intensive process underlying their work's creation to an obsession thematically.
And what I've noticed in selecting these three is that there is very much a through line of establishing the meaning of one's current identity, based on the identity of the past or of one's personal history.
And so in the case of LDS culture, that parallel is quite strong in Angela's work. How her ancestry is laden in to these works is very powerful. With Nancy, we can see a connection between her status as an undocumented person navigating the immigration process and receiving U.S. citizenship and kind of drawing parallels there as someone outside of the kind of normal associations with a Utah or LDS artist.
GILGER: Let me ask you about this quote from Stephanie Leitch, right, like, I thought this was so interesting. She said, “it also imprinted me with a highly structured, but at the same time, mystical cosmos.”
And she's talking about, you know, the church there. I love that duality, like highly structured and mystical.
HILL: Yeah, it's fascinating. Because I think Stephanie's work, to me, is a great example of how the LDS faith has left an imprint on her as a person, as an artist, but that there isn't this sort of moralizing of, here's how it's had a profound impact for the good or the bad. Here's kind of beating you over the head with the allegory that I'm trying to tell you about how the LDS church has impacted me.
But instead, you see these sort of more ephemeral remnants of that lineage in her work.
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