Gallery East presents the art of facades
Salt Lake City artist Justin Wheatley finds something arresting and beautiful in facades. Whether it’s an old downtown high-rise building or a quant tract home, Wheatley sees something compelling about their external design. His paintings and multi-media work is featured through April 11 at USU Eastern’s Gallery East on Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Salt Lake City artist Justin Wheatley finds something arresting and beautiful in facades. Whether it’s an old downtown high-rise building or a quant tract home, Wheatley sees something compelling about their external design. His paintings and multi-media work is featured through April 11 at USU Eastern’s Gallery East on Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Ehren Clark of City Weekly, writes, “To everything there is a surface, a façade, an outward appearance. With most of life, the truth of the matter is distorted by the façade, by the physicality, limited by what the eye can see that is only an artificial layer to truth.”
“The work of Justin Wheatley,” Clark explains, “dares to probe beneath the façade and discover the essential truths of existence. Wheatley’s canvases and his sculptures are intricately layered including subjects such as buildings, homes, bridges, latticed with abstracted line, shape, color, plane, symbol, and detail.”
Wheatley breaks down the visual components of a structure and reinterprets it into an intricate, colorful design. Though it may be a combination of semi-abstract lines, color, and geometric shapes, the outer façade is always a recognizable theme of the work.
According to Clark, “It may be a brightly colored and ‘poppish’ home that conceals all that is real within thus deconstructing domestic ideals in lieu of secrets and obscurities. Or it might be the multi-dimensionality of his abstract layering breaking up the absoluteness of the subject thus deconstructing both space and time in lieu of a pure reality.
“The work of Justin Wheatley creates a multifaceted statement that is visually powerful and cognitively complex that synthesized, weaves an ongoing fabric of existential meaning.”
Wheatley grew up in Clinton, Utah. He attended Utah State University, where he received a bachelor’s of fine arts degree in drawing and painting. He resides in Salt Lake City.
An opening reception and artist talk will be Friday, April 12, from 6-8 p.m. in Gallery East. The gallery is free and open to the public during the academic year.
Any questions, contact Noel Carmack at 435-613-5241 or email at [email protected].
