September 30, 2022 & October 1, 2022

8pm

Elijah Hancock and Melissa Younker combine their artistic curiosities to collaborate in a musically driven performance art work. Their multidisciplinary project “Snapshots & Souvenirs” premieres September 30th & October 1st, 2022 as a selection for Salt Lake City Arts Councils Finch Lane Flash Projects. This evening length song and dance cycle includes live performance of original music and choreography, film projection, playful costume design and moves through the intimate spaces of Finch Lane Gallery.

A vocal artist and multi-instrumentalist, Elijah Hancock has specialties in songwriting, opera and choir. Melissa Younker is a multi-disciplinary movement artist with experience in dance performance, choreography and film. Both artists aspire to cross genres and step into the vulnerability of sharing their desires in live performance. Together they have created a new work that embraces each other’s diverse skill sets, crossing boundaries and sharing in all sides of the creation, direction, and performance.

“Snapshots & Souvenirs” is a reflection of memory. Each song/dance is a snapshot of moments in their ancestors’ histories and personal pasts. To quote the first song they wrote together titled Bag of Dirt, “an embellished memory, a varnished catastrophe; both distorted, both true.” Elijah and Melissa find comfort and comedy in their shared understanding about the souvenirs we carry.

Register here.

Reception Friday June 17, 5-8pm

Open Saturday June 18, 10am-12pm

Prism Portraits celebrates North Star Elementary student artwork and aims to connect students to the local art culture of Salt Lake City. The project features artwork created during a 4-week long project in which students learned about the elements of art and created kaleidoscopes and self-portraits.

Finch Lane Gallery will feature student paintings, self-portraits, and large decorated kaleidoscopes. In addition, there will be an activity space for visitors to make their own kaleidoscopes, fold and decorate prisms, and enjoy light refreshments on an outdoor patio.

BIOS

Melissa Howell is currently pursuing her second undergraduate degree at the University of Utah in Art Teaching with a minor in History Teaching. She rediscovered a love of art when she was part of an art therapy group in 2018 and realized she wanted to be a teacher after volunteering with kids of all age groups.

Aubrey Ellis is currently earning a BFA in Art Teaching and has just finished her second year at the University of Utah. She plans to make the arts a more integral part of education and work as an elementary school art teacher. Aubrey is a practicing artist and is passionate about the positive effects of arts integration in schools.

March 2, 2022

7pm

“Death Café for the World As We Know It” is a kickoff event for the year-long, international Climate Thanatology project, an arts laboratory that includes visual art, performance, and participatory events in the U.S., Norway, and Denmark. This project, developed with SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen, applies the therapeutic practice of music thanatology, or music for the dying, to climate grief and collective repair. This event will include live harp music in response to participants’ voicing of climate losses while gathered around a table at the Finch Lane Gallery. Music thanatologist Catharine DeLong’s musical responses to the rapidly drying Great Salt Lake inform her playing for the Death Café.

Climate writer and activist Ash Sanders will guide participants to voice and write their griefs about drought, habitat and species loss, wildfire, pollution, or even loss of innocence about the natural world. These short texts will become part of a Grief Shrine installation by Copenhagen artist Anne Louise Blicher and an algorithmic poem to be archived in the Climate Thanatology digital exhibit. Additional elements of the laboratory include a Lost Species Walk with artist-designed animal icons to be carried by each participant, sound art developed from DeLong’s harp music, and an interactive shadow-art performance with guides in nineteenth-century mourning dress and bird masks.

The overarching goal is not to remain in mourning but to create a pause for community formation around slowness, listening, and criticality about carbon-dependent ways of life, so that new imaginaries can emerge.

Heidi Hart, who is the curator of this project, is an Art & Humanities Research Fellow with SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen. She received her B.A. from the University of Utah, where she also worked as an Interdisciplinary Research Fellow at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. She holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph.D. in German Studies from Duke University (2016). She has received an ACLS-Mellon fellowship and several grants for environmental curriculum development, as well as Utah Humanities funding for a conference on the Anthropocene at Utah State. Heidi has been an invited participant in the Kelp Congress in Norway (Lofoten International Arts Festival, 2019) and The Curatorial Thing in Copenhagen (2020), which she will co-curate in 2022. Heidi’s publications include the recent books Hanns Eisler’s Art Songs: Arguing with Beauty and Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative: Sounding the Disaster. She also serves as a Nonresident Senior Research Fellow in the Environment & Climate program of the European Center for Populism Studies.