THE UTAH EXQUISITE CORPSE PROJECT

 The Utah Exquisite Corpse Project is a series of collaborative paintings and drawings created by 58 Utah artists. Each piece is divided into several panels, with a different artist painting each one in ignorance of what the other participants are doing. The only clues telling each artist what to paint are the knowledge of where their panel is in relation to the whole, and lines or colors left at the top of their panel by the previous artist. The project was inspired by games played in the 1920s and ‘30s by the Surrealists in Paris. The name Exquisite Corpse (translated from the French Cadavre Exquis) came from the phrase “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine,” which was generated from a word game played by Surrealist leader Andre Breton, Marcel Duhamel, Yves Tanguy and others around 1920. The first conceal part of the story before passing it to the next player, who continued writing from there, folding the paper again and passing it along, etc. Before long, the practice was adapted to the visual arts, with a folded sheet of paper passed from one player to the next, each of them drawing a portion of the whole and extending little marks over the folded edge to show the next artist where their lines should start. One century later, we began the project with some traditional ink-on-paper exquisite corpses (four of which are included in this collection). We then adapted the process further to create full-color paintings made up of several sections of stretched canvas or panels.

We’ve found that creating these exquisite corpses has presented us with palettes and problems we never would have encountered in our normal work, providing a valuable and challenging artistic exercise and a chance to step out of our standard routine. It also gives us a chance to partake in an unusual form of communication with other artists, second-guessing how they might interpret the cues we leave on their panel, or, from the other point-of-view, trying to infer an image of their panel from the vaguest of footprints. We hope this exhibition is equally inspiring for the viewing public and that it motivates people to create exquisite corpses of their own.