ILLUMINATIONS

Artist Statement:

Throughout time and space, humanity has found our past in the ground and our future in the

stars. Through patterns and documentation of these natural phenomena, we understand where we

are and how the universe operates. Illuminations seeks to recontextualize this habit of pattern

seeking and meaning making by exploring humanity’s relationship to control and that which we

have no hope of controlling. In this body of work, both artists reference not only the aesthetic

properties of light and its diverse sources, but also the idiomatic tradition that accompanies them.

While Wilson’s work imperializes celestial bodies, contorting the stars into orderly rows and

columns, Trépanier’s work traps atmospheric sources of dynamic light into static vignettes. Her

photo-based works imitate the proportions of shrines and relics, pointing toward primordial

sources of light. Both bodies of work aim to force human-made order upon wildly mysterious

and untamable entities. In this way, Illuminations examines the exchange between manipulation

and order through the lenses of cosmic and earthly light.

Artist Biographies:

Liza Trépanier Ray was born in Los Angeles in 1998 and received a BFA in Studio Art from

Brigham Young University in 2023. Trépanier Ray’s work fixates on the connections between

light and language primarily in the form of photographic objects that seem both manufactured

and organic simultaneously. Her work appropriates terrestrial light forms with highly saturated

colors and manipulates the imagery and materials to create pseudo-linguistic artifacts. Her

experimentative, material-based processes and photo-object results suggest a playful curiosity

and attitude of wonder. Trépanier Ray lives and works in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Malachi Wilson is a Canadian born artist and curator. He completed his BFA in Studio Art at

Brigham Young University in 2023, and continues to live and work in Provo, UT. Wilson uses an

interdisciplinary approach to conceptual art experiments with structural and linguistic

frameworks, material production, and ideations of self. Wilson’s work utilizes found objects and

images in pursuit of new patterns and fabrications of thought. Often this points to an exploration

of lived and transcendental spaces, using these objects and images as stepping stones to better

understand himself and the world around him.