Original Artwork


Notation in Time (detail) 2004, Valerie Atkisson		Notation in Time (detail) 2004, Valerie Atkisson

Valerie Atkisson, a compelling young LDS artist whose installations and sculpture have been the increasing focus of exhibitions in New York and in the west, created original artworks for the project. Atkisson's art thematically responds to an urge to connect, typically over a broad expanse of time and cultures. Her recent, large installations of sculptures and wall paintings trace the names, stories and sites of her family history.

For example, Atkisson spent the duration of a recent exhibition in New York City's prominent gallery for emerging artists, Artists Space, in a white gallery room, scrawling onto the walls in tiny letters and numbers the names and dates of her ancestry. For an artworld public, the sight of an artist visually labeling several centuries of her own past was mesmerizing. It went beyond the scope of genealogy; her installation hit the viewer as a pure and strange detailing of a world freed of mortality.

Valerie Atkisson's other paintings, sculptures and installations have dealt with the ways one person's experience is inherited by another, the charted bestowal of legacy.

For Mormoniana, Valerie Atkisson decided to respond to the shapes and colors of musical notation throughout multiple centuries. The resulting artwork, "Notation in Time," incorporates musical marks spanning four centuries and include such diverse sources as illuminated manuscripts, Byzantine chant, Bach and Beethoven manuscripts, early American shaped-note singing, and contemporary computer-generated note-making instructions. To this found vocabulary of notational marks, Atkisson improvised landscapes of imagery that the musical notes suggested to her using the methods of a visual artist to bridge the gap between sight and sound. A goauche painting followed, ultimately culminating in a finished work which was digitally scanned and then manipulated to incorporate further imagery.

Atkisson also created an untitled drawing for the volume's cover. It is reproduced on the brown silk bookcloth of the front cover in twelve-color embroidery.

The other visual artists in the volume (selected by each composer) include two from among the earliest artists in church history--British painter Alfred Lambourne, and William Weeks who was the architect of the Nauvoo temple. The remaining artists are contemporary painters, photographers, and printmakers. They are: Monte Anderson, Ray Andrus, Natasha Brien, Matthew Day, Thomas Epting, David Linn, Jon Moe, Stephen Moore, Peter Myer, Sallie Clinton Poet, Walter Rane, Bruce Hixson Smith, V. Douglas Snow, Lane Twitchell, and Leslie Williams. Each of the artists, their estate representatives, or the holders of image rights has kindly granted permission for their works to be reproduced in the volume.