The Burning Hope of Artist Collin Bradford

Glen Nelson: How did you get into it, to be an artist? Is that from childhood or does it come later?

Collin Bradford: No, I started as an electrical engineering major at BYU. I had taken art classes in high school; I had a really good art teacher. I enjoyed it a lot, but planned on becoming an engineer and spent my first semester figuring out that that wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. I had a small portfolio of work from high school, and I took it to the department chair at that time, who was Robert Marshall, because it was past the time to apply to the department. He kind of accepted me to be an art student. And then I went on a mission, and I didn't know what I was going to do. I came back just insatiably curious about all sorts of things, and also more in love with the Spanish language than I knew what to do with. So I kept studying art. I started doing a lot of stuff in math and computer science and philosophy, and ended up getting degrees in Spanish Translation and Art. And the truth is, art was where I felt like I was at home, it's where I found the most interesting people. It's where we had the most interesting conversations. It's where you could think about anything else. All the other things I was interested in fit into art. It felt like a great place to be. But I also loved my Spanish Translation degree and ended up working for a bit as a legal translator and interpreter and then going to grad school in art. 

Glen Nelson: That's very cool. I didn't know any of that stuff. Let's talk a little bit about New Genre and interdisciplinary art making. If you're describing that to somebody who's outside of the art world, how would you define those terms? 

Collin Bradford: Those are terms for things that nobody actually knows what to call because we kind of all inherit ideas about what art is and what art does and what artists do from the culture around us. People are really familiar with things like painting and sculpture and ceramics and things like that. We use the word New Genre, or New Genres, here at BYU. Some universities call that New Media or things like that. So artists since, we'll say, the mid 20th century, have been working with materials and methods that are outside of the traditional materials and methods like painting and printmaking and ceramics, and that includes things like performance and video and sound. And then the interdisciplinary part of that is just where art intersects with other ways of knowing, other ways of thinking. Those could be academic disciplines, but they don't have to be. Somebody could make art that lives at the intersection between contemporary art and fashion, for example. So there are lots of interdisciplinary ways of making, but one of the things that I've done here in the department is work with students who are interested in finding how their making as artists can be fed by, or intersect with, their other interests.

Glen Nelson: Wow. Those are the works of yours that I first noticed, the kind of work that you're just describing. Okay, a work from 2007 is titled Accelerating the Sunset (by riding a bicycle away from the sun as fast as I can). It's a side by side video of a sunset. On the left is a video of a stationary camera pointed at the sunset. On the right is a video made by mounting a camera to the back of your bicycle and riding away as fast as you can. So first of all, I mean, I love it. I love everything about this piece, I have to tell you. But first of all, it's a beautiful image. And second, there's a subtle difference between the two. And the main point for me though, is considering how things I see all the time can be reimagined by playing with how they're presented. It's a little trippy, too, I will admit. It's kind of like a DIY time travel. So how did you come up with this idea?

Collin Bradford: Well, I lived in central Illinois, which is the flattest place you can imagine. The biggest hills within 10 miles of my house were highway overpasses. And because of that the curvature of the earth actually, it matters a lot more than here in Utah, for example, because the mountains kind of overshadow the subtle curvature of the earth. But being in a place like Central Illinois, in some ways the piece grows out of, to use like an academic-y word, existential things like, what does it mean that my body is made out of stuff that came out of the ground, right? And what does it mean to be made out of the earth and then live on this chunk of rock that spins around at the speed that it does and orbits the star that it does? And what volition do I have in all of that? So, in some ways, by attempting to assert volition in how fast the sun sets, I'm also like, it's absurd. And it's futile, because I have to go back home to the same house. And any amount that I changed time by accelerating the sunset is returned to normal when I go back home, essentially,

Glen Nelson: Well, your watch doesn't show any differences.

Collin Bradford: No, the watch doesn't show any differences. It's just that by being further to the east, because the sun sets earlier in the East, by moving my body further to the east on the Earth's surface during that hour that the sun is going down, if you watch it, you can see the sun actually does set earlier in the view from the back of my bike. I rode 18 miles or something like that. And that's far enough that you can see it be eclipsed by the horizon line, maybe a minute before the other one.

Glen Nelson: There's a fair amount of contemporary art about time, moving through time and works that are connected to the passage of time. My favorite of these works is Christian Marclay's The Clock from 2010. It's a 24 hour video montage that shows 24 hours worth of film clips spliced together where timepieces are on screen, and it's shown in installations synchronized to the local time where it's exhibited. Actually, that piece just knocks me out, like completely. Why is time such a great subject for art, because there really are quite a few works connected to it as a theme. Are artists trying to document a moment in time or trying to capture something that's fleeting in time? 

Collin Bradford: Maybe I'll just answer for myself. I don't know how many other artists this will resonate for. But for me, time is something that is a little bit like the ocean, or like the night sky. It puts you in relation to something bigger than yourself. I'm particularly interested in the way we think of time, or we mark time, or we experience time in relation to the earth, in relation to the stars, in relation to the sun. It's all in relation to things that are much bigger than us. We might get into this a little bit later, but here in Utah, I step out of my front door, and I look at the mountains there to the east, and the lowest layers of those mountains - you have all the other layers created by sedimentation - and those lowest layers were made three or five hundred million years ago. And so I'm looking at an amount of time that my mind can't understand. I like being humbled by time and by the earth. I think it helps me keep a better perspective.

Glen Nelson: You know, philosophers trying to describe all of this could use a lifetime's worth of books writing about this. But one of the amazing things about art works, and your piece too, is you capture quite a bit of that in a very short video. There's just this compression of an idea in visual art that can be pretty amazing sometimes. It doesn't always work, and it's hard to land on the great idea, which is part of the idea of conceptual art, right?

Collin Bradford: Yeah, something I tell my students sometimes is that if what you're trying to do with art can be stated in a sentence or a couple of sentences, then maybe it's not quite worth doing as art yet. Maybe you have some work to do to find what can't be said in a couple of sentences. A parallel to that is that what art is good at, or what art does, is it can make ideas available to our minds and to our emotions, directly through our senses instead of having to pass through the linguistic part of our brain. So you can feel an idea rather than having to think through it logically. The idea is that they become experienced in a physical way instead of in an abstracted, mental way.

Glen Nelson: You should be a teacher. That's very well said. 

Collin Bradford: [laughs] Thanks. 

Glen Nelson: Another video work that really grabbed me is End Light from 2016. Although I'll tell you, I can't explain what's going on at all. But there's a series of video images in it - is that your son who is in it?

Collin Bradford: That's my son, yeah.

Glen Nelson: …interacting with spaces and light fixtures and other kinds of industrial spaces. I mean, I'm terrible at explaining this. Could you set it up a little bit? It's a short film.

Collin Bradford: Sure, the whole thing is shot in a library. And it was a brand new library that had a new book storage and retrieval system that is this huge multi-story vault full of stainless steel bins that are maybe four feet by three feet by a foot and a half deep. So ninety percent of the library's collection is in these big stainless steel boxes. And the vault is just this huge grid that's several stories tall, and there's a robot crane. When you want to book, you find it in their catalog, and then you push a button to request it. The robot crane goes and gets the stainless steel box that contains that book and brings it to this window where there's a library employee who finds the actual book out of the fifty or whatever that are in the box. And then you can get the book from the employee. It's where I used to teach at Grand Valley State University. 

Glen Nelson: I would have never guessed that it was a library because it feels very industrial. But it's kind of new and cool looking.

Collin Bradford: Another thing I sometimes tell my students is that whatever you make now that you totally believe in and you think is amazing, you'll likely be embarrassed by it at some point in your future, and not embarrassed like, "Oh, it's terrible," but it's something that I grew from and that I've maybe moved toward other things from. That grew out of thinking about how, there are a couple of writers, Deleuze and Guattari, who wrote about a shift from modernist ways of organizing information that are based on logic and reason and math and the grid and branching structures to the ways that we organize information now that are especially true in the internet. They use the word rhizomatic, which comes from biology, it's like aspen trees or rhizomes, and what it is, is that they send out shoots underground, and there's a huge network of interconnected nodes and there's no hierarchy. So when you see an aspen forest, it's often all one single organism, and there's no hierarchy among the different trunks. So this library system was a weird embodiment of something that was super modernist, and something that was super postmodern. The premise of it is that I'm trapped in this system, and my son, who is able to navigate the rhizome because he's able to access the computer system that governs the whole library, he is able to send me things by requesting books, and therefore these bins come to the window. And so he can request a book, and then send it back, and we can exchange information in that way. And then eventually, he kind of helps me figure out how to escape the system. And at the end of it, I crawl into one of the bins, and I ride that bin on the robot crane into the storage system in the belly of the library, and I'm able to escape.

Glen Nelson: Don't quiz me on any of that!

Collin Bradford: It feels super convoluted to me now. And like I said, it's something that I made, and I'm happy I made it. I don't show it anymore really. It doesn't feel like a part of what I'm doing anymore. It feels like it requires way too much explanation.

Glen Nelson: Yeah, I get that. I like the vibe of it a lot. If I'm watching an art work that's in the medium of video, I put away my expectations of it being linear, of it being narrative. I just go into it and let it wash over me. I try to figure out what is happening. But I also let myself just free associate or whatever. On the other hand, if I'm in a movie theater, and I have popcorn in my hand, I'm really uncomfortable if I don't know exactly what's going on every second. So how do you respond to video works that you see in museums and galleries? Are you a patient person, an impatient person? How do you process what you're seeing?

Collin Bradford: I'm pretty patient. But I guess I'll put it this way. Doing art for my life means that often when I'm looking at art, I have to be selective about what I give my time to. Because I go to New York for a week to look at art, and you know that there's more art to see in a week than I can see. And so, because I've spent my life with it, I can maybe sometimes figure out, “Oh, I kind of understand what this person is doing.” And maybe I'm not the audience for this one. Right? I'm not interested in making decisions about, this is good or bad. I'm more interested in, "Does this speak to me? Am I the right audience for this thing?" And so sometimes I can sense, "Oh, this isn't made for me, or maybe I'm not made for this." But often with video art, you have to give it some time. And I love how you just described your approach to experiencing video art because I think a lot of people carry their assumptions from the context of cinema and television into an art museum or gallery, when they see time-based work, and video art operates in a different kind of way. Often it's not narrative, it's more meant to be felt than understood as a story with characters or things like that. Anyway, you get it.

Glen Nelson: When I go to a museum, I'm dismayed looking at other people looking at art because they're just speed reading. They might as well just be on rollerskates going through a gallery. That's how much time they're spending in front of artwork. Video requires a whole other thing. You can speed read through video too. I've done that. I've sometimes gone into a room and said for one reason or another, "Okay, that's not for me," and I've turned around. But there's no way that I can think that I'm looking in depth at a video with a quick scan of it. I have to let it seep in, right. 

Collin Bradford: Yeah, you got to spend at least a minute or two. And even then, you don't know what's going to happen. Maybe there's a cut. You walk out of the gallery and at that cut, it becomes something totally different. Yeah, it's an interesting challenge, both for viewers and for artists.

Glen Nelson: I think most people think about artists, and they're imagining things that can hang on walls, you referenced this a little bit earlier. Your works include frameable things. I love the suite of drawings titled Temporary Arrangement. I love those pieces so much. I hope that's an ongoing series that I can see in person someday.

Collin Bradford: Yeah, I'd like to keep making them. 

Glen Nelson: But you're not limited to that. So, what are some of the kinds of works, media wise, that you've been working on, let's say in the last ten years?

Collin Bradford: Well, artists just get used to being asked, when somebody finds out they're an artist, the first question is almost always, "What kind of art do you make?" I don't love that question, just because it doesn't have a super easy answer. But what I often say is, I don't work in a specific medium, or with a specific set of materials. But instead, for the past eight or ten years, I've been making work that centers around how we relate to the land, and what geology and land and the Earth's processes have to do with me as a sentient being. That takes the form of photography sometimes, that takes the form of video, that takes the form of drawings, and I've been making some sculptural work recently. The medium or the materials that things end up getting made in generally just happens in response to what the ideas are and what it feels like it would be best to do them in. There are some things like, I'm not a super skilled painter, so painting just isn't the right way for me to make things. But in other things, yeah, I can draw, I can take photographs. And I don't do that flippantly. I try to really learn the crafts. But yeah, I don't have the ability to sit still in one medium for too long. 

Glen Nelson: I work with composers a little bit, I write texts for them. The question that I get is, "What comes first, the words are the music?" That's the age-old question. For you, does the idea come first, and you try to say, okay, which of the media that I have at my disposal would be the best fit for that? Or do you start working with media and say, oh, this would actually be an interesting way to talk about this range of ideas that I've got for it?

Collin Bradford: It happens in both directions, and most often it is less clean than one perfectly preceding the other. Because I use a camera quite a bit, there are things in the world that I'm like, oh, that thing, I could do something with photographs of that thing that could go somewhere interesting. I had an idea for a piece that used a hospital bed, like ten years ago. And I just sat on it because I didn't have a hospital bed, and I didn't have a studio big enough to have it taken up by a hospital bed. And then my circumstances changed. I made a bunch of different work. The things that I thought I was going to do with that hospital bed, I never made. But then I got a hospital bed because I was like, oh, wow, this thing that I'm doing now, these things that I'm thinking about now, totally make sense in terms of what I was planning to do previously, but I just sat on it for a decade. So, it's often just that I get an idea, oh, that'd be an interesting thing to try. And eventually, these ideas fit with this physical or technical or material thing that I've been thinking about. So normally the process is a little more interwoven than one proceeding the other.

Glen Nelson: Is the hospital bed piece finished?

Collin Bradford: So I've made two things with this hospital bed, actually. As long as you buy a hospital bed. So the first thing that I made was a video installation. I took the mattress off of the bed and I hacked into the electronics that control the bed going up and down. And I mounted a projector where a person's head would lie if that person were in the bed. So as the bed goes up and down, it moves the projection from the ceiling to the wall of the room. And then the person lies back down and it goes back up to the ceiling. The image being shown by the projection is a really slow scan of a mother tree in a forested area of some mountains here nearby. So you're just going really slowly tilting up toward the top of the tree and then down. As the projection moves up and down, it kind of goes in and out of sync with the camera going up and down. So sometimes it seems like you're looking up in the real world and other times they're going in opposite directions. Then I kind of assembled some rocks on the bed in approximately the shape of a human skeleton. So I made that thing and then I made a thing that was at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art this past year [2023]. I flipped the bed upside down and I made essentially a death mask of myself. When somebody dies, sometimes they'll make a plaster cast of their face. So I made my own face and it's in white and it's mounted to the bottom of the bed. But now when the bed goes up and down instead of the back of it just tilting up, it kind of kneels upward and then it flattens itself back down onto the ground and then it kneels upward. I put a big pile of dirt under it so that as the bed goes down, it presses my face into the dirt and then when it goes back up, it leaves the negative impression of my face in the dirt.

Glen Nelson: I love that piece. The “face plant piece,” as I called it. But I didn't make the connection. When you were talking about a hospital bed, I thought, wait, I don't even know what he's talking about. But now when you describe those two works, OK. Worth the wait, is what I would say about that. Let's talk a little bit about Mesa. The exhibition in Mesa is thrilling to me because these three curators - Heather Belnap, Ashley Whitaker Evans, and Brontё Hebdon - are telling a story of artists who have an LDS connection and are talking about their identity in some way. What those identities consist of, it runs a broad range, which is sort of the point. But again, the title of the show is Materializing Mormonism: Trajectories in Contemporary Latter-day Saint Art. They had selected a work of yours to be included in the show, and then kind of at the last minute, the museum had a video room open up. So instead of just being a video monitor on the wall hung next to other works in the show, it's given the full museum installation treatment. You were probably pretty happy to hear that, is my guess. 

Collin Bradford: Yeah, I was thrilled. That work got exhibited once, and I didn't really know how it was going to be installed. It ended up on a little tiny screen, and it just didn't work as I intended. So I was thrilled. I really intend for that piece to be experienced in a bodily way.

Glen Nelson: Let's talk a little bit about it. It's called A Burning Hope from 2021. It's a one-minute video that I imagine is being shown on a loop. Is that right? 

Collin Bradford: Yeah, I don't think of it as having a duration. It's just a continuous loop, and I worked so that you can't see any seam in the loop. So it just goes on forever. 

Glen Nelson: The image is a lake at sunset, I believe, and there are four huge letters that are on some kind of fixed mounts that stick out of the water. They are H-O-P-E (hope), and these block letters have been set on fire. So the experience of the video is watching the word “hope” ablaze. Is that basically the description of it?

Collin Bradford: Yeah, it's a good description.

Glen Nelson: It's striking, mysterious, beautiful, dramatic, lots of different possibilities for interpretation here. I'm not necessarily sure I want you to be the one to give your reading of it. I think artists kind of hate doing that or being asked to do it, but you did give it a title of A Burning Hope. So I imagine that one reading of it is literal. Religious people like me talk about a burning faith in terms of courage and enthusiasm. Maybe I'm in a darker mood right now, but I also see the word “hope” going up in flames. I read one too many newspaper articles today, I think that's what that means. If you were invited to speak at the museum right now after the work was shown, what kind of gallery chat would you give about this work? 

Collin Bradford: Sometimes I am hesitant to pin down meanings in a work of art, but I'm happy to talk about ranges of potential meanings. You kind of laid out the spectrum there a little bit. It grew initially out of despair at what we're doing to the planet. This is another one that I kind of had the idea and then I was like, oh, no, I'm not going to do it. I just sat on it. I realized that the initial idea might have grown out of one way of thinking or a kind of experience that I was having, thinking about my kids and all of the things that since the 90s we've been projecting would be happening with extreme weather patterns. And then because of those extreme weather patterns, changes in what parts of the earth are habitable or are able to be used in the ways that they have been, and how that'll drive migrations, and how those migrations will drive political crises. That stuff, it weighs on me a lot. I'm leaving that land, that earth to my children and to the world's children. So, I decided at one point, I'm gonna make this thing. And so I made these eight foot tall letters - yeah, they're big- and built this structure to support them and found a place where I was pretty certain I wouldn't start a wildfire. I really put a lot of thought into the time of year that I was doing it, where I was doing it, how easily I could extinguish the fire if I needed to, and all that kind of stuff. Nobody wants to be the newspaper story about somebody starting a wildfire. 

Glen Nelson: Yeah, I wouldn't think so. 

Collin Bradford: Yeah. So I had somebody help me do it. We'd lit the letters on fire and about 13 seconds in, there were some cinders that started floating upward from the letters that I hadn't really anticipated. We were in a part of the lake that was really shallow, but you could go about 100 feet out and still be able to stand. So we were a long way from shore, but those cinders could float. So I said, no we need to extinguish it. So we went and we knocked the letters over into the water. I didn't know what I'd do with it. I had 13 seconds of footage, and it was then, it was actually from that limitation that I realized this thing could become a loop and then it becomes more complicated. Its potential meanings expand because, yes, it's hope being consumed by flames, and then it's also hope that burns forever. The title, at first I was like, is it too much of a pun? But I think it really embodies the two things: facing the hard things that bring real despair and then finding hope in the face of that kind of despair. 

Glen Nelson: I don't know when I saw it, but I saw it when it was new, and I immediately loved it, Collin. I really do. I think your work is really great, and anybody listening can easily go to see it. If somebody wants to see this video or the other works that you have, where would they go? 

Collin Bradford: If you just Google my name, or you can go to CollinBradford.art. I have two L's in my first name, so it's collinbradford.art. 

Glen Nelson: I don't want to end our chat with you before we talk about the future a little bit, since you've been saying that you're concerned about it. Let's talk about education. So here you are. You're working at a university. You're interested in art and the trajectories of it. That's what new art is all about, really, is what's going to happen next in a way. And you kind of have a front row seat at a university working with artists who are like you and completely unlike you. If you had to generalize and give a few different answers for this, where is their head at these days? 

Collin Bradford: I think I would say that there's no one place, and that just as the art world has become incredibly and richly diverse, so are our students in the kinds of things that they're thinking about. I would say that there is an intense kind of sincerity in the work they're making. The art world that I grew up in had a lot of irony and sarcasm, a lot of detached coolness. I see just real genuineness in not just my students, but in what young artists are doing today. There's an intensity and a real belief in each other, in people, in moral or ethical issues. People are doing all kinds of different things in relation to identity and in relation to conceptual things and technology and the earth and all that different kind of stuff. But I would say that what marks our time is a return to sincerity. 

Glen Nelson: I came across a pretty well-known quotation by Ira Glass, who's a radio personality and hosts series like This American Life and other programs on National Public Radio, Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and so on. In this quotation, he's speaking directly to people just starting out in their art career. I think he's talking to writers specifically, but I believe it applies universally. I'll just read it. 

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish somebody told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there's this gap. For the first couple of years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you're still in this phase, you got to know, it's normal. And the most important thing you can do is a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's going to take a while. It's normal to take a while, but you've just got to fight your way through.” 

So I'd love to know your reaction to that, whether that rings true to you. 

Collin Bradford: I've shared that with students in the past and there's a lot I like about it and there's a little bit that I don't. Maybe I'll start with what I don't so that we can talk about what it does offer students. So what I don't like about it is the concept of taste, because the concept of taste is messy and gets tied up in socioeconomic issues and in class and stuff like that. And another thing I don't one hundred percent like is that there's a way that taste can be tied up also in external validation. And all I mean by that is that I need to make something that lives up to this standard or somebody's expectations or something like that. But he's absolutely right that when you make something, and I would assume that he knows this, and it's true for me too, I make things that don't turn out very good all the time. I start down a path and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna try this thing out, and I try it out and I'm like, yeah, that's not doing what I hoped that it'd do. And sometimes it means that it's a path that's just not going to be fruitful, and sometimes it means that I need to keep working on it. I have to be able to sense if there's something further down that path. Something that I really like about what he said is that you just have to make a lot of work, and that can be discouraging if your only motivation for making the work is some hypothetical, unknown time in the future when your work will be good. Something that I feel like he left out, but I know that actually is true for Ira Glass, is that he makes the work because he loves it, right? Anybody who's listened to the work that he's done knows that he just loves doing it. And so I think something that's so important for people who are growing as artists, which is every artist, is that you have to find a way for what you're doing to come out of love, and for you to love that thing so that you can keep making it, so that it's not drudgery, so that it's not discouraging, so that the journey of making the thing and continuing to make things is enriching enough to carry you through it. And that's the only way that you'll be able to sustain the making to get to where Ira Glass is, where he can make just amazing things time after time after time. I think that excellence in the way that he's talking about it is a worthy goal, but I think it's really only possible when you love the thing so much that it'll carry you through it. 

Glen Nelson: So what do you love right now? What's next for you? What are you working on? 

Collin Bradford: I have a colleague named Daniel Everett. You know Daniel. Something he sometimes says is that artists only have maybe one or two good ideas in them. 

Glen Nelson: They have a small number of breakthroughs, maybe. 

Collin Bradford: Yeah, yeah, that's what he means. Most of us aren't going to revolutionize thing after thing after thing. But you find a thing that you can sit with and that you can stay with. And for me, that's ideas around just the wild - Adam Miller would call it grace or privilege or whatever - blessing of getting to be a sentient being made out of little bits of the earth, assembled into consciousness for a couple of decades. What a wild privilege to get to live embedded into the cycles of life and matter, and to sense myself in all of that. I feel like I'm going to be working in this vein for a long time. I'm making more work about rocks. I'm making work about this one little area that's on the backside of Kyhv Peak, in Provo. It's on the backside of the mountain and within about one hundred yards, there's one area that's an old fir forest, a mature fir forest that's been devastated by bark beetles. All the trees are dead and all the branches have fallen from the trees. They don't have any bark on them, and so the wood is bleached white. It looks like the entire ground is covered with bones. It's just such a haunting place. And then within a couple 100 feet of that is an area that in my mind I call it the nursery. It's got just an uncountable, just thousands and thousands of thousands of fir and maple and gambel oak saplings. So many baby trees. Everywhere you step, the ground is covered with baby trees. In some ways it's like A Burning Hope, that you see this just absolute devastation and despair at the devastation, and then see so much potential for the future in this area of saplings. So I'm making work back in that area, in relation to that area, thinking about the same kinds of things: the earth cycles, life cycles, time, hope, how to keep hope in the face of despair. 

Glen Nelson: Sounds amazing. I'm so glad to have interviewed you today, Collin. It really was wonderful talking with you. Thanks for your generosity and your willingness to chat for a few minutes. Listeners, I encourage you to go to the Center's website and take a look at the Mesa exhibition, Materializing Mormonism, Trajectories in Contemporary Latter-day Saint Art. The exhibition opened May 10th and continues through August 4th, 2024. On behalf of everybody at the Center, thanks for listening. You can look back over several years of artist interviews by going to our website, centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org. Goodbye.

Transcription by Erin Eastmond.