Hannah McBeth

Abstraction broke onto the art landscape of different countries at different times, but often as a response to disillusionment with the narrative art relied on previous knowledge of religious or mythical stories. Instead, abstraction provided a totally self-referential possibility, where an artist created their own code of line, form, color, and material, with their own identity dictating the direction of the abstraction.

Filling the gallery space at the Main Library in Salt Lake City with a vivid marriage of opposing elements—made and found, organic and human-made, real and reflected, flat and three-dimensional, natural and civilized— “Ditchbank” features paintings by Downy Doxey-Marshall and sculpture by Heidi Moller Somsen. The show’s title alludes to the two artists’ shared interest in the “shaggy unkempt wild places, existing just beyond our manicured yards,” or the wilderness that pushes through the cracks of the urban environment.

McPhie tells me that early in her adulthood, navigating her roles as mother, wife, and individual was the first challenge to becoming a professional artist. Inspired by folk art and her love of family life, McPhie’s paintings in Seasons focus on domesticity, story telling, imagination, and, centrally, cycles of personal and natural transformation.

Thanks to Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein storming the art world in the 1960s, scenes from comic books, graphic novels, and newspaper advertisements don’t look totally foreign in art gallery space. However, animation and illustration are still separated from the serious business of producing “high-brow” art by critics and audience members alike. On exhibit at the Rio Gallery, Under the Influence sees local Utah artists challenge these kinds of social and cultural categorizations and explore animation’s role in their personal artistic developments.

Viewers can see signature Vehar-Evanoff techniques in the works that make up Submerged Reflection. Pieces in the exhibit are on large canvases — “Untitled I” and “Untitled II” are each 48” x 48”, while “Submerged II” and “Untitled III” are 60” x 48”.

Notifications pinging and screens flashing: the average person’s day is filled with hundreds of stimuli demanding attention. In The Human Condition, philosopher Hannah Arendt writes that the point at which the world passed into modernity is when people stopped striving for the vita contemplativa (a life of contemplation) and began idolizing the vita activa (a life of action). Constant doing and accomplishing leaves little time to sit and relax.

Finally, one of the most striking works in the exhibit—also in the form of an imposing structure made of repeating objects—is Kimball’s “Five Thousand Souls.” The piece is made of 5,000 pairs of clean white sneakers, stacked in high rows that reach the eye level of an adult. The text alongside the piece explains that in the last few years, vendors on European streets have begun selling scores of used shoes. When the origins of the shoes were traced, authorities discovered that scavengers have been finding shoes and other possessions washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean, where an estimated 5,000 refugees have drowned since the beginning of the refugee crisis.

If you reached into your refrigerator and pulled out a carton of plump strawberries, only to find they’re covered in fuzzy, circular patches of fungus, you’d grimace and throw them away, right? You’d hardly examine the tiny, flowering patterns of decay and growth. But fascination with such microscopic details, which show how plush organic material changes over time, is one element that makes Naomie Marine’s drawings and soft sculptures alluring.

Exhibiting at Modern West Fine Art, the traditionally trained painter Ben Steele chooses subjects that hark back to a nostalgic American childhood. From Washington and educated first at the University of Utah and then at the apprenticeship program in Helper—under the instruction of David Dornan and Paul Davis—Steele’s Western background informs pieces that are emotionally charged because of their engagement with American symbols.

In his new exhibit, Ryoichi Suzuki’s carved, flowing forms of wood and stone punctuate two rooms in Salt Lake City’s A Gallery. In each sculpture on display, Suzuki uses different stone or wood to produce elongated and graceful organic forms. A native of Japan, Suzuki’s subjects hark back to shapes found in Japanese paintings and Zen gardens, but he also received his BFA and MFA from USU and has spent extensive time studying, creating, and living in Utah.

If somehow the primal essences of cult horror movies, ‘80s arcade games, abandoned amusement parks, and pulp sci-fi magazines were smashed together, Elmer Presslee’s art might have been fused from the resulting debris. Although many elements feel familiar—callbacks to subcultures of the 1970s and 1980s—Presslee’s style is so distinct that the whole body of work feels new and cohesive. Each detailed and polished piece in Unprovoked Collaborations looks like it was plucked from a terrifying univer

The short wall text near the entrance of the gallery space speaks of regeneration and reinvigoration of the discarded, broken, and useless that can be found in a marriage of contrasting materials.