If there isn’t a narrative illustrated by “Flight of the Oculus,” viewers can be excused for inventing one. The appropriately highest panel on the wall depicts something that earlier generations would have pegged as science fiction: a drone floating in air on four spinning propellers. To the side, another panel shows a long-standing, mortal danger to humans: an avalanche of snow spilling down a mountainside. Between these two, and proving how quickly a nightmare vision may become mundane, a man, whose head is captured in a device that covers his eyes, manipulates, at waist level and seemingly blindly, another piece of machinery. He is the pilot of the drone and, presumably, the witness to the avalanche, which for the first time in human experience it is possible to regard close up, yet in perfect safety. This work comments on, and belongs at the core of, the art of Terrel VanLeeuwen.

VanLeeuwen, who wants nothing more than for those who come across his work to stop and contemplate it long enough to make a connection, had the misfortune to have a major exhibition precisely one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, when few in his audience were even aware of the handful of arts venues still open. Those viewers who were fortunate enough to make it to Bountiful Davis Art Center were met by an artist who enjoys abridging the distance between them and those places and things within which humans are drawn to seek, and to find, meaning. In addition to his family and teaching in the UVU art department, VanLeeuwen has two great passions: researching the visible world, and capturing it in ways that reveal what he’s learned about it—drawing it in conté crayon and painting it in oils.

Visual accuracy being paramount in this art, it would be redundant to limit the titles to identifying the subjects. Instead, in a gesture to past practice, the names match the intentions of the artist. The initially bizarre skull of a cephalofoil shows “The Strangeness of the Truth.” A cluster of roses, a subject Vanleeuwen identifies with his mother, is in a larger sense about “Being a Part of Something.” A bee sharing with a flower in the essence of symbiosis is also in “A Relationship,” while a flower cresting its maturity is “A Memory of Time.” Where, in the past, VanLeeuwen might have shown his drawings of nature singly, here he may show three or four together.

If he associates his mother with flowers, agents as well as symbols of life’s continuity, VanLeeuwen has always connected his father with tool use and craft, particularly the work of making things that were always a presence in his youth, and to which he points to explain his own impulse to create art. Connections are clearly central here, possibly including the verbal ones called “puns,” which can be made in images as well as words. “Fabrication” suffuses his life, which could explain the emphasis in his human figures on “fabrics”—the worn and ripped clothing, figurative and literal uniforms deliberately chosen for specific purposes, artistic as well as vocational.

There’s a whole body of paintings not present here that feature mechanical devices and, in particular, man-machine hybrids. Even his roses display an awareness of the totality of their being, including function and not just their good looks. So when, on entering the gallery, four landscapes come into view, it’s tempting to search them for signs of scientific interest. There’s nothing neutral, after all, in the exhibition being titled The Round Earth Society, thereby invoking and repudiating the pseudoscience of modern Flat Earth proponents. However, it comes to mind on further consideration that the hours required to produce so many conté crayon images, and the black oils that often preceded them, could easily produce a desire to break out some colors. Take the case of the classic view of a butte, in which the durable Navajo sandstone has protected the softer, underlying rock layers from erosion. It’s titled “Roots of the Mountain,” which Terrel VanLeeuwen knows is an inversion of cause and effect. What he may want, then, is to show that the mind of a scientist and the eye of an artist do not repel the soul of a poet.

The Round Earth Society, Bountiful Davis Art Center, Bountiful, through Sep. 21

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.