Kristina Lynae’s “Flesh and Sinew” at The Gallery at Library Square in Salt Lake City.

Kristina Lynae’s Flesh and Sinew, on view at The Gallery at Library Square through October 10, turns to the human body—deconstructed, recombined, and reimagined—to probe questions of identity, intimacy, and fragmentation in the present day.

Born in California in 1999 and based in Salt Lake City, Lynae came to collage relatively recently, after completing a degree in film and media arts at the University of Utah in 2021. The influence of cinema is clear in her work: her images feel edited rather than composed, with the razor of the scalpel standing in for the cut of film. Her earlier experiments, shared online, reveal a playful approach to juxtaposition: televisions broadcasting skulls, legs dancing across checkerboard floors, fruit erupting from draped fabric.

With Flesh and Sinew, the work sharpens, the focus narrows and the body becomes central. These collages slice into images of flesh—isolating torsos, limbs, and gestures—only to reassemble them in stark, reverent compositions that render the body newly strange, yet newly affecting.

Since the First World War, when Hannah Höch and other Dadaists began fragmenting photographs of the human form, collage has been a medium uniquely suited to interrogating how bodies are represented, commodified, and controlled, often showing the body as a collection of fragments, fantasies, and histories stitched together. Many of Lynae’s collages, by contrast, move gently against this grain: while they deconstruct, they do so not only to dismantle but also to reassemble with care, offering images of the body that feel less like attacks on representation than acts of recognition and regard.

“Crease”

Some works in Flesh and Sinew lean into the sensuality of the fragment: stockings, painted nails, and high heels appear as markers of desire, though handled with subtlety rather than vulgarity. Elsewhere, a different tension emerges—hands enclosing bodies, or a larger hand enveloping a smaller one—gestures that edge toward violence or possession. These moments remind us that collage has long carried a critical charge, exposing the body as a site of power, control, and fantasy. Lynae does not deny these histories; instead, she threads them carefully into her work. The result is an ambiguity in which intimacy and danger are held in delicate balance, a reminder that fragmentation can reveal not only beauty but also the shadow of constraint.

In Lynae’s most successful works, a cut is a negation of wholeness, but also an opening into new visual and emotional truths. By slicing bodies apart, she reveals unexpected continuities: the curve of a shoulder mirrored in the sweep of a thigh, the echo of flesh in negative space. The cut is not an end but a beginning—a way of remapping physical form to uncover new resonances.

What distinguishes Flesh and Sinew is its restraint. Against crisp fields of white, Lynae’s figures float, stripped of context. A shoulder becomes an abstraction. A thigh turns architectural. The absence of background heightens the viewer’s attention to form, curve, and gesture. Fragmentation often risks suggesting violence, but here it does not. Her collages do not brutalize the body; they honor it. The effect is one of quiet intensity. Rather than spectacle, these works invite contemplation. They are small in scale, requiring viewers to draw close, creating a sense of intimacy. Flesh appears not grotesque, but vulnerable, resilient, and deeply human as the works allow us to linger in that in-between space where fragility and beauty converge.

“Crab”

Flesh and Sinew, Gallery at Library Square, Salt Lake City, through October 10.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.