Three works by John Sproul: “Now That It Is Gone,” “Shruggle,” and “ugh.”

When the painter John Sproul lost a beloved friend, he found a way to visually represent both the other man’s presence in life and the intensely personal experience of his loss. He produced at least 30 images in this innovative visual language, expressing both “emotional turbulence and its ability to fracture reality,” as he says in his statement. There is also a word for how to express an individual response to the loss of something we care about. We call that response grief.

Those who remember or are familiar with the history of the Sixties may recall its having been called the decade of peace, love, and understanding. Sadly, the present decade may well go down in history—if anyone can stand to remember it—as the decade of setbacks and grief. There are feelings of loss for all those who died of violence, drugs, or suicide; and for the loss of the environment, a healthy climate, sufficient water, civility, social cohesion, and the list goes on. These are just some major losses. Countless others that haven’t yet made the headlines all but guarantee that every one of us has some personal grief as well. At times, our suffering seem about to overwhelm us.

Recently, Molly Heller, a University of Utah associate professor of dance and founder of the multi-disciplinary collective Heartland, decided she should do something about all this. Something substantial. So she approached some of her colleagues, including innovators Colour Maisch and Jorge Rojas. Maisch creates artworks that replicate life processes through growth and development, then often end up by decaying. Rojas participates in social and culturally-based encounters that typically result in group-shared projects. Both were eager to collaborate and offered the use of Material, their complex of studios and gallery, for some of the events they envisioned. Not surprisingly, Material has recently become one of the hottest arts venues in the Salt Lake area.

Installation view of Grief Work at Material in Salt Lake City. Image by Geoff Wichert.

Mounting an exhibition in a gallery requires more than one level of precision. A good example can be seen in the wall title of the show they eventually went with at Material, Grief Work, below which hangs an eloquent and powerful painting by Kirsten Beitler titled “Flood Damage.” In it, Beitler symbolically reveals the experience of being “flooded” by events and feelings, all the while depicting herself as she might appear if what happened left physical marks on her and her surroundings.

Statistics tell part of the story of Grief Work. In response to their invitation, the three curators received more than 150 submissions from a mix of visual and performance artists including painters, graphics experimenters, musicians, dancers, and poets. In all, 500 works of art were considered and 150 were selected. At the same time, interest was so great that it was decided the event would become national in scope. Some performances will take place at Material, and others have yet to be announced. 15 Bytes has listings for some, and more will be added as the schedule takes shape.

Printmaker Stefanie Dykes has always freely intermingled autobiography and social concern in her work, in the compound images that fall from her fingers like so many reflexive responses to whatever she encounters as well as in the activities and organizations she generates to help in carrying out her goals. In some typically productive years she has produced three-dimensional prints, sometimes on fabric, at other times on origami-like bits of paper, and sometimes in ritual objects made from the component parts of printing but not actually completed as prints. Then recently, in response to deeply personal loss, she folded a large number of paper boats made from paper on which various words and images, which she calls “songs,” were written or printed. The idea for this meditative ritual came from the poet and author Martin Prechtel, whose book The Smell of Rain on Dust inspired her to take up a familiar folded form many of her audience probably practiced as children, making “canoes” that might float haphazardly on flowing water. Many cultures practice forms of burial that involve launching a body onto water or into the air, and such a way of bearing the remains of a lost loved one strikes a plangent chord in many mourners.

Stefanie Dykes, “First Rain Petricho”

Zoe Nicole Nielsen, “Stillborn Lamb with Straw and Yellow Meconium”

Losses suffered by others may force us to re-examine our identity and sense of purpose. When an “enemy” loses his entire family in a single blow, is that a triumph, or a tragedy? Bryan Hutchison asks us to reconsider the biblical fate of Lot, whose wife’s moment of natural human regret led to her being turned into a pillar of salt before his eyes. We may well ask, with Hutchison, what we surrender when we take arbitrary sides in a conflict we don’t own.

Clearly, there are those among us who treat animals like enemies, arbitrarily exercising powers they did nothing to earn. Increasing numbers of our own species reject such thoughtlessly depraved values in an effort to alleviate the unnecessary suffering of what we perceive as conscious and vulnerable fellow travelers. Zoe Nicole Nielsen often chooses from among them stillborn offspring, those rejected by their mothers for trivial flaws, and accidental roadkill as subjects for paintings, prints, and sculptural taxidermy that lets her seek to enkindle thinking about mortality, grief, and care on a level that some consider beneath themselves, while others consider, if anything, even more deserving.

Finally, it’s worthwhile keeping in mind how much a sense of loss can be made worse due to regret about not having done better before doing so became impossible. Anna Pottier expresses this irreparable regret in “La Tchuisine Chu Nous (Our Kitchen),” in which she conjures a time in her mother’s life before the artist was born, including her mother’s pride in her youthful accomplishments. A young wife with her own adult role and personal space was unfortunately not how Anna saw her mother, and to imagine it now is to invite her own “heart-pinching, inexpressible grief for our miscommunications.” This possibly universal experience of strife and regret across the generational chasm, over years, captured in the oddly distorted perspective of her painted image, multiplies the occasions of loss and resulting grief that even the best families experience.

Much of the suffering that makes up the 53 individual subjects of Grief Work is irreparable and unavoidable, but here art offers its audience a possible way forward to a degree of freedom from future regret, and if not, then fellow feeling in the face of shared grief.

Anna Pottier, “La Tchuisine Chu Nous (Our Kitchen)”

Grief Work, Material Gallery, South Salt Lake, through Apr. 10

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.