On the way to a creative life, many eager students are given advice approximately based on their interests. An avid reader might be urged to become a writer, though in truth there are numerous perfectly good and potentially more appropriate vocations for readers. One who draws compulsively may be urged to become an artist, though it’s been many years since drawing became an elective in art school, rather than an indispensable skill. Lost in the middle of this process is likely to be the inquisitive individual who enthusiastically explores the media and methods entirely for their own sake, thrilling to what she finds therein.

That may be the case with Anne Flynn, whose textile explorations are closer to assemblages than pictures: in other words, sculptures that call attention to and draw on the previous lives of their component parts. Some are textiles with an identifiable life story—as clothing, say, or something else. The various cyanotypes constitute the captured shadows of other, now absent objects: most of them natural, like the plants in “Imprinted” and the large quilts, though they may also be manufactured ones, like the typescripts reproduced in “Pages.”

Flynn speaks of these as objects containing both identity and memory, and of course from the first-person point of view, memory is most of what constitutes identity. This artist trades in copies made from life, which as much as replace memories so that they, too, become part of who she is. Effectively or otherwise, written in blue at The Gallery at Library Square can be viewed as her self-portrait.

Four of her objects—which might well comprise be one untitled “polyptych” with four parts—that are particularly provocative are “Window,” “Journal,” “Sticky Note,” and “Envelope.” It’s clear that each of these titles names a fundamental element in the universe of stationery, but they also catalog types of representation: the window is a negative cut out from one piece and sewn over another, while the journal is a positive, book-like shape in perspective. It also has its presumptive writing represented by individual stitches that add up to sentences, in recognition of something writing and sewing have in common.

In her statement, Flynn discloses that being absorbed into the fibers of cloth essentially allows the light-sensitive blue dye to become permanent. It certainly wasn’t in the past, which is why most shadowgrams and cyanotypes were small, because expendable. A major use of this technology was printing-out paper, which was used by commercial photographers to make samples that, should the client try to keep them, would fade away soon enough. Having a way to make these permanent opens up a whole new sense of scale, as is evident in the large size of the quilts, though these are initially composed of many smaller units. Still, a piece like “Grounded,” in which the three-dimensional folds present when it was made have become a permanent, illusionistic part of the final form, argues this represents a challenge conceived of and met.

Finally, while Flynn presents as an earnest phenomenologist, beneath the serious artist lurks the playfulness of a child. Bedtime stories are one of the places where we first learn to confront the instability and recklessness of the real world, and she invokes the essence of those experiences in her own “Bedtime Stories,” a house that appears conventional until a viewer realizes that its outside is paradoxically sliding into its interior. Looking further around the gallery, it becomes apparent that the magic of the artist’s shadow world does only part of its work by inverting the convention that the eye sees what is in the light and not what is in the shade. Further lessons come in the form of quilting that goes places on its own, patterns that start out like maps, and the frustrated expectations that we know where this is going and have probably been here before. Be prepared to be surprised. Be prepared to end up somewhere else. Somewhere new.

written in blue, Gallery at Library Square, Salt Lake City, through June 12.

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.