Scott Durant’s mixed media works.

The downstairs gallery at Bountiful Davis Art Center hosts the staff group show — a fitting metaphor for what lies beneath the institution above. Paintings, pottery, sculptures, mixed media. Self-taught and art-school trained. The variety is a showcase of the different approaches that make this fine center of local art happen, while offering a glimpse into the brains behind its decisions and curations.

Kristi Libutti Burton’s family dining photo series is among the strongest work here. Her Easter Sunday image captures the full aesthetic of the holiday—lacey, pastel hues, time spent with elders; butter shaped like a lamb; rolls passed hand to hand; cousins shoutin funny lore across the table. The serialized project finds fascination in the subtleties of change over time: what remains integral to tradition, what quietly shifts.

Carter Radcliffe’s mixed-media collage “Human Intervention” assembles canyon walls, rolling hills, and thermal terraces into a landscape over which a large, classically rendered hand descends, fingertips just grazing the rock. The torn edges of the collaged sky are left visible, keeping the image’s constructed seams present even as the panorama pulls you in.

Scott Durant’s wall pieces mix mediums into abstract, textural hangings. In his more figurative work, mosaic tiles and ceramics shape fine ladies in well-to-do hats—the kind of garden sculptures that would keep you and the birds company in the shade of a backyard maple.

Photo by Kristi Libutti Burton

Photo by Sara Serratos

Sara Serratos, the education and exhibitions director, who had a wonderful show in the upstairs gallery at UMOCA this year, is showing various works throughout the gallery, both in this exhibit and upstairs in the group show Anthropocene. Here, some older works show their early play with a sense of nostalgia and loss, weaving photos, distorting their photography, creating a sense of fading memory.

BDAC has a strong ceramics program, and the staff reflect that: Bronson Burningham’s ceramics resemble ancient Thai temples, with multi-tiered ornate facades. The pieces carry an urn-like quality, as though meant to hold something sacred. One mug’s handle takes an unexpected turn—octopus tentacle, suckers and all. Madison Hansen etches her signature whimsy onto mugs and vases: the house from Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro” on one, intricately painted countryside homes on another. Lindsay McBride’s stoneware reads like excavation, a torso pushing through teal glaze like coral growth. Victoria Brown’s paired celadon vessels explore the same ruffled form under different pressures.

Ceramics by Bronson Burningham (front) and Victoria Brown.

Paintings by Theresa Otteson and Sherry Meidell, and Jessica Bedingfield’s small, meticulous drawings round out a show that, without stating it, demonstrates something about the creative spirit coursing through a community arts center. The range on view speaks to the phases and seasons artists move through: the novel experimentation, the dialing in of personal process, the way one project quietly informs the next. It’s the practices of the people on the inside — their evolutions, their ongoing conversations with their own work and with each other — that give a place like BDAC its vibrancy.

Sarina Villareal Ehrgott, “Memory Preservation”

Director Sarina Villareal Ehrgott is represented downstairs by colorful, semi-abstract paintings, but it is her installation upstairs that speaks most directly to what that foundation is for. “Memory Preservation” suspends plastic bags of water, binder-clipped to wire, each holding a cutting or flower — caught between living and gone. It is the creative spirit at the heart of these staff members, their practices and their care, that holds something like this in suspension. Trying to keep it from slipping away.

Undercurrent, Bountiful Davis Art Center, Bountiful, through June 19.

Genevieve Vahl

Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.