Carson Cahoon, “No Filter,” mixed media, 14×170 in.

The metal air filters should be your first clue that Carson Cahoon is interested in materials. Six of them, in a row, without comment or adornment, frame one end of his exhibit Dead or Alive, on the basement floor of the SLC Main Library, where Cahoon, a Salt Lake City-based artist, presents a body of dozens of mixed-media works that explore the relationships between material, structure, and decay.

Cahoon’s practice draws from a background in architecture and urban ecology, and that sensibility runs throughout the exhibition. Many works resemble fragments of walls, facades, or industrial remnants, their surfaces layered and eroded like the city’s own infrastructure. In several pieces, broken frame moldings and steel strips form partial enclosures around textured panels, suggesting both containment and collapse. Others, such as the suspended frame constructions, treat negative space as an active element, making the void itself a part of the composition.

The materials—cement, mesh, rusted steel, found wood, and photographic prints—carry the marks of previous use. Cahoon does not disguise their histories. These traces of wear and damage become integral to the work’s visual language so that what might otherwise appear as debris or residue is recontextualized as evidence of transformation, inviting reflection on how human systems interact with natural processes over time.

A smaller series of intimate assemblages extends this dialogue between the mechanical and the organic, expanding from the material into the metaphorical. In one, a firearm’s trigger mechanism and an animal jawbone share a single frame, forming a quiet but unsettling hybrid object. Here, technology and biology are joined as parallel artifacts—each a product of necessity, evolution, and decay.

Throughout Dead or Alive, Cahoon’s restraint is notable. The compositions rely less on overt symbolism than on the physical and visual tension between materials. The works occupy a space between sculpture and design, their meanings emerging through surface, proportion, and the traces of time embedded in matter.

Carson Cahoon, “White Night,” mixed media, 9.5×11.5 in.

Carson Cahoon: Dead or Alive, Main Library, Lower Urban Room, Salt Lake City, through Nov. 22.

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.