One of Sbarge’s 3-D printed hybrid creatures—part bison, part human—faces a solitary egg in the foreground, set within the larger installation of Anomalies at OCA. Part of her large-scale “Conjuring” can be seen in the rear.

At the entrance to Ogden Contemporary Arts, a large video screen scrolls through 30 candid photos of New Mexico’s Suzanne Sbarge, OCA’s current visiting artist, along with staff assistants, students and visitors to the program. They all appear happy to be there, which is not surprising once viewers realize they feel much the same way. No doubt all this joy is testimony to the capacity of art to lend perspective to what, in the crisis-embroiling nature, can only be described as a dire predicament. The pressure on living things to adapt to the changing environment, along with the stress caused by loss of habitat, is only two factors that contribute to the “anomalies” Sbarge investigates in the life of every plant and animal in nature; and they have potentially motivated anyone who is paying attention, not only to help where possible, but, acting out of self-respect and self-love, to try to find ways to maintain a sense of optimism and dare we say hope, that it will all work out somehow.

That said, Sbarge brings broader and more palpable forces to bear on her average audience member’s awareness of nature’s local predicament. First there is her imagination, which after her arrival in New Mexico in 1989 became focused on psychology and myth. This occupancy in Ogden has exposed her in turn to the remarkably influential impact of the Great Salt Lake, with its own climate and extensive but challenged populations. Then came the resources of OCA, which allowed her to explore cyanotypes and, once provided with a distinctive form of image-making, to move on to stop-motion animation and 3-D printing. Perhaps her greatest advantage, though, was her experience in collage, a medium that so well fits the age we live in and its effects on our own memories and imaginations. Not for nothing do our universal cameras, and the apps they supply with subject matter, resonate with so much of the art in our galleries. Audience members who have explored and experimented with mashing up their own lives have prepared their brains to collaborate in the gallery with the likes of Suzanne Sbarge.

Kelly Carper, who wrote the brochure that every visitor to Anomalies should plan on adding to a home or studio library, adds: “The process-oriented and tangible nature of collage lends itself to happenstance and unexpected deviations from the norm.” Certainly true for collage, which among its virtues includes that viewers can see exactly how it’s done, even as they compare it to their own points of view. But it also gestures towards something vastly more significant. Evolution, the process that may offer the only hope for nature’s future, is also the most misunderstood scientific theory of our time. Just recently, for example, a local radio station offered a guest who drew parallels between the evolution of a theoretical Martian population and that of life here on Earth. He actually argued that the aliens, whom he assumed are now extinct, would have somehow been ahead of life on Earth in the process of evolving.

But of course there is nothing so external and organized as a “process” of evolution. Nor is there any way that evolution on Earth could duplicate the history of evolution on Mars. The miraculous key to life as we know it, which after all might be unique to us in the universe, lies in the poor copy-making powers of DNA. Errors routinely riddle copies of this master plan for life, most of which make no known difference to the organisms they produce. Yet every so often, an error produces a more successful creature, who may outperform its peers and establish itself as the new paradigm. The hope for our immediate future, then, lies in the mere chance that such errors will arise and enable the Earth’s population to survive in the new environment. If that sounds unlikely, we should be aware that it has happened at least five times in the history of life, without which none of us would be here. Talk of a sixth extinction implies the hope that it can happen again. And if it does, rest assured it will be … an anomaly.

Suzanne Sbarge’s “Blossoming Deer” (left) and “Dancing Bird.”

And so we come to Sbarge’s “anomalies”: creatures of the imagination, to be sure, but also expressions of wonder at the extraordinary variety of life. Sbarge envisions life, as we all should, as a wonderful adventure and a great story. Her “Blossoming Deer,” with a rack of antlers bursting into flower, makes us realize how much those horns resemble plants as they branch out and fill the space efficiently, in order to enable as many pollen-bearing agents access to their reproductive stamens and pistils. Dare we reflect on their complementary effect on human gardeners, who further open them up while meaning only to exploit their beautiful colors, shapes and scents? And perhaps there’s an engineer ready to explain why the best shape for flowering plants is also the best for a deer.

In “Flying Pelican,” a boatload of Utah tourists is either amazed or oblivious to a local bird that had been driven from the lake by falling water levels, but has returned and taken on the celebratory form of a ballerina. Another pelican had been seen flying over the “Blossoming Deer,” perhaps turning this survivor of the dinosaurs, who still looks like one, into a harbinger not just of survival, but of renewal.

It’s often said that some artist has painted a landscape that viewers feel they could just walk into. Sbarge demonstrates a way to do this with “Conjuring,” an enormous, indeed wall-sized photo collage of the title character seeming to either magically call into being, or perhaps play a tune on an invisible flute for two dancers performing a pas de deux. The ambiguity speaks volumes to the versatility of human hands, while the bird heads displayed by all three figures have something to say about music and dance, which latter behavior is one shared by humans and birds alike. One other thing that might somehow escape notice is the way the sky reflects the ground. It might be just a theatrical effect, or it may remind us that the cracked clay of Earth has us in thrall, captives within a natural event.

Another work one can almost literally enter is the stop-motion animated video that occupies the media space adjacent to the front desk. Here the viewer enters to find the other three walls covered by elements from throughout the exhibition, collaged in new ways and, in a very familiar-looking fashion, made to move about, as one always knew could be done. Where a commercial enterprise might claim “no effort has been spared in this production,” here instead no effort has been made to conceal the moving parts of such an elaborate story, all of which quickly come to feel like old friends.

As the same characters and visual components repeated themselves in differing media throughout the gallery, one unlikely precedent that came to mind was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was in turn a book, then a radio program, then a movie, and possibly other things. Rather than bore the audience with multiple versions of the same material, which might well have served some versions better than others, that production involved scrambling its images and anecdotes across the scenery, so that each version ended up unique. So it is here, and that includes the most original form—the one that few viewers are likely to have encountered before. These are 3-D printed sculptures of the figures, familiar yet re-presented anew. First of all, they’re astonishingly detailed and flawlessly crafted examples of something not seen before outside OCA. The candid photos at the door give some idea of the lengths that had to be gone to in order to make them, but this will surely not be the last time such marvels will be shown.

Detail from a wall full of cyanotype prints by Suzanne Sbarge in OCA’s upstairs space.

Kelly Carper has some penetrating and spot-on things to say about facets of this work, such as the history and meaning of the Prussian blue color of cyanotypes, or the story of the bison and the absurdity of their deliberate mass-murder—not for use by their killers, but by European invaders bent on destroying the indigenous population of their “new” land. It would be redundant to repeat Carper’s brilliant efforts here. Instead, we might consider how many recent and current literary works have taken it upon themselves to picture the world that humans have created for ourselves, or imagine the one that might take its place. A major British author writes from the perspective of a century hence, in the guise of a historian looking back on our time and marveling how a supposedly intelligent species fatally failed to anticipate the coming environmental catastrophe, the effects of rising waters, and the inescapable threat of nuclear war, not to mention proved unable to simply recognize the limits of its own thinking. Several of the fictions submitted to 15 Bytes as candidates for its coming awards have depicted a world where only one elephant remains, or birds are completely gone, the stars have become invisible due to air pollution, and other inconceivable miseries are depicted.

Clearly, Suzanne Sbarge has forged a way to accommodate such nightmares to the imagination and material realization that art give us the capacity to share. As we move past the journalism, the initial reporting of climate change, we will inevitably encounter the challenge of holding not just the past of life on Earth in our minds, but the present and future as well. It’s good that here at OCA, and other places as well, that journey has begun.

A collection of Suzanne Sbarge’s teal 3-D printed “anomaly” sculptures—hybrid beings combining animal bodies with human features—displayed alongside paintings and photographic collages at Ogden Contemporary Arts.

Anomalies, Ogden Contemporary Arts, Ogden, through Jan. 11, 2026.

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.