Gwen Davis-Barrios, “3-point Turn and Forbidden Blackberries”

Light is doing a lot of work in Gwen Davis-Barrios‘ exhibit at Border and Square. And it’s not the flattering kind. Headlights, streetlamps, the ambient glow of a building—her scenes are lit the way the world is at certain hours. Partial light. Temporary light. The kind that picks out one thing and ignores the rest.

Night dominates the exhibit. “It Won’t Be This Good Again (Vineyard Megaplex)” splits into two horizontal panels—scrubland lit from somewhere low, and above it a suburban skyline sitting on the dark. The shrubs in the foreground go almost orange where the light catches them. The title is the most opinionated thing in the room, and even then you’re not sure whether it’s mournful or just descriptive.

In one striking work, the reflection of a car hood floats into view, and suddenly you’re not in a gallery looking at a landscape—you’re in a moving vehicle, glimpsing something out the window. The headlights pick out the wet road, the rain hitting the surface, the immediate few feet of scrubby vegetation. Beyond that, shapes that might be a tree, four lit rectangles that might be windows. The light doesn’t reach far enough to say for certain.

Gwen Davis-Barrios, “It Won’t Be This Good Again (Vineyard Megaplex)”

“Waysides”—the first half of Davis-Barrios’ exhibition title—are the places you don’t stop at. The roadside ditch. The overgrown strip between a guardrail and whatever’s behind it. The weedy margins where a parking lot gives up and nature makes its move. The BYU grad’s brushwork is loose and layered, forms surfacing without clean edges. Color stays mostly quiet—the night blues and dark greens that run through the show—with occasional flares that make you look twice. Guardrails and fences stake their claim, but the vegetation is insistent. Litter joins the mix, whether as temporary migrant or permanent resident.

These scenes are neither fully wild nor fully tamed—late-stage suburban, you might say. In “The First Time I Saw Her in Years,” a guardrail cuts the canvas horizontally—dense vegetation above, scrubby grass and debris below. The line it ostensibly demarcates does not hold. In “Rebeldes,” chickens have taken over an outbuilding—roosting among scattered furniture, a television screen still glowing in the corner. Whatever human life organized that space has moved on. The chickens haven’t noticed.

In “A Place Where You Live,” a “Thank You” bag is snagged in roadside vegetation, painted large, painted seriously. The text is legible. It’s almost funny, except Davis-Barrios has given it the same attention she’d give a flower—the same layered marks, the same careful observation of how light moves across a crumpled surface.

Gwen Davis-Barrios, “A Place Where You Live”

Gwen Davis-Barrios, “Las que hilan y deshilan”

“Las que hilan y deshilan” runs the same situation in reverse and complicates the whole premise of what litter is. A Virgen de Guadalupe medallion sits nested in prickly pear cactus pads, spiderwebs threading it into the plant as though it’s always been there. The thank-you bag ended up where it is. The medallion seems placed—a devotional object, an act of faith in a specific location. But from a passing car it might read as debris, something plastic and bright snagged in a cactus. This is what she means by the “b-sides” of her title—the quiet messages at the heart of the matter, slipping in through the side door.

The coyotes in a series of three related works function similarly. They are both unexpected and, in a sense, belong. They are not lit by headlights or lampposts—they’re the same gray-brown as the scrub around them, the same tone as the median, almost invisible until they’re not. They have wandered into this scene on their own time, making it their world, as we sleep or drive by.

The diptych “Two Views from a Car Window on New Year’s Eve” centers a viewpoint that is implied throughout, the one from inside the car. The left panel is readable—a wet road, rain hitting the surface, droplets on the glass separating the viewer from the weather outside. The right panel takes it further: green and orange smears of light, the windshield doing its own thing with whatever is outside. It’s the same subject, thirty seconds later, or just a little faster.

What holds all of this together are, yes, a series of related subjects but the more important glue is a condition— the experience of a world seen partially, briefly, through glass or at speed or in a different kind of light. In her statement, Davis-Barrios mentions children misreading found materials—seeing treasure where adults see trash. But Waysides and B-Sides doesn’t feel like an argument for paying closer attention. She’s just painting what’s actually there, in the light that’s actually available, which turns out to be stranger and more various than the places we bother to look.

Gwen Davis-Barrios, “Two views from a car window on New Year’s Eve”

Davis-Barrios isn’t alone in this. Ben Childress has spent the past year painting Salt Lake City’s alleyways—service corridors behind houses that everyone uses and nobody looks at. His description of the subject could work for either show: an alleyway is always there but kind of ignored, but if you really look, there’s a lot going on. The difference is vantage point. Childress slows down and walks in. Davis-Barrios catches the margin at speed, the image already receding before it fully forms—which is what headlights do. They find something for a second, and then you’re past it.

Waysides and B-Sides, Border and Square, Provo, through Mar. 28

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.