Installation view of works by Josanne Glass and Paul Vincent Bernard at Phillips Gallery, Salt Lake City. Glass’s soft sculpture sits in the foreground, with Bernard’s drypoint landscapes and Glass’s paintings lining the wall beyond. Courtesy of Phillips Gallery.

Josanne Glass and Paul Vincent Bernard’s works are nestled among each other on the walls of Phillips Gallery this month, bringing out their best qualities through contrast. Bernard’s anxious, restless line moves between attentive examinations of the landscape and, at times, darker glimpses of a world under strain, while Glass’ work returns us to the quiet rhythms of the natural world. Barbed wire and eerie, mysterious doors in the dark are set against the simple calm Glass captures in the aspen forests of Utah.

Bernard uses drypoint on aluminum to etch in his scratchy gestures, which are perfectly imperfect—wobbly but intentional, erratic but stylized—with paint filling in the etching marks to create color play and highlights. Many of his works read as straightforward examinations of the landscape, built up through dense, repetitive marks that map barren hillsides, fields, and ridgelines with a patient, almost meditative attention. A piece titled “Fallow Field” speaks to my agricultural background—peaceful and pastoral, quiet and plain. But elsewhere, that same language shifts register: the shadowy silhouette of industrial sites in “Södermalm” elicits those extractors keeping their sinister ways secret and in the background, behind closed doors, nothing to see here. It is in these moments that the work takes on a more charged edge, holding such presences in view as an art of accountability.

Paul Vincent Bernard, “Warm Soil,” drypoint with oil on aluminum, 16 x 24 in.

Glass’ paintings have a print quality to them even though they are acrylic on paper, with a paint-roller effect to the textures and the precision that stenciling gives. It is as if she uses tape to mark off the precisely sharp, abstracted aspen forests. Her simple compositions allow the viewer to experience her fascination with the aspen groves, seeing the repetitive undulation of their subterranean connection in her interpretations of the understory—trunks repeating, patterns emerging, a solace found in their connection.

Her strongest paintings are a pair titled “At Day Break” and “At Sunset.” The former is a more rigid collection of precisely diagonal stripes, with layers delineated and sharp, like the start to a new day after a cup of coffee. The latter hums like a sunset, those same layers blurred into a gradient at the end of the day. The weight of the day has softened the rigidity of those once perky lines and melted them down into a blur of relaxation.

Like the stacked stone cairns guiding travelers on their journeys in the backcountry of Utah, Josanne’s soft sculptures—a new expansion of her practice—wrap around the gallery, leading viewers through Bernard’s darker passages and back toward the forests and horizons of her paintings. Merino wool, Māori wool, and silk sari coalesce into directional pieces, their strand structures recalling the testing of staple length for spinning, creating blends that appear both soft and deliberate. The strongest of these wool pieces are suspended from the purple ceiling and orange beam, their gentle sway responding to the movement of passersby, like a soft aspen breeze in the fall. Thin, skipping-stone-like wool forms hang on nearly invisible wires, sandwiched between wood beads, introducing an ethereal element—a levity, a breath of fresh air among the darker tones.

Installation view of works by Paul Vincent Bernard (left and right) and Josanne Glass (center), Phillips Gallery, Salt Lake City. Glass’s stone-like soft sculptures echo the textures and rhythms of Bernard’s etched landscapes. Courtesy of Phillips Gallery.

Josanne Glass & Paul Vincent Bernard, Phillips Gallery, Salt Lake City, through Apr. 10

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.