Shoutout to the docents of the St. George Art Museum. I hope to be a morsel as patient and informed as they are one day—showing the youth how to look at art, asking questions that get them grasping at the subject matter. What do the colors make you feel? There are the patient kids listening attentively, the ones eagerly raising their hands every time, and of course the ones with shorter attention spans snickering in the back. These docents are sure to make the work curious, encouraging their viewers to look longer. I listened in, too.

Stephanie Leitch’s “Spell Field II” stands alone—gorgeous and intricate. Precise and refined. The docent mentions to the kids that this piece took the museum staff a week to install. There were four hundred hours of prep time for the artist: one week of installation, 1,800+ strands, 40,000+ disks. Numbers of unfathomable tedium, displayed with grace and precision.

“Spell Field II” is a sea of laser-cut acrylic disks with random, scrambled letters etched onto their surface. Conical pipette tips form a proboscis-like apex, coming to resemble a tack, each hanging from a brass EDM wire. There are clear disks and black disks, arranged in a pattern the untrained eye must learn to hone. I cannot emphasize enough the precise planning the artist must have undertaken to make this happen.

After gentle urging from the docent to look at the piece from different vantage points, patterns emerge in the black disks among the clear ones. The work inquires into our different views—what can be exposed at varying angles, how the disks interact. What patterns emerge? What secret codes are hidden inside? The viewer is encouraged to interact with the piece, which wraps up and down the staircase and around the upstairs banister. The kids and I duck our heads and point at the floating, airy word-search puzzle mystery. It’s like a constellation of stars, connecting the dots. The floating piece is enamoring to get lost in. I will say, once the code was transcribed, I was spooked. It’s a haunting thing to find hanging among you, taunting you.

Wrapping around the upstairs, in the languid sway of billowing air, hangs the artist’s second installation, “Kirtland Windows.” Sheets of agricultural wire filter, cut by the artist into the shapes of cathedral windows, hang from their apex in rhythmic procession. It recalls the stained glass windows of the Catholic church of my youth. Plain black, though—anyone could see the ornate window treatments of the temples of their own upbringing. The black wire acts as a blank slate, transposing the room into a holy space of the viewer’s own.

Between this show and Clinton Whiting’s, the second floor of the St. George Museum of Art expresses an airiness—a play with light and air, layering effects. It holds a cathedral essence. Leitch’s windows lead into Clinton Whiting’s chapel-like exhibition, floating, translucent tributes to those who hold us, playing with different ideas of where we find holiness. The entire curation felt reverent, reminding us to be slow, to see the intricacies of simple gestures.

Heaven and Earth: Attached by One Pillar, St. George Museum of Art, St. George, through Feb. 28.

Images by Shawn Rossiter.

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.