Elena Lawrence, “Domaine Du Laundrie,” encaustic, 18 x 24 in.

The main gallery at Phillips is large enough to allow viewing a painting from a moderate distance, a point of view where one current work presents as a charming landscape, featuring a cottage beneath two large trees that resemble tulips. On a clothesline from one of the trees to the house hangs a colorful blanket, while various flowering plants and a picket fence surround it. In the air, lines like cartoon wind lend a feeling of motion to this static scene.

Come a little closer, though, and it’s not a painting at all. Rather, “Domaine Du Laundrie”—the fancy French title means just what it sounds like in English—is an assemblage made from the scraps of fabric and metal junk that the artist, Elena Lawrence, enjoys hunting for. When she finds the right bits, she further delights in embedding them in encaustic wax and resin, forming pictures that coexist in mind and eye with their component parts.

Sometimes she lets her finds suggest a subject; at others, she will turn to the local hardware store for what she needs to complete an idea. The flowers in “Atomic Blue,” which suggest the diagrammatic atoms seen everywhere in the early days of nuclear power, are faucet handles standing on bent strips of sheet metal, surrounded by washers and nuts, all on a background of fiberglass cloth. Here and there, the viewing experience is reversed: larger, found objects protrude from the panel and are seen from a distance for themselves, then the representation emerges on approach.

Elena Lawrence, “Atomic Blue,” encaustic, 15 x 28 in.

Elena Lawrence, “Swiss Hills,” encaustic, 18 x 24 in.

There’s a childlike quality to this game that may discomfit some viewers. Lawrence, who scored magna-cum-laude on her BFA degree, may have come close to having her pleasure spoiled by professionalism: close enough to convince her that, for her, art is first and foremost the playground of imagination. In another landscape, “Swiss Hills,” half of a hinge and a corrugated fastener are visual synecdoches—parts that stand in for the whole—of a chalet. This is sophisticated child’s-play that climaxes in the bits of lace grazing like sheep on a canvas hillside.

Her favorite subjects are plants and animals: an agave in a bowl, a money plant in a coffee mug here, owls with delicate hand tools for faces over there. It would be a shame not to look closely at the textures in both foregrounds and backgrounds. Wax, of course, is everywhere, but while it generally disappears, sometimes it floats a loose fabric in interior space, while in other places it’s been stamped into a character all its own.

Nature is inherent for Elena Lawrence. It begins with the hunt through grounds and gardens for lost bits, primarily of metal. The atmosphere of their patinas and rusts, the deformities they suffer, suggest histories to her. Each represented object then hangs in the balance: background to others lives, but the stars of their own stories. Play like this is serious work, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.

Elena Lawrence, “Plant Peeper,” encaustic, 16 x 20 in.

Elena Lawrence, Phillips Gallery, Salt Lake City, through June 15

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.