Most photographs aren’t begging to be turned into paintings. The things a camera captures effortlessly—busy detail, awkward smiles, a split-second expression—can become stiff or even unbearable once translated into brushwork. But Kirsten Holt Beitler has a rare ability: she can take the casual, unpolished image and make it feel intentional, even, at times, luminous.

In Utah, art exhibitions frequently begin in the populated Wasatch Front, then travel to venues further afield. Kirsten Holt Beitler’s The Selfie and the Soul reverses that trend. This fall, the Washington County artist staged the exhibit on the ground floor of the St. George Art Museum, and now, like someone who needs to make space on their phone, has brought a smaller version of the show to the Bountiful Davis Art Center.

Beitler’s portraits pull their source material from the familiar flood of everyday life: selfies, family snapshots, beach days, costume moments, kids mid-performance. The subjects aren’t posed like traditional sitters, and they aren’t polished into ideal types. Instead, Beitler leans into what most people would crop out. There’s humor here, often delivered through expression and gesture: a face mask paused mid-self-care, hair exploding in all directions, a child swallowed up by swim goggles, a figure crowned with grapes like a low-stakes Bacchus. But the longer you look, the more the joke gives way to something quieter. These are paintings about being seen—about how we perform for the camera, how we try to look like ourselves, and how rarely those images survive past the scroll.

Beitler’s greatest trick is turning the disposable into something that holds. In her hands, a phone photo becomes a kind of contemporary portraiture—alive to the present moment, but anchored by the patience and attention of paint.

The Selfie and the Soul: An Exploration of Accidental Art in the Digital Age, Bountiful Davis Art Center, Bountiful, through Feb. 20.

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.