Exhibition view of Anthropocene: Landscapes of Use, Memory, and Transformation at Bountiful Davis Art Center with Dana K Senge’s “Dancing in the River Grass (otter)” in the foreground.

A few years ago, artists began making work that sounded the alarm about the state of the Earth. It was a bold effort, but one came away from it—if in fact one didn’t approach it in the first place—with the realization that no work of art, or even all of art working together, could significantly alter the downward trajectory of the powerful forces responsible for our common distress. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” said W.H. Auden in 1939, and recently, essayist Zadie Smith added, “The odds of making a piece of art that truly matters never really improve.”

So why have 27 artists gathered at Bountiful Davis Art Center to express themselves on the many ways humanity impacts our planet, or as the exhibition title has it, the Anthropocene: Landscapes of Use, Memory, and Transformation? The Center’s press release seems sanguine on the matter. “Across the exhibition,” it says, “artists trace the visible and invisible forces that shape place: extraction and preservation, erosion and renewal, habitation and displacement. In Utah and throughout the American West, landscapes carry layered histories of settlement, labor, and stewardship that continue to inform how place is experienced, remembered, and understood.”

So the way we view our historical moment, threatened as it is by the advance of the Anthropocene, is changing. One of the more appropriate adaptations comes about when newly invented, technical alterations modify traditional ways of seeing. In the past, the work of art was largely thought of as a conduit through which nature enters the immediate space and consciousness of viewers. However, Susanna Herrmann has chosen to insert relatively random chemical transformation into that conduit in ways that parallel the characteristics of her approach to the camera. Experimentally distorting her film stocks by soaking them in fluids derived from her subjects’ environs, or even her lunch, before she exposes them becomes a direct, material intervention that carries a work like “Losing Place” beyond the limits of conscious choice and imagination seen in a conventional photo.

Susanna Herrmann, “Losing Place”

Russel Albert Daniels, “Plaza Blanca”

Another way of transforming the memory of the land is to consciously see it through eyes other than one’s own. Ours is a vain species, and yet we are often introduced to whatever comes to matter to us through a point of view that may not be to everyone’s liking. Russel Albert Daniels travels widely to view and photograph the local terrain, but he deliberately seeks out places that recall those he was introduced to by his grandmother. To see a bold, rocky formation like “Plaza Blanca” composed in a way that feels approachable, rather than forbidding, sets in place a paradigm for how to engage, rather than inevitably confront nature, which Daniels wishes to assure viewers can be better used if not seen as something needing to be overcome.

Most photo collages employ a single strategy for joining images that may represent different times and values. Jaclyn Wright, in works like “Mining Archives,” introduces her own symbolic language for alternately blending images and shattering those connections. Something of the hypocrisy whereby the “public” in “public lands” is interpreted to make those places accessible to corporate “citizens” but denied to others, for example, comes through the way her archival photos are broken and mended.

Jaclyn Wright, “Mining Archives”

“Mas Vale Morir de Pie” and “Movimiento Libera” by Luis Nova flank Kelly Tapia-Chuning’s serape work.

From “Pacific 231,” by Arthur Honegger, the French composer and member of Les Six, to Meredith Wilson’s opening of The Music Man, two among many popular evocations of trains in music, the driving rhythm of the steam locomotive has carried audiences into lives dependent for transportation on railroads. Luis Novoa has an existential relationship to his subject in the interconnected “Mas Vale Morir de Pie” and Moviemiento Libera,” in the second of which he moves in closer to the larger image of the first. Each essentially presents a painting within a painting, and a gesture by which the outer painting freezes the action of the inner one, holding it for the audience to see better, before it hastens off to an implied destination in another agricultural zone, state, or nation. The inscription that circles the train around its door and the image of the bracero within visually captures the rolling feeling implicit in this illicit and essential form of transport and the circular lives of those it transports. A hugely popular slogan of the Spanish Civil War, in which Europe’s Fascists prepped for World War II, and most accurately attributed to Dolores Ibårruri, in English it means “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

“We are stardust,” says the song. Kellie Bornhoft has devoted a couple of years to tracing the paths by which 16 of the heavy elements that ended up in the Earth’s portion of that dust find their way into our bodies to become our bones and so forth. By combining these elements in precise and accurate proportions, she produces samples of the “cosmic soups” from which we arose, with the reminder that our portion will one day return to be reused by something else.

A rather fascinating technical inversion was produced by Dana K Senge for a couple of ceramic sculptures. Looking in person at “Dancing in the River Grass (otter),” one may see an effect familiar from animated films. The sculpture depicts strands of grass flowing as they might do under water, where the currents cause them to form various shapes as they move in the flow. Circling around the work, following the action, the body parts of a swimming animal seem to emerge. It’s possible to imagine that in the animation, the waving blades of grass give rise to an otter like a phantom that emerges before one’s eyes. However, the artist, who is clearly an expert, explains that it actually came into being in the reverse order. That is to say, Senge first formed the complete otter in clay, then having given it satisfactory form, followed up by carving away the surplus clay to leave only the river grass which, of necessity, retained the overall shape of the otter.

There are still more artists here whose techniques have adapted or are adapting to this changing vision. Consider the warnings of Greta Thunberg, who in recent years has fought for the understanding that where we are today is not, and should not be mistaken for, “the new normal.” Someone willing to settle for one year of decent precipitation in every three, one good snowpack in that time, needs to grasp that the climate did not agree to a one-time change. Nor will the summer temperatures we’re having this spring be part of any new pattern. It will oscillate, but the overall trend will be to get worse. There is one artist whose work hints at this fate, regardless of the starting point. Diane Bronstein’s landscapes are almost conventional, being made of embroidery floss and vintage photos, rich with relief that makes them more vivid than conventional. They are lush, indeed superabundant. Yet they bear warnings of another disastrous alternative.

This dilemma has come to be known as the Goldilocks predicament. The Earth’s location in the solar system is key: not too close to the Sun, nor too far. From this descends a cascade of narrow and precarious options that demand precision we are likely to alter without consideration of the result, and between which lies the only place where life as we know it is possible. Bronstein’s world presents a metaphor for that galactic dilemma. The people imported to her world with their pictures are menaced not by drought or heat, but by jungle-weight foliage and, presumably, the menacing living things that dwell within. Escaping too far from danger only results in falling into the opposite disaster.

Diane Bronstein, “And Soon the Darkness”

The lessons being advanced here might best be summed up as demonstrating the importance of respecting the conditions nature presents us with. We evolved to fit a particular world, and run the risk of exceeding our own capacities if we change it, which we are currently and carelessly doing. It’s not impossible that another flora and fauna, seemingly desirable but not when it’s too extreme, will take the place of the one we have known. The question is, will there be a place in it for us?1

Anthropocene: Landscapes of Use, Memory, and Transformation, Bountiful Davis Art Center, Bountiful, through Aug. 28.

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.