Tony Jacobsen’s studio at his farm in Boulder, Utah.

In third grade, Tony Jacobsen built a diorama of the Grand Canyon. His school put it on display in the library, and Jacobsen found reasons to return to it—restroom pass, lunch break, any available detour—looking again, mentally revising. Others were fascinated as well. When he had talked to his classmates about the canyon, about the landscape and the animals and the forces that shaped them, he got glazed eyes. When he built it, though, he saw they leaned in.

Forty-some years later, Jacobsen is doing it again. You Are Home, his exhibition at the Boulder Community Gallery, grew out of a $2,500 Boulder Artists Grant and marks his first sustained move into three-dimensional work. At the center of the show is an earth house diorama, built to a scale and lit in a way designed to make you bend down and get pulled in. As you get closer, details come into focus and then, as Jacobsen has observed, something shifts: “the interaction becomes expressive, and observers instruct others to come closer to share in the experience or information gathered: ‘Look, that’s an amanita mushroom!’ ‘There is bear sign on that aspen,’ ‘A woodpecker hole!'”
It’s the vast and varied ecosystem of his adopted home, where Boulder Mountain unravels into the cream cliffs of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument—one of the most biologically diverse landscapes in Utah.

Jacobsen grew up in Oquirrh, a small community at the foot of the Oquirrh Mountains in Salt Lake County. He moved to Boulder in 2012, recruited to manage the farm at Hell’s Backbone Grill, the restaurant and farm operation at the heart of Boulder that has become something of a landmark in the region. He stayed for reasons that had less to do with the job than with what the place did to him. “I have always had a lot of energy, am a bit feral at heart,” he says, and he’d never been comfortable, as he puts it, “playing the near meaningless work-to-rent-to-work-to-rent human games.” Boulder offered an alternative: “work had deeper meaning, I felt everyday, and I experienced every season.” The dark skies helped. So did the clean air.

Jacobsen’s intricate three-dimensional work is a return to third-grade form and invites viewers to lean in and explore a miniature world where home, habitat, and ecosystem intertwine.

After about a decade managing Hell’s Backbone’s farm, he left to start his own small operation and turn his attention to art. He now farms ten acres with his partner, Nina, and an assortment of animals. His approach is straightforward: “I do not harm wild animals—instead I adequately protect my domesticated ones.” He plants native species for wildlife, has replaced the old ranch fencing on the property with deer-safe alternatives, and tends to the land with the same quality of attention he brings to the studio. “My life informs my art, and my art informs my life.”

When farming, especially in an arid landscape, observation becomes key: “You’re paying attention to the fungi in the soil and the microscopic insects that appear on a plant’s leaves. And you look up and watch the red-tailed hawks locking talons and the ibis landing and feeding in the fields.” That quality of observation is evident in his paintings.

They operate on multiple registers at once—figurative and precise in their individual elements (the animals are rendered with care, almost naturalistically) but dreamlike, even cosmological, in their overall compositions. Every painting layers ecosystems, timeframes, and scales into a single image. “When viewing this landscape at face value, or only presenting the beauty of the pastoral-esque scene, the interpretation misses a deeper excitement,” he says. What interests him are the forces that made the view: “the actors involved in the creation of a hoodoo—wind, water, time, temperature—show up in my work and help tell the story of the place, rather than simply providing a snapshot of it.”

Jacobsen’s works on view at Hell’s Backbone Grill.

Several of Jacobsen’s paintings hang at Hell’s Backbone Grill itself and in the visitor center on the property. Among them is a large horizontal work where the painted edges frame the scene like the wings of a stage in which a hoodoo rises from a swirl of red sandstone, a mule deer standing at its base. Snow-capped mountains recede into the distance behind it. A solitary pine, a great egret, a duck on the water and a strange cloaked figure, part human, part natural form fill out the scene. The painted border around the scene is weathered, oxide-stained, as if the framing itself has been subjected to the same forces as the landscape inside it.

Through June, his works hang in the more formal setting of the town’s community center, where a dozen or more paintings surround his 3D piece. In one, a bison floats against a night sky, its massive hump transformed into a plateau of desert scrub and rock—an entire ecosystem growing out of the animal’s back. A raptor dives into a spectrum of light, starlight passing through a prism. Below, a juniper tree anchors a lower world of fire, water, a heron, fish.

Another large canvas depicts a small cabin set against a deep cosmic sky—stars, nebulae, a comet. A heron nests in the tree beside it. A fox works the right edge. Skunks cross in front. A raccoon has claimed the roof. A full moon floats in the outhouse window. The boundary between nature outside and humans inside becomes something of a fiction.

Tony Jacobsen, “Bison Orbit,” 2025, acrylic on board, 36 x 36 in.

Visitors admire Jacobsen’s work at the Boulder Community Center

In one of the more structurally inventive pieces, a black bear peers down from the top edge of a canvas divided into horizontal bands: aspen grove, weathered wood siding, a rushing stream. Embedded in the siding at the center is what appears to be a stained glass window—the kind you’d find in a church—containing a single pine tree beneath a crescent moon.

Underlying the work is a conviction that humans are not the center of every story. Jacobsen draws on object-oriented ontology, a philosophical school that challenges the assumption that people occupy a privileged position in relation to the world around them. He is skeptical of what he calls the outsourcing of human meaning to external spiritual authorities, particularly when that authority is used to justify dominance over the natural world. What he proposes instead he calls “decentralizing a moral center”—not erasing the importance of humans, but refusing to place us at the center of every story.

He is clear-eyed about the difficulty of making that legible in a work of art. “I’m not sure I ever achieve 100% success in communicating these ideas to an outside audience,” he says. But he has a working test: “When I can feel the temperature, hear the wind or water moving, or see the flora and fauna in a type of harmony, it feels like I am close.” When a piece moves someone to consider themselves as part of a larger whole—to see the connections between elements of nature, food webs, symbiosis, and how we fit in and impact those elements.

“I feel like I am a part of a continuous human plea,” he says, “to remind ourselves of our early wonder for our home—and the utility of bringing this view to our later, more socially and culturally complicated lives.” The early imaginative play with found materials—sand, dirt, sticks, water, rocks — was, in his framing, “a playdate with the universe where a kind of primitive physics is learned: wet sand holds together, unbalanced sticks fall, thorns are sharp.” Our earliest guidebook, he calls it.

Tony Jacobsen, “You Are Here,” 2025, acrylic on board, 42×72 in.

Tony Jacobsen: You Are Home, Boulder Community Gallery, Boulder, through June 29.

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.