Anne Albaugh, “The Great Salt Lake,” oil on canvas, 60×48 in.

It’s been half a century since artists began to see themselves as kin to the legendary canaries in the coal mine, those storied animals that gave the alarm when workplace environments deteriorated to the point where the workers’ lives were endangered. Here in Utah, where there are many threats and injustices to call out, artists have recently focused on one of the more imminent: the demise of the Great Salt Lake, arguably the most significant symbol of the state’s identity.

Many exhibitions in recent years have focused on our degraded environment. Yet artists mining these themes don’t all agree. Some want to present the maximum beauty of what remains, while others focus on what may soon come to pass. As a result, a stunning sunset may share space next to a cluster of dead birds on a dry, cracked lakebed. Such contrasts can only undermine each others visions. How to take the purported threat seriously when surrounded by so much beauty? It’s like pondering how there can be global warming and record-breaking wet weather at the same time.

Two artists, painter Anne Albaugh and sculptor Jonna Ramey, joined forces to seek a single perspective that may serve both to remind us all what is at stake, yet also express the fragility of what is, after all, the only life we know. The moment of realization they chose is embodied in their title: What We Will Miss. The Lake effects everything in many ways: which of them is finally dispensable?

Anne Albaugh, “The Hard Freeze”

Anne Albaugh has a knack for capturing nature under harsh weather. “The Hard Freeze” captures the sharp definition of mountains in full sunlight, revealing the battle going on between stone and the forces of erosion that are breaking it. On the square foot of “The Bottoms,” contending forces are literally seen to be black and white, while windy brush strokes swirl about.

In “The Great Salt Lake,” irony verges on sarcasm. A brown cloud drips something unhealthy onto a half-exposed lakebed. Another painting mockingly complains of “Too Much Beach.” The artist points out on a title card that every added inch of snow is worth $28 million to ski entrepreneurs, but as the lakebed dries and turns to dust, which blows onto that snow so that it absorbs sunlight, the ski season is shortened by premature melting. She might add that what snow there is owes its quality and quantity to the lake effect, which requires a lake.

Speaking of “The Lake Effect,” a work by that name features a nighttime storm over the Lake, such as was stock-in-trade for Romantic painters and poets. It might show that all this has been part of the scene since long before the climate shift began. What it actually reveals is how natural forces have always been delicately balanced between creation and destruction, while it leaves room for the recognition that human activities are throwing that balance ever further off. What was once exaggerated for poetic effect is becoming everyday fact.

“Quietude” in which clouds and land are seen exquisitely composed in three dimensions, further makes the point that there is still plenty of visual majesty and splendor to contemplate, but leaves the viewer open to the realization that as it grows more beautiful, it may be simultaneously becoming unsustainable, tipping towards darkness. And when do we all realize that the world outside, the only one we will ever know, is undergoing the same transformation?

Among these visions, the birds of Jonna Ramey go about their business as innocently as their models do at the Lake. In spite of any anxiety she may be experiencing, Ramey confesses to feeling fortunate to live in a time when she is free to experiment with her art. Comparing historic sculpture, often carved in monochromatic stone like white marble, to these vivid stone colors and crystalline structures inside them certainly makes her point visible. But Ramey works at a time when scholars have identified numerous bright colors that were originally applied to statuary by the Greeks, Romans, and others, only to be lost over time, and when so many wild colors of stone have become commercially available to her, of which she has enthusiastically availed herself.

Jonna Ramey, “Entwined”

For What We Will Miss, Ramey settled on the most visible wildlife at the Great Salt Lake, including waterfowl, raptors, and owls . Her carved versions, while sometimes quite realistic, can be almost as abstract as those of Isamu Noguchi or Constantin Brancusi. One example is “Enso Bird,” whose head protrudes from a ring-shaped body. This figure refers to Ensō, a Japanese spiritual exercise, and the brushed ink circles that result, which is just one of many spontaneous Zen drawings imbued with complex meanings. The circle refers, in part, to completion, but also to emptiness, including freedom, even from the dominance of ones own mind. While splendidly evocative of the liberty of a bird in flight, it may also suggest an antidote to the kind of obsessive behavior that is rapidly destroying the Lake.

“Entwined” refers to the necks of two Trumpeter Swans, which can live for 25 years and mate for life. Like numerous other species, they undertake long migrations during which a stop at the Great Salt Lake is essential. Another family connection is seen in the pair “Pelican Dreaming” and “Hungry Baby.” Both were carved from Honeycomb Calcite, a stone found only in the Uinta Mountains and known for its distinctively cellular appearance.

Not everything by Ramey has feathers. The spiral carved into “My Utah” is a mirror image of the Spiral Jetty, which had its own role to play in warning us of what has become of the Lake. “When the Sun Flares” takes advantage of an inclusion, around which the pattern of the stone lends a third dimension to the corona of the sun that becomes visible in a total eclipse of the sun, which unlike the Lake always recovers from being eclipsed. Ramey favors such asymmetry, a natural event that happens when the two sides of a stone don’t match. As Ansel Adams pointed out, living in a fully manufactured world, as so many people do today, blinds us to the independence of nature.

Albaugh’s “Eos-the Dawn” makes a particularly unforgettable impression. Here we see a mountaintop piercing the darkness as sunlight engulfs it, even as its bulk remains in shadow. It might stand for those who, as the Lord said to Thomas, have not yet seen, yet believe. It may even acknowledge the dawning of an environmental consciousness throughout the world. In any event, it clearly requires strong vision to anticipate the catastrophe that lies in wait for us: a vision the may be strengthened by asking ourselves what we will miss.