Salt Lake City legend and prolific painter Susan Kirby is showing both old and new works in There Is Nothing More Shocking Than Joy, a show that crosses timelines, from ethereal dreamscapes into realities that bend the narrative of history. Rendered in what Kirby herself admits is a naive, visionary style, the paintings play with timelines and historical references to imagine new scenes where characters hang out on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, at the Spiral Jetty, in Mexico, and in the valleys of prehistoric high desert. She blends reality with fantasy, folklore and history into scenes of what if.

Kirby’s older pieces showcase large, regal self-portraits, the artist sitting with her signature silver blunt-cut bob and bangs in thrones adorned with her feline companions. The portraits are feisty, almost Cruella De Ville-esque—without the animal-killing part, just the girl-boss, intense bad-bitch energy the puppy villain embodied. Gaudy pattern clashing and an intensive use of the cheetah print, in proper early-aughts fashion, stamp these pieces as prime examples of fads of an era. Rhinestones pock her canvases while her cats sit languorously around her like royalty on her throne.

Some of Kirby’s more refined works are deeply rooted in elements of Mexicana, influenced by her time living in San Miguel de Allende, “a magic town” and World Heritage Site where cars from the ‘60s still putter down the streets and town squares are bustling with third-space vigor. The place has a historic essence that transports tourists and locals alike to another time outside of the 21st century. The architecture and traditional rural Mexican culture remain so intact, it’s impossible not to feel the magic coursing through the cobblestone streets. And that magic Kirby certainly fell under the spell of. The pieces can teeter on cultural appropriation—at what point is an artist inspired versus making a white-woman career off the visual effects of an entire culture?—but they create dreamscapes in such admiration to the culture and land of the place, rather than copping without credit, that the works remain inspired.

Frida Kahlo is a frequent character in Kirby’s cast. After experiencing a horrific bus accident that left her disabled and in immense pain for the rest of her life, Frida Kahlo painted as a respite, as a way to express her grief, her pain, to experience her body in a way she no longer physically could. Kahlo frequently painted the heart, the corazón, anatomically rendered to symbolically represent her experience. In a parallel experience, Susan Kirby had heart surgery while living in Mexico, where she too turned to her painting as a manifestation of the tango in her heart and her experience recovering and the pain endured during her own experience of recovery.

The sun and warmth and beauty of the rich Mexican heritage contrast with her more current works of the Western high desert, where she uses more blues and grays and sages. The dinosaurs of Utah’s Jurassic history create scenes of what this place used to look like before human eyes ever caught a glimpse. Bringing the fossils and ancient artifacts of this place to some form of visual reality, imagining when T.rex tromped along the shores of the lake looking for their next prey, and pterodactyls soared overhead in the wetlands. Like the Natural History Museum’s way of putting visitors in the timeline of Utah’s loaded paleontological past, Kirby gets viewers imagining what if – what if these creatures still roamed, what would our landscapes look like. She also uses iconic images of Utah’s land art, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels as backdrops and playgrounds for figures from pop culture and art history.

Kirby’s works all have a curiosity about the past, an obsession with the strangely possible. What would it look like if Pope Francis and Pink Floyd and Frida Kahlo all had dinner on the shores of the Great Salt Lake—and what kind of story would they tell once they got there?

Susan Kirby: There is Nothing More Shocking than Joy, Finch Lane Gallery, Salt Lake City, through May 29.

Genevieve Vahl

Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.