{"id":35649,"date":"2018-04-28T12:41:54","date_gmt":"2018-04-28T18:41:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=35649"},"modified":"2023-11-21T16:56:14","modified_gmt":"2023-11-21T22:56:14","slug":"urban-nature-in-flux-ditchbank-at-library-square","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/urban-nature-in-flux-ditchbank-at-library-square\/","title":{"rendered":"Urban Nature in Flux: \u201cDitchbank\u201d at Library Square"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Exhibition view of Ditchbank at The Gallery at Library Square.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Filling the gallery space at the Main Library in Salt Lake City with a vivid marriage of opposing elements \u2014 made and found, organic and human-made, real and reflected, flat and three-dimensional, natural and civilized \u2014 the exhibit \u201cDitchbank\u201d features paintings by Downy Doxey-Marshall and sculpture by Heidi Moller Somsen. The show\u2019s title alludes to the two artists\u2019 shared interest in the \u201cshaggy unkempt wild places, existing just beyond our manicured yards,\u201d or the parts of nature that are closest to us, the wilderness that pushes through the cracks of the urban environment. We tend to crop road signs out of our landscape photos, prefering to think of \u201creal\u201d nature as pure and civilization as removed from the wild. \u201cDitchbank\u201d reminds that humans live in a hybrid environment and everything occurs in the midst of cycles of material change, all of which involve people as much as plants and animals.<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a>Nature is in perpetual flux, and the sculpture and paintings in \u201cDitchbank\u201d show this flux continues whether you\u2019re in the middle of the forest, under the sea, or next to a freeway. Somsen\u2019s \u201cStrata #1\u201d has a base that looks like a gritty cross-section of layered sediment. Sitting on top are two plants, (they could be either underwater or terrestrial), and a thin piece of bicycle inner tube emerges from the mouth of one and loops around the sculpture. The piece presents the natural process of building up and how it supports life, with the rubber loop giving the impression of perpetual movement. Similarly, Doxey-Marshall\u2019s large, colorful canvases, like \u201cTwo Clouds,\u201d depict the sky and trees refracted in pools busy with the cycle of living and dying. Leaves fall and logs decompose in pools, and the water seeps into the ground to nourish the living plants. Doxey-Marshall has never selected just the most beautiful of vistas to represent an idealized and pure nature, instead choosing places where humans have encroached. In last year\u2019s exhibit \u201ckloTH<\/a>,\u201d the painter also worked on uncelebrated areas of the outdoors. Her painting \u201cPromenade,\u201d like works in her earlier show, could be a puddle next to the freeway, captured in a moment of gray shadows and warm light dancing on the surface of the water.<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a>The two artists also bring human figures into the mix. Somsen\u2019s blue-glazed ceramic sculpture, \u201cIn Potentia Blue,\u201d presents flora merging with a female figure. The sculpture hints at how the fruits of the land and sea nourish and build our bodies (the left arm of the ceramic woman is a frond of seaweed or a sprig of a terrestrial plant), a debt that we don\u2019t always remember. Doxey-Marshall\u2019s \u201cSelf Reflecting\u201d may be a human shape reflected in a pool, or a human-shaped depression filled with water. In either case, bits of sky and plants fill the figure and help define the human shape.<\/h4>\n

Many of Doxey-Marshall\u2019s paintings are reflections that unmoor the viewer\u2019s perspective and dance between beautiful depictions of nature and nonsubjective planes of color and brushstrokes. Much like Monet\u2019s \u201cWater Lilies Series,\u201d which art historians recognize as some of the first semi-abstract paintings, works like Doxey-Marshall\u2019s \u201cRainbow Bank\u201d blur the line between subjective and non-subjective, or what a person observes or idealizes nature to be.<\/h4>\n
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The show also addresses the ways that human-made materials and changes to the environment have encroached onto almost every area of the natural world, for better or for worse. Somsen\u2019s rubber inner tubes are regular features of her organic multimedia sculptures and serve her well as a versatile and compelling element. \u201cDitchbank Reverie,\u201d for example, is a tall, striking ceramic palm-like plant sculpture, with hanging black rubber instead of foliage. \u201cOh Wild and Nameless\u201d is a piece with a glazed ceramic female bust with the black rubber vines coming out of her neck. Both show a different way of approaching the inner tubes. Just like the other loops in the exhibit, here we see that humans take natural materials and use them to create rubber and plastic, which then end up back in the natural world once their use has been filled.<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a>Change and hybridity are not threatening in \u201cDitchbank,\u201d just part of the normal order of things. However, there\u2019s something like a warning embedded in the show. Yes, nature persists and continues to develop on the fringes of our urban sprawl and often in the \u201cin-between spaces.\u201d Ditch banks have their own hybrid beauty, even if you can sometimes find candy wrappers or bits of tires, life and death go on there. But still, when human society transforms natural materials into products that are indestructible and outside the natural cycles of growth and decay, there will always be consequences down the line. That imaginary (in reality, non-existent) barrier between nature and civilization can make us forget how interconnected we are with the environment, but anything we do to impact the land or sea will eventually loop back to us.<\/h4>\n

Ditchbank: Paintings and Sculpture,\u00a0<\/em>an exhibit by Heidi Moller Somsen and Downy Doxey-Marshall, The Gallery at Library Square, Main Library, Salt Lake City, through June 15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Exhibition view of Ditchbank at The Gallery at Library Square. Filling the gallery space at the Main Library in Salt Lake City with a vivid marriage of opposing elements \u2014 made and found, organic and human-made, real and reflected, flat and three-dimensional, natural and civilized \u2014 the exhibit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1523,"featured_media":36796,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/ditchbank2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-31 18:48:27","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1523"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35649"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72128,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35649\/revisions\/72128"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}