Daniel Everett: Salt 5

A series of photographs titled Monuments portrays security booths—uninteresting and indistinctive, standard types or on a tower, yet each serving a specific function. In these photographs, however, they’re detached from their natural environment, superimposed against a plane of color: green (pictured), blue and red. The booth’s function, its reason for being, no longer exists. If, instead of security booths, three individuals were the subjects of these photographs—removed from their natural environments, placed in colored planes—what then is their reason for being?

Existential questions such as these are fundamental to the art of Utah resident Daniel Everett, featured in this iteration of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts’ salt series.

In salt 5, habitats for living, working, eating and sleeping are not given much thought by those occupying them, but for Everett, they’re an opportunity for exploration of meaning like a living time capsule. With his analytical art, he examines artificial environments through an informed human perspective.

The UMFA show consists of two video pieces, new mixed-media installations and photographic prints such as the ones in Monuments that Dawsey calls “anonymous architecture,” which question parameters of being, both hypothetically and metaphorically. Everett’s artificial subjects, understood on a human level, thus become lucid and uncanny. (Ehren Clark)

salt 5: Daniel Everett @ Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 S. Campus Center Drive, 801-581-7332, March 30-July 29; opening reception March 30, 7 p.m., $5-$7. UMFA.Utah.edu