CURRENT EXHIBITS

Ron Arthaud In Passing: Elko Plein Air On view in Halleck Bar Gallery until December 7, 2025 Artist Reception: September 11 from 5-7 p.m. Plein Air is the common French term used to describe painting in the open air. It began in the 18th century with groups like the Impressionists. The invention of collapsible paint tubes in 1841 helped artists get outdoors without having to carry so much equipment. I chose In Passing as my title since most of the subjects are not what you may think of as obvious—something that catches your eye on your way to some-thing else. In recent years, I’ve mostly painted pure Nevada landscapes. Elko changed my approach, but much remained similar. The images seemed to call for more detail. I tried not to force them but rather let them evolve into what felt right. A clump of sagebrush is very different than a car fender. The transitions of col-or and value in sage are subtle and predictable. Fenders have extremes, and they tend to drive off. I had to get smaller sable brushes. My colors remained the same, just primaries and white. I still tried mixing colors directly on the canvas rather than on the palette. I always stand while painting. I tried using “loaded” brushes, multiple colors not overly mixed. I continued painting for only an hour or so each session, returning several times at the same part of the day. I studied Fine Arts at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Most of my work was rather loose and abstract. I then happened upon a small “Classical Real-ist” school in Minneapolis. I spent three intense years learning new ways of seeing and analyzing. It changed my approach. I then left for several years to live in the west and the humbling experience of leaning to paint outdoors. I moved to Europe for several years—more painting, teaching and struggling. In the 90s I ended up, by chance, in Tuscarora, Nevada, and I remained there. As a painter, it felt important to stop and get to know a place and its land well. —Ron Arthaud

Caro Nilsson For Those Who Bear Witness On view in Barrick Gallery until December 2025 There are many ways I can think of that love looks like. Sometimes it looks like a garden tomato, a shared meal, or sometimes it looks like a postcard in the mail. Sometimes it looks like the tracks that snails left for us overnight on sidewalks or sacred datura opening for the moon. Sometimes it looks the way a trail in the forest does—a collection of anonymous shared footprints that go somewhere that many somebodies thought was special. Sometimes it looks the way the sky does once it finishes raining. Sometimes it looks like stopping to look around to say ‘wow’. Sometimes, it looks like this. To me, love always looks like remembering our communities, communities that are so much broader than just our human neighbors. In the beloved Basin, here, the community is the boulders and the scrub oaks, the cliffs, the meadow on the mountaintop, the vast remainder of the inland ocean that we call the Great Salt Lake. The seagulls, the snakes. The owls, the mountain lions. Love looks like remembering that we are a tiny part of a big, unknowable something. Love looks like continuing to care, continuing to bear witness, even when it is hard. At this moment, we are watching as an era unfolds. Wildfires, inversion, dust storms—all these things obscure the air, hiding landscapes (our context, our home) within them. We are unable to see into the distance, to think about time and space and infinite chances. The world as we know it is condensed to a bubble of our immediate surroundings. As we acknowledge our changing landscapes, we must also acknowledge our grief. These paintings are asking what it feels like to hold grief and hope simultaneously alongside one another. These paintings ask if perhaps they are the same thing, two sides of the same coin. Can we continue to walk during the slow motion unfolding (despite, in spite) and continue to bear witness with all of our grief and all of our hope? Can we remember that we are small among the ancient others who bear witness alongside us? —Caro Nilsson Caro’s dream-like landscapes pull the viewer into a specific place that feels outside of time. Gestural marks eddy beneath swaths of color-shift or tactile embroidery thread. Her paintings straddle the line between real and imaginary—understanding the notion that everything is always both. Caro paints primarily from memory, focusing more on the way a place felt than how it may have actually looked. In this way, memory morphs and heightens the shapes, shadows, and colors of her landscape blurring the facts in a way that feels more honest and true to the experience that it came from. At its heart, Caro’s work is about a personal relationship with landscapes and all the human and non-human influences and presences within them. Rooted in traditions of impressionism, Caro’s paintings depict worlds in which the act of observation (beyond just that of sight) plays a role in their creation. By simply noticing magic within the mundane, the world that we live in becomes full of mystery and excitement, a world of hidden stories meant to be uncovered by those who take the time to listen. Caro was born in Vancouver, Washington on April 14, 1993, and has spent her entire life building relationships with the land in America’s endlessly variable biomes and translating those feelings and findings into paintings. She holds a B.A. in Fine Art with a Distinguished Major in Printmaking and a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Virginia. She currently lives as a multi-media painter and muralist, painting full time from Salt Lake City.