Exhibitions Open Mar 2 through Apr 10, 2026
Fri, Mar 6, 6-9pm: Opening Reception
Fri, Mar 20, 6-9pm: Salt Lake Gallery Stroll
Jill Saxton Smith: (un)contained: On Skin, Boundaries, and the Emotions We Hold
Exhibition Statement
In this body of work, I explore the concept of “skin” as both boundary and container, a mutable surface where the personal, political, and collective converge. Skin becomes a site of inquiry: it holds, resists, remembers. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s writing on skin as a threshold of sensation and relationality, and Esther Bick’s theory of the skin as a psychic envelope, this work meditates on how we come to know ourselves—emotionally, psychically, politically—through touch, rupture, and proximity.
Skin, in my practice, is more than flesh; it is metaphor and material, archive and interface. It marks where the self meets the world, where we are made vulnerable and where we find resilience. Ahmed reminds us that pain makes the skin known, that our awareness of boundaries is often produced in moments of tension, trauma, and resistance. My work attempts to give form to these moments, to visualize the subtle thresholds between holding and breaking, exposure and protection.
I work primarily with unconventional materials such as, organic plastic derived from algae, SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast), textiles, found objects, and raw materials.
These elements carry a tactile language of permeability, transformation, and decay. The bio-materials resist fixity and invite decomposition, while the textiles and found objects speak to the domestic, the worn, the already-touched. These materials stretch, scar, blister, and collapse, echoing bodily processes and fragilities.
The work operates across intimacy and collectivity, moving between what is privately held and what is shared. Rather than offering fixed forms of containment, the sculptures remain unstable; responsive to pressure, time, and environment. This instability reflects the ways emotional and social boundaries are formed, tested, and reconfigured, pointing to the tension between care and collapse, endurance and exposure.
This exhibition is not simply about skin as surface, but about skin as witness. It asks: what do we carry at our edges? How do we hold ourselves and each other through rupture? And what forms of containment allow us to remain whole, even as we change?
Biography
Jill Saxton Smith is a Utah-based interdisciplinary artist and art educator whose work explores comfort and dislocation, the female body, motherhood, and the idea of home. Working with found materials, raw construction elements, and bio-materials, her practice is rooted in process and material transformation. She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and a BFA from Utah State University, and has exhibited across three continents, including at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Jill has led workshops and lectures in diverse communities, emphasizing accessibility, material inquiry, and embodied ways of making.
Benjamin Childress: Shadows and Alleyways
Exhibition Statement
Shadows and Alleyways is a body of work with a focus on the peripheral; the people, places, histories, and parts of ourselves that live just outside our frame of attention. Inspired by the alleyways of Salt Lake City, these paintings move through back streets and in-between spaces, injecting vibrancy and light into areas typically ignored or unseen. Shadows, appearing as echoes rather than portraits, show traces of movement, emotion, and identity. This work is about what lingers. It is about the beauty, tension, and resilience overlooked in people and spaces. It is an invitation to slow down, to look sideways, and to notice and recognize what exists in the margins.
Biography
Benjamin Childress is a Utah based artist, living and working in Salt Lake City. Blurring the line between representation and abstraction, his work addresses themes like human connection, identity, anxiety, loss and his surrounding environment—with an emphasis in figurative and landscape motifs. He draws inspiration from life and different eras of expressionism and psychedelic art. His work is in private collections nationally and has been shown in the Pacific Northwest and Utah.
