Exhibitions Open Jan 12 through Feb 20, 2026
Fri, Jan 16, 6-9pm: Opening Reception & Salt Lake Gallery Stroll
Fri, Feb 20, 6-9pm: Salt Lake Gallery Stroll
Ben Bloch: Make Me a Landscape, Do Not Include Any Sky
Exhibition Statement
Make Me a Landscape, Do Not Include Any Sky explores the relationship between art, nature, and technology in the emerging age of artificial intelligence. In collaboration with fellow artist (and tech entrepreneur) John Brownell, I used a collection of my paintings to train a closed-circuit AI image model specializing in “Ben Bloch” style images generated from text prompts. In some sense, all landscapes are based on prompts (be they nature itself, or a representation/memory of nature), and I wondered, what might these images based on a custom visual language model have to offer to a landscape painter? What would happen if I reversed the feedback loop and re-rendered them in paint on canvas? What could AI—which is, after all, a human creation—have to tell us about our own human designs? From hundreds of outputs, I selected a few of my favorites to paint by my own hand. This series is the result.
Biography
Ben Bloch is an artist living and working between Utah and Montana. He earned MFAs in Painting and Creative Writing from the University of Montana in 2002. Before deciding to focus on landscape painting, he was a co-founder of the arts collaborative Goatsilk, and he built and ran an experimental art space by the same name in Missoula from 2002-2004. During these years, he also wrote an arts and culture column for the Missoulian newspaper. Before moving to Salt Lake City in 2015, he was a visiting professor in new genre arts at Whitman College and a resident artist at Central Michigan University. Along his journey, he has also worked as a carpenter, an inventor and entrepreneur, co-created the web series “Killin’ It with Paul Crik,” and been a technical writer for a software company. He has received an NEA grant as a National Parks artist-in-residence, and his work has been featured in the UK Guardian, Hyperallergic.com, Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art, Public Art Dialogue, and G4TV's Attack of the Show.
Carol Sogard: A Pictorial Atlas of Fossil Remains
Exhibition Statement
The discarded remains of our consumption provide evidence of our impact on the natural world. Throughout nature’s decomposition process, these remains exhibit new attributes and evolve alongside found organic natural debris. They take on fresh meaning, confronting us with our discarded leftovers as they decompose and merge with the environment. The subtle message within these images conveys the inorganic attributes of our natural world as it has evolved in the Anthropocene, emphasizing the lasting effects of consumption through an exhibit of the unnatural fossils that will survive long after we are gone.
Biography
Carol Sogard’s work sheds light on the environmental impacts of consumer waste on the natural world. She integrates photographic documentation, weaving, and sewing into the creation of works that are rich and complex in layered details. The artifacts that she creates instill reflection and inspire contemplation on one’s relationship with the natural world and how human behavior dramatically affects it. Her design work and textile artifacts have been honored and published by the AIGA, How Books, Print Magazine, Rockport Publishers, Utah Division of Arts & Museums, and the Royal Geographic Society and have been exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally.
