ST. GEORGE, Utah — Offering a fresh perspective on a longstanding artistic tradition, the Sears Art Museum at Utah Tech University is featuring “Fractured Lands / Fractured Narratives,” a group exhibition featuring eight artists from Utah and Idaho whose work challenges traditional approaches to landscape painting.
Featuring artists Shelly Coleman, Micah Henrie, Tyler Tāne Huntzinger, Aaron Cordell Johnson, David Mensing, Matt Pectol, Barry Scharf and Steve Sheffield, the exhibition explores the intersection of abstraction, landscape and the stories humans attach to the natural world. The exhibition opens Nov. 13 with a public reception from 6:30 to 8 p.m. and remains on view through Jan. 8, 2027.
At the heart of “Fractured Lands / Fractured Narratives” is a question posed to each participating artist: Are your abstract landscape paintings driven by formal choices or metaphor?
The question invites artists to consider whether their work emerges primarily from the formal elements of painting — color, composition, texture and gesture — or from the ideas, experiences and associations that landscapes can evoke. Rather than requiring a choice between these approaches, the exhibition encourages artists to embrace, resist or complicate the distinction.
The exhibition brings together artists whose diverse approaches reflect what Sears Art Museum Director and Curator James Peck describes as contemporary realism. While their works retain connections to recognizable landscapes, these artists move beyond straightforward representation, making inventive formal choices that may — or may not — suggest deeper layers of meaning. Their paintings challenge the notion that landscape art must faithfully reproduce the visible world, instead exploring the possibilities of interpretation, abstraction and personal expression.
“Landscape painting has traditionally been associated with the depiction of place, but abstraction allows artists to explore something less tangible: the memories, experiences and ideas we project onto the land,” Peck said. “This exhibition asks whether those meanings are deliberately constructed or emerge through the act of painting itself.”
All eight artists are based in Utah or Idaho, a region defined by dramatic geology and a complex cultural landscape. While the American West provides inspiration from fractured rock formations and expansive deserts to mountain ranges and shifting environments, the exhibition is less concerned with documenting specific places than with exploring how artists transform their experiences of landscape into compelling visual statements.
By questioning the boundaries between realism and abstraction, formal experimentation and metaphor, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider not only how landscapes are represented, but how meaning is created through the act of looking.
The exhibition is free and open to the public. The Sears Art Museum is located on the Utah Tech University campus in the Dolores Doré Eccles Fine Arts Center, located at 155 S. University Ave. in St. George. The museum is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and closed on university holidays. Learn more at searsart.com.
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