Jill Saxton Smith | Benjamin Childress

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, Memory, and the Bodies We Hold

Exhibition
Saxton Smith’s work explores skin as both boundary and container, an intimate, political, and psychic surface. She investigates how rupture, sensation, and relational experience shape identity and memory. Her materials, algae-based plastic, SCOBY, textiles, and found objects carry a language of permeability, transformation, and decay. These organic and domestic elements evoke both bodily fragility and cultural memory, blurring the line between flesh and artifact. un(contained) meditates on the ways we carry histories in and on our bodies, asking how we are held, emotionally, materially, and collectively, through trauma, change, and the traces of care.

Biography
Jill Saxton Smith is a Utah-based interdisciplinary artist and art educator with over 20 years of experience working and exhibiting both in the U. S. and abroad. Her practice explores themes of comfort, dislocation, motherhood, and the sense of home through process-based experimentation with found and raw construction materials. Saxton Smith has exhibited across three continents, including at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and has led workshops and lectures in diverse communities, focusing on supporting underrepresented artists and artists with disabilities.

Benjamin Childress: Shadows and Alleyways

Exhibition
Shadows and Alleyways is a series of oil paintings that explores the intersection of memory, presence, and place, rooted in the often-overlooked back alleys of Salt Lake City. In these pieces, layers of paint are built up to construct landscapes with atmospheric depth, while the figures—inspired by shadows and the way they shift under colored lights—exist as spectral impressions. Their vibrancy represents a life force within these otherwise empty, seemingly abandoned spaces—composites of those who have lived in, traveled through, and shaped these areas over time. They serve as reminders that people leave traces after they're gone.

Biography
Benjamin Childress is a Utah-based artist, living and working in Salt Lake City. Specializing in oil paintings, he creates work that blurs the line between representational and abstraction, exploring themes of identity, human connection, anxiety, memory, place and the seen and unseen forces that shape us. Employing a mix of layering, blending and bold brushwork, with an emphasis on light, form and color, his paintings are rooted in personal experience and shaped by influences ranging from various eras of expressionism to psychedelic art. His work is in private collections nationally and has been shown in the Pacific Northwest and Utah.