Installed across an expansive wall in Orem’s Library Hall, Impressions by Marissa Albrecht scales up a quiet meditation on utility, repetition, and the residue of work.

I first learned of the future Orem Public Library when samples of its stained glass panorama, drawn from folk tales and children’s literature, appeared in public, but I didn’t get there to see the finished complex for myself until I was recently encouraged by Marissa Albrecht to see her installations Signs of Life, Impressions, and Negotiations, currently in the Library Hall.

Albrecht has had three major shows in the last year, and while normally we don’t write about an artist that often, her body of work has become so large and varied that she can’t show even a complete, representative sampling in one place, so each of her outings has had unique works that appeared only there. At Finch Lane, for instance, photographic prints of roadway surfaces, with painted lines and texts and generous discarded and run over bits of cultural ephemera, were laid out on the floor, showing us our streets not transferred to the wall, as custom dictates, but on the ground where we could truly recognize them.

One thing she showed at St. George, but almost twice as large here, Impressions consists of a grid of 5-gallon paint lids, each marked with the history of its use before Albrecht claimed it. This archive of a ubiquitous industrial byproduct that surely no one, not even the painters themselves, have paused to contemplate until this artist, who was one of those painters once upon a time, stopped to do so, turns out to be a massage for the eye and a revelation for the mind once she has arranged it so it can be appreciated.

A detail from Impressions, Marissa Albrecht’s sculptural archive of used 5-gallon paint can lids, revealing the history and materiality of labor through industrial byproducts.

Signs of Life is Albrecht’s operatic homage to civic infrastructure—an exuberant, layered display of signals and safety devices that transforms the logic of public space into visual art.

Albrecht’s pièce de résistance is always her Signs of Life, an operatic collection of every conceivable sort of easily-overlooked lifesaving device, from simple road signs and bits of warning tape to complex electrical signal boxes. Arranged in depth and width in a three-dimensional collage, which here at the Library finally has enough space to show its power, this song of praise and triumph celebrates not only the desire of engineers and working men and women to make their labors safe for all who use public spaces, but demonstrates the endless creativity of a society that has chosen to make safety an indispensable kernel lying at the heard of a system that has grown organically as if uncontrolled, but only seems so until we see its component parts arrayed in a work of art.

New to this iteration, Negotiations takes the place of the collages of discarded mailers and packaging material that completed Albrecht’s triad at Finch Lane. Here, hung along a curved wall, eight assemblages—collages executed in three-dimensional space, each  on a vertical pedestal—recall the Comte de Lautrémont’s defining contribution to 20th-century aesthetics—“Beautiful… as the fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” An unsigned comment at the Library says, “These works don’t aim to offer final answers but suggest a kind of visual negotiation, where disparate parts find harmony through proximity. Arranged together, they form compositions that celebrate contrast, complement, and interdependence—reminding us that meaning is often built not in isolation, but in relationship with others.”

In Negotiations, Albrecht explores harmony through contrast, placing disparate urban detritus into formal compositions that invite viewers to reconsider relationships between structure and improvisation.

What that says about Marissa Albrecht’s art applies equally well to her message and her context. Just as art works and exhibitions can be built of independent parts, so a civil society must be assembled deliberately, through effort. The library demonstrates that a willing populace can create a resource that benefits all its members equally. We can view these powerfully connected examples and then go out into the streets, alert to music unheard until now.

Common Ground, Orem Public Library, Orem, through August 2.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.