Art within 'Proximity'

Stepping into the Rio Gallery, one is immediately drawn to the size, subject matter and technical proficiency of "By Proximity," an exhibition of paintings, sculpture and prints by 10 art professors from Brigham Young University.

The brainchild of Joe Ostraff — one of the art professors — the original show was slated to include Ostraff and a few others. However, Ostraff decided the show would be better if he included all the art teachers with whom he worked.

"I announced to all the studio faculty what was going on and told them it would be fun to do it together," said Ostraff. "We don't show together often outside of a faculty show. And then I realized that people in Salt Lake may not be familiar with the faculty here, so I became kind of excited."

The BYU art professors are an eclectic group, tied together — according to Ostraff — only by their physical proximity to each other, ergo the show's title.

"By Proximity" includes work by Von Allen, Wulf Barsch, Gary Barton, Brian Christensen, Bryon Draper, Peter Everett, Wayne Kimball, Robert Marshall and Bruce Smith.

• Allen studied at Syracuse University (M.F.A., 1983) and has

been teaching art at BYU since 1984. Of her two pieces in the exhibit, "Career Ladder (Achiever's Charm)," is the most fetching. This ceramic sculpture of an arm with a hand holding a small ladder has such a unique patina, one almost feels as if her piece were created 2,000 years ago, was lost at sea and was just recently discovered.

• Barsch's pseudo-cabalistic, didactic renderings — and his influence on students at BYU — have been legend since the 1970s. Born in Reudnitz, Bohemia, and educated in Europe and America, Barsch joined the Y.'s art faculty in 1972. He has several paintings in "By Proximity," all in his trademark style, but "Magic Square" is particularly nice.

• Barton, a professor of art at BYU since 1994, received his M.F.A. from Ohio State. Prolific and inventive, his series of four intaglios — "The Straight Line," "Yesterday," "Through the Leaves" and "Artifacts" — are stark, sooty scribbles that grunt and groan their way across the surface of the paper. Expressionistic and bold, they make a strong, graphic statement.

• Taking his M.F.A. in ceramics at Washington University in St. Louis, Christensen is a sculptor who thrives on giving his finished pieces a sense of history, as if they were at one time functional. His exhibition piece "Cauldron" is an excellent example of a work made to appear practical, and yet is not.