Anomalies – Suzanne Sbarge

Arts & Culture Categories: Arts,Visual Arts
Audience: Children,Teens,Adults,Members
Type of Event: Exhibit
Cost: Free Admission
Link: https://ogdencontemporaryarts.org/exhibition-anomalies-suzanne-sbarge/

Anomalies is a solo exhibition by New Mexico-based artist Suzanne Sbarge, Ogden Contemporary Arts’ 2025 Artist-in-Residence. The exhibition features hybrid creatures within landscapes that reference Ogden and Utah and is inspired by the last 150 years of people settling on the edge of the harsh salty environment of the Great Salt Lake. Sbarge incorporates vintage photographs along with living, extinct, or imagined fauna and flora to explore how human existence is inseparable from nature, and to reflect on our delicate ecosystem.

Sbarge highlights fluidity and interconnection across humans, animals, genders, time, dimensions, and art mediums. She says, “In science, anomalies highlight errors, rare events, or entirely new phenomena. This exhibition looks at the animals of Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake through the lens of my imagination, where stories of loss and renewal play out in and around the shrinking, enclosed body of salt water in the high desert.”

For this new body of work, Sbarge has expanded her two-dimensional collage and painting practice to include three-dimensional printing, stop-motion animation, and cyanotypes, allowing her characters to take on new forms and gaze at the viewer and one another as if challenging reality, nature, and perception. Ever-present in her work are the dualities of familiarity and otherworldliness, interior and exterior, domesticity and freedom, sky and earth, real and imagined.

In tandem with Anomalies, Sbarge is presenting “Real/Surreal: Stories of Antelope Island,” a mobile art exhibition that presents works created in collaboration with student participants in OCA’s Artist Factory program. These works are featured on digital billboards throughout Ogden and Salt Lake City and as a full bus wrap on the exterior of one of Ogden’s city buses.