Enter the staff of the Visual Art Institute, who know the difference between teaching "about art" and teaching art. Instead of handing students a list of terms to memorize and understand as dictated, they offer an exhibit that allows students—and us, the viewers and public—a chance to explore some fundamental concepts and see if and how they may remain relevant to us today. For instance, Jones took a direct approach to scale, demonstrating how a crane made from a sixteenth of a square inch of paper must differ from one made from a hundred square feet of paper; and how comparative size, which is called scale, will affect our encounter with each; and how being in the presence of both will be different from either by itself.

Unlike Jones, Andrew Callis uses a single technique that produces different effects when applied to a small versus a large canvas. Beginning by building up a thick impasto of acrylic paints, when it is dry he sands it down to produce two-dimensional color areas that recall inkblots. In addition to the literal sense of scale, Callis exploits a philosophical equivalent as well: he controls the amount of color and where it's applied and chooses how much to sand off, but since the two processes operate at cross purposes, one creating in three dimensions and the other collapsing three back to two, the overall (macro) result could be said to be under his control, but the local arrangement (micro) is not. The full effect combines the two, but not without regard to scale. "M.A.S.," his large abstract, primarily delivers what he means it to,|0| while “Bear” and “Beryl,” two seeming miniatures, teeter on the brink of pure accident.

In the eponymously titled “Macro” and “Micro,” Benjamin Wiemeyer explores the absolute limits of artistic scale, where they bracket genres or even whole media. The canvas of “Macro” is so large that the mural comes off the wall and becomes its own architecture, defining the space the way a tent set up in the living room makes a home's interior also an exterior.|1| The energetic abstraction that marches across the canvas refers to, among other things, music, an appropriate choice as music, like very large art works, modifies an environment even as it enters it. But if large paintings tend to insist on our seeing them in sculptural or even architectonic terms, Wiemeyer argues in “Micro” that we see miniatures in much the same way. Here he mounts his painting as a microscope slide. The centuries-old convention that a painting is a kind of window into an imaginary space, which stood from the Florentine Quattrocento until Duchamp substituted real glass for canvas, only works in the middle range. As technology allows us to expand the limits of human perception, painting turns into something new.

Meanwhile, in "Winter" and "Spring" Nolan Baumgartner alters scale by switching media. In the micro-sculpture "Winter," |2| a Monopoly house bordered by trees made of dental brushes rises from a field of snow on plowed earth represented by a corrugated potato chip. In this witty confection, the artist transforms familiar elements unexpectedly into a gem-like landscape as captivating as a snow globe: a drugstore equivalent of a Faberge Easter egg. Behind it on the wall, two similar tableaus have been blown up into large photographs with a completely different feel. Where in "Winter" we are outside, peering in, "Spring" allows us to enter the mise-en-scène, wherein toy armies face each other across a grass-green field of flocked potato chips. The apparent confrontation argues that better weather doesn't necessarily mean things will improve for the inhabitants.

"Tandem," in which Katherine Jones mixes Xerox transfers with acrylic paint, places the microscopic and the cosmic in context against a witness who is also the reference point.|3| Both views feature the same torso, denied agency by its lack of a head, hands, or feet, but able to sense and display the universe within and without. The interior world is suitably organic, like the myriad of micro-organisms and tiny structures that dwell within and make our lives possible and risky; the exterior world is galactic and vast. Placing the two on separate canvases emphasizes the skin that separates them and allows the point of view that distinguishes them to emerge as the zone of human identity.

The most challenging work here -- the one that strongly invites interpretation even as it resists verbal equivalence -- is ironically the one that directly incorporates speech as a kind of lyric to the music of its visuals. Patrick Munger's title, "I have good pants on," |4| comes from a running series of captions that alternate with lightning-like legs that make the small drawing appear to scurry across the pedestal on which it stands—straddling the line between two- and three-dimensional representation. The lines resemble a schizophrenic's word salad, connected as much by sound as sense, beginning with

MANY LIGHTS UP TODAY
MANY LIGHTS UP THIS WAY

Self-assertion alternates with hostility and accusation, while whatever sense or argument lies behind them remains as elusive as gauze:

WHAT IS THIS ROAD HERE
WHERE HAVE I COME
I AM A RICH MAN
I AM A VERY RICH MAN
I HAVE GOOD PANTS ON

is followed by

STITCHED AND STITCHED
I AM IN STITCHES
I AM LAUGHING AT YOU.

Rhyme and echo as much as sense dictate the next line:

I AM IN BRITCHES
I'VE WRITTEN BOOKS FOR YOU

Alternating accusations and self-assertions follow, culminating in

I AM A RACING HORSE
I AM A GRAZING HORSE
I AM YOUR FAVORITE HORSE.

All this apparently emerges from a hood-shaped head with a mouth resembling a stitched wound, capturing a disordered state of mind that might be mistaken for a mood. Something analogous, but non-verbal, takes place on the mural-sized collage that accompanies this tiny anecdote. Linked primarily by the repeated use—and manifold repetition—of a three-quarter view of an anatomically distorted head, the larger piece presents an initially engaging, but ultimately alienating hallucination of a population of aliens who stand—perhaps float—in silent contemplation of something that remains unseen. Neither work feels like a fantasy; rather, they come across as explorations of a genuinely alternative, but entirely human, state of consciousness. In an art environment of relentlessly positive, holistic imagery, these fragments stand out as infinitely more real than the most photographic landscapes or spiritual figures.

Credit for the success of MICRO/macro and, for that matter, the Visual Art Institute, must go first to the Institute's executive director, Bruce Roberson, and to the City of Salt Lake, which owns the former school building and houses several public programs within. The gallery (as well as the work it showcases) is the work of local artists Kenny Riches, whose previous gallery experience includes founding the Kayo Gallery, and Cara Despain. During the month of July the Institute featured an intensive figure drawing program taught by Kate Mooth, who graciously showed me to the gallery before returning to a studio full of high school talent. There aren't a lot of signs telling visitors where to go, but that's in keeping with the lack of signs telling anyone where not to go. The Institute staff have turned one of Salt Lake's few loft-like buildings into an engaging place, where even the office feels like an artist's space. Those who like to experience such places as give rise to art would do well to visit the Visual Art Institute. For those who prefer to consume art in classier environs, Cafe Niche on Broadway is presenting a large sample of student work from the Institute along with its more conventional fare.

MICRO/micro is at the Visual Art Institute's GARFO gallery through August 26.

Geoff Wichert