In her 2015 master of fine arts’ thesis, Molly Heller wrote about her formative development as a dancer. performer, choreographer and teacher. “It is in the act of being witnessed and witnessing that I feel my existence. I believe that we are all part of the same mystery and collectively we search for meaning. On our individual paths that march towards the great unknown, we occasionally experience moments of clarity – a quality of light that serves to inspire others to stay ‘in-life’ and to find their path with heart,” she explained. Reflecting upon her own family experiences which was incorporated into her thesis choreographic project (This is your Paradise), Heller added, “Trauma can confuse that path, and damage the heart, which I believe is the driver of life. From my past experiences with trauma, I realize that finding connections with others, and creating opportunities for connection, promotes healing.”
Today, Heller, an associate professor of dance at The University of Utah, also is director of Heartland Collective, a multidisciplinary arts collective. With that multidisciplinary arts context in mind, she also is the curator for Grief Work, the most ambitious undertaking by Material Art Gallery in its still very young history. The show puts an impressively diverse lens on the creative expression of grief, a topic which many find difficult to communicate in a sociocultural environment which generally encourages individuals to move on from the vulnerabilities of loss in its many forms. It is an exceptional fully integrated multimedia experience in its collaborative provenance.
With a call for work that expanded across the country, guest curator Heller worked with Jorge Rojas and Colour Maisch, Material cofounders, to judge and curate submissions of nearly 400 pieces from more than 150 artists. The resulting exhibition features 53 Utah and national artists in a broad spectrum of media, including two- and three-dimensional work, performance, film, sound, and poetry.
This is collaboration par excellence. The gallery art was meticulously curated to augment, amplify and accompany the curated body of choreography, literary performances and performance art video and short films. To wit: two important events will take place before the exhibition closes April 10: an April 3 performance and film at the V. Project Art/Space Experience, founded by Gary Vlasic, and a closing night grief rave (April 10, starting at 6:30 p.m.) with a Shadow Play performance as well as music by Músico, a drummer who also extensively programs and mixes bass beats.
Heller emphasizes the sixth sense capabilities of performance for the creative intelligence that anchors this outstanding exhibition. Again, as she wrote in her earlier thesis, “For me, becoming incredible is terrifying and magical; it means that I choose to believe I am capable of anything. Performance is vast, unparalleled in its extremes and transparent in its condition.”
The show’s instinctive bridge to the curated body of visual arts reflects that philosophy in its edifying principle. A stunning piece rendered with graphite pencil on paper, Caroline Liu’s The Dead Cannot Return to Life (2026) is an exquisitely composed contemplation rooted in the artist’s own experience with infertility, but contextualized in ancestral Chinese symbolism highlighting the longevity of cranes as the guides for souls transcending earthly and other worlds. As the artist notes, the rope “recurs as a motif of tension and restraint, the difficulty of release, and the paralysis that accompanies loss.”
Vanessa Romo’s Meditations on Grief (2026), emphasizes the symbolic universal architecture of grief as an infinite chain and loop of cycles signified by materials including ceramic, iron, muslin, and coffee. Peter Wiarda’s Dysthymia Landscapes (2025) emerges from the premise of cycles, with multiple-exposure photographs that portray the artist’s direct experience with a chronic form of depression. Just as he grieves the loss of meaningful moments and the rejuvenating sense of lightness during cycles of depression, Wiarda anticipates the prospects of breaking such cycles.
There are works that chronicle the artist’s grief, as we are most commonly associated with, when a loved one dies. A photo by Andrew Rease Shaw, Wedge X1-XB BX no B not EB (2024) was taken during a camping trip which would become the last with his beloved chihuahua. The photo shows the morning light touching a gnarled tree at Wedge Overlook. As Shaw explained, “Grieving his death, I removed the letter ‘B’ from the file’s digital code, which resulted in this glitchy expression of memory and loss.”
The empty chair in the kitchen is a potent visual metaphor about grief’s invisible but yet unmistakable presence in Anna Pottier’s La Tchuisine Chu Nous (2024). The work vividly captures the artist’s intentions: “Me imagining my mother’s pride as she started married life, conflating with heart-pinching, inexpressible grief for our miscommunications and how I’d yearned to fly out that window; for the meals, talks, and times around that table, never to be replicated except via art.”
These aforementioned works are tied together elegantly by the creative layered impetus of Lis Pardoe’s Matter of Being (2024), about the complex coexistence of the pain of grief (in remembrance of her mother’s death) and, as the artist explained, “the complexity of the simultaneous beauty that I ultimately felt alongside it.”
The abstract canvas rendered in acrylic and mixed media in Nuha Moretz’s The Land Endures (2025), is a reverential expression of grace and gratitude, inspired by the artist’s trip through Capitol Reef National Park. Grief here represents the relentless vulnerability nature is subjected to by human dominion. As Morerz notes, it calls “us to pause and truly listen to its quiet strength beneath a storm-filled sky and its warm colors shaped by time. No matter the scars or sorrow it carries, the land continues to give, remember, and sustain life.”
A sharp portrayal of the progressive sense of loss and grief for the constant state of war and turmoil, destruction and destabilization her homeland of Lebanon has endured for many decades, Aya Krisht’s hand/disintegration (2023) is a set of eight prints made via carving or “reducing” the same lino block for each subsequent print. Krisht has focused on the traditional arts of letterpress and preserving the history of Arabic type. She is cofounder of Maamoul Press, a small publisher and collective organized around the creation, curation and dissemination of comics, printmaking and book arts. The example of grief as a motivator to rescue and preserve the elements of essential identity from obscurity is conveyed brilliantly in Krisht’s piece.
Kelly Lawler’s Ascension (2025), a watercolor and thread installation piece standing 18 feet tall, encapsulates the thematic impulses of the curatorial mission behind Grief Work. The synergy with performance is critical to the effective integrity of the show in all of its multidisciplinary components. “Performance is a return to expression and meaning – it gathers people together to feel and experience something larger than form. It is ritual,” Heller wrote in her thesis. That certainly was evident in the packed crowds which turned out when the show opened earlier this month.
Grief Work could not be more timely than its current presence. With the grave and tremendously disheartening news that we encounter without relief every day, this show definitely has struck a nerve. Our public engagement and even personal interactions with grief often are awkward, discomfiting and formidable, generally to the point of even seeming to be a social taboo. But this collaboration also validates what Heller already had figured out years ago as a graduate student about trauma and grief: “It can be a throughway to access our potential as humans, to access the microcosms and macrocosms that we are constantly negotiating. It is a calling to separate from our habitual created realities, realities that often serve to trap us within societal molds and expectations.”
The collective experience epitomized in Grief Work signifies a natural and mutual exchange of trust. More of this should be welcomed in the Utah arts scene.
For more information, see the Material Art Gallery website.