SALT LAKE CITY, UT.- The Utah Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah is presenting salt 5: Daniel Everett, the fifth project in the Museum’s series of exhibitions showcasing innovative contemporary art from around the world.

salt 5: Daniel Everett is organized by Jill Dawsey, associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and former chief curator at the UMFA. The fifth salt installation will remain on view through July 29, 2012 in the Marcia and John Price Museum Building at the University of Utah. The exhibition is located in the salt gallery on the UMFA’s second floor.

Working in a range of mediums, artist and Utah resident Daniel Everett investigates the ways in which the built environment shapes our experience as individuals. His work explores ideas relating to architecture, virtual and physical space, modes of vision and surveillance, and the legacy of modernism. salt 5: Daniel Everett includes several photographic prints, two video pieces, and new mixed-media installations.

A highlight of salt 5: Daniel Everett is the artist’s photographic works, which often feature what curator Jill Dawsey calls “anonymous architecture”: generic buildings and structures that serve as spaces of transience. In his Monument series, Everett places images of standard security booths against gradient pink, blue, or green backgrounds, leaving them to float freely and detached from their original context. By referring to these minimal, mass-produced structures as “monuments,” Everett may suggest that they serve a commemorative function, perhaps paying homage to modernist architecture of the past. Yet the buildings also serve an authoritative purpose of security and surveillance, complicating their perceived banality. Like much of Everett’s work, the Monuments are both inviting and unnerving.

“The salt series is designed to bring the best of global contemporary art to Utah, and we are delighted to feature a Utah-based artist who is creating work as compelling and challenging as art found anywhere else,” says Dawsey. “Everett’s work is rigorous, formally inventive, and frequently humorous. He uses technologies of his own time and takes inspiration from the contemporary landscape, which is what great artists have always done.”

Daniel Everett received a BFA in photography from Brigham Young University in 2006 and a MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. Everett has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the NEXT Art Fair, Chicago, and his work has been included in group exhibitions at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, PPOW Gallery, and Allegra LaViola Gallery in New York; 12 Mail Gallery, Paris; XL Art Space, Helsinki; and the Central Utah Art Center, Ephraim, Utah. His work has been featured in Index Magazine, Proximity, and Carousel Magazine. Everett is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Brigham Young University.

The UMFA’s salt series affirms the Museum’s commitment to the art of today and tomorrow, demonstrating that contemporary art is vital, dynamic and socially relevant.