Jann Haworth has found a great deal of personal satisfaction in the realm of two-dimensional art and in exploring the possibilities of the time/space continuum, brought to the fore first in the Cubist movement nearly 100 years ago just as Einstein’s convention-shattering theoretical ideas were published.

Today, she is encouraged as young artists – many in their twenties just as she was during the 1960s when Pop Art manifested itself in far-reaching ways – explore the spatial possibilities of the fourth dimension as directed by the artist’s continuously shifting point of view. Of course, today’s digital age has transformed the time/space continuum into a conundrum but no worries for Haworth and for inventive artists, filmmakers, and musicians, especially those at this year’s Utah Arts Festival.

As avid, intent surfers of the Internet know well, images online can be held in a state of suspension, in effect inhabiting virtual space where one can recall the images at will, thereby connecting them back to their time and space characteristics at their creation.

Certainly those ideas echo resoundingly in the daily collage workshops she is conducting each afternoon during her residency at the Utah Arts Festival. And, the Gallery at the City Library is home to Pop Plastiques, an exhibition of her work. It features abstracted images of mannequins, corsets, and portraits of cut and sewn painted canvas and vinyl plastic. Most significantly, it is her statement as an artist freed from the constraints of tradition and from prevailing philosophical notions of postmodernism where she explores pop culture subjects using the comic “frame” genre of the graphic novel and filmstrip.

Haworth’s biography, with British and American roots, is intriguing particularly for its connection to filmmaking. Her family was involved even in the early days of the cinematic industry. Her husband, Richard Severy, is a writer and screenwriter. And, her son, Alex, has a short film in the festival’s Utah Short Film of the Year Competition and was involved in the recent documentary about the 337 Project in the city. Incidentally, the young Haworth’s The Deep also was screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Haworth, who has lived in Utah for more than 10 years, often is recognized immediately as being the co-designer for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover, for which she received a Grammy. Local residents also know her well as being the project director for the Sgt. Pepper mural project that can be found on 400 West between 200 South and 300 South. The project was, as she wrote in a 2004 column for a British newspaper, a corrective:

“I wanted to repair a lot of damage; lose the three Miss Temples and the pin-ups. Replace them with flesh and brain women. Set other poor choices right; create a new fresh look; and make a collaborative work of Fine Art on a city mural scale. And paint the catalysts of our time.”

And, the resulting mural in SLC reflects the contemporary promise of the steady rise of different voices in our politics, culture, and economy.

Haworth is just as energetic in her creative work as she is engaged with students, whether in a collage workshop or, as a manifestation of her connection to The Leonardo at Library Square, showing young students techniques for science drawing. A major figure in the Pop Art movement, she recently participated in UK pop shows in Modena, Italy and Bilbao, Spain as well as the Tate Great Britain’s recent show that coincided with the three-part BBC program about artists of the 1960s. Her recent solo show can be seen at The Mayor Gallery, London, and then at Galerie du Centre, Paris in September, 2008. Forthcoming shows include Pop Art UK Angers, France (2008), and Philadelphia: “Beyond the Surface, Women in Pop Art,” which will tour the United States, beginning in the spring of 2010.

During the collage workshops, she lays out for her students a list of questions and principles that value unconstrained participation and exploration. I’m reminded by my own work as a teacher of writing. With my students, I always start with the premise of The Elements of Style, the classic best-selling brief grammar and style primer of William Strunk and E. B. White. The rules are presented in staccato fashion, almost as if a general is barking orders to his troops. But, then I show how White himself, as well as many other writers, broke those rules eloquently and famously so. The point is – just as Haworth suggests to her students – that learn the rules and then break the rules. The artistic being should never be prescribed nor proscribed.

And, the current exhibition at the library reflects Haworth’s wisely chosen independent stance that disavows – punctuated periodically with evidently effective sarcasm – formalistic and postmodernist notions about aesthetic ambitions and meanings. For example, Art in the 20th Century – done in canvas, fur, oil, paint, fabric, and gesso – is a collection of donuts suggesting an unfettered candid, witty, biting assessment of the movements found in last century’s art – including Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, Pop, Postmodern, and even Graffiti. Minimalism – so fleeting as to be ignored – doesn’t even merit a donut but a tiny spot in the lower right-hand corner, a mere footnote at best.

However, what is most significant in the exhibition pieces – such as Mannequin and Scheherazade – is what they reflect about her evolving exploration of the time/space continuum. Hence, the influence of the ways of filmstrips, in which clips are pieced together, and movie storyboards – and, in fact, even comics, anime, and graphic novels – suggest how the narrative unfolds in time. Freed from the constraints of Euclidean geometry, these works clearly show her efforts to represent that unfolding of time by compressing the sequential panels or frames of a storyboard, comic, or filmstrip into a singular manifestation. Propelled by her own natural instincts, she is rightfully preoccupied with correcting the 20th Century problem faced by Cubists whose progeny became obsessed with the modernist avant-garde sentiments of exclusion and aloofness, distancing art from society.

And, four floors above the festival grounds, the tag line of this year’s festival – Take Part in Art – is in full force inside the City Library as Haworth leads students clearly energized and enthusiastic about doing just that.

The exhibition continues past the end of the festival and will close July 26.