But the blotchiness of the words and the sunshine yellow color make you want to come closer and try to understand.

Artist Jenny Holzer has left us a message. "Preliminary Autopsy Report," one of her two pieces on display at the Salt Lake Art Center, is art about secrecy, made of an internal U.S. military document Holzer acquired through the Freedom of Information Act.

Holzer, who magnified the document and silkscreened it onto wood, leaves the viewer to puzzle out the story behind the words.

The name of the victim and other classified details have been redacted (by the government, not Holzer), but this much is clear: The nameless man referred to in the document was a 52 year-old Iraqi detainee, and the cause of his death was homicide - specifically, "strangulation." As a document, and as art, the piece is grim and illuminating, a paradox of disclosure and withholding.

Holzer's work is included in the Art Center's new exhibit exploring the complex beauty that arises when artists address civil liberties in America.

The display, curated by the Art Center's Jay Heuman, employs art to do what conversations often cannot: to reach citizens where issues really hit them - in the gut and in solitude, says Karen McCreary, executive director of the Utah chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Art has the power to "say something more than what we say when we blithely talk about freedom," McCreary says. "Visual art, in particular, has the particular power to pierce through a lot of the crap."

At the moment, McCreary's reference point is the current general election. The devaluation and drone of contemporary discourse may be the very reason that the American public does not find itself more outraged about violations against the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, she says.

Right-brain activism

The art center's exhibition appeals to the right brain. None of the works in the show is a direct protest about civil liberties, but a sub rosa conversation.

It's timed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the ACLU of Utah, but its broad categories are focused on national and international issues, such as abuse of power; the separation of church and state; the rights of gays, lesbians and transgendered individuals; racial justice; and torture, imprisonment and war.

The American Civil Liberties Union came into existence in 1920 to serve as a watchdog of and activist for citizens. Some high-profile ACLU issues have included the Scopes trial in 1925, loyalty oath requirements during the Cold War in the 1950s, and more recently, human rights standards after 9/11.

"What would life look like," McCreary asks, "if we took the Utah ACLU out of the picture?"

The artwork

Artists whose work is included in "Liberties Under Fire" indirectly answer McCreary's question.

Sue Coe is a draftswoman and printmaker whose high-contrast, tight pieces read like 19th-century political cartoons. One striking and direct work is "Thousands Try to Escape the Superdome, 2006," a Bosch-like graphite drawing from her Hurricane Series.

Two pieces by artist Enrique Chagoya examine, at a slant, civil liberties and U.S. immigration policy. The icons he employs are cross-cultural shards - fallen Buddha heads (referencing the Taliban's destruction of religious sites in Afghanistan); Hebrew, Chinese and Arabic script; golden illuminated pages that appear to be the work of medieval scribes; and altered biblical images.

Other highlights in the show include commissioned essays, which are part of an exhibition publication. Utah Poet Laureate Katharine Coles has written the introduction, with other essays by Terry Tempest Williams; Forrest S. Cuch, executive director of Indian Affairs in Utah, Weber State University professor Forrest Crawford; and Salt Lake writer and activist Mary Dickson. In addition, Utah playwright Julie Jensen responds to the cheeky, complex, playful and deadly serious concerns raised in the dreamlike super-realistic photographs of Alabaman John Trobaugh.

Curator Heuman labels Trobaugh as something of a poster boy for freedom of expression. At the college where Trobaugh once taught, one of his exhibits was closed by the college president due to "indecency" before it even opened.

One of Trobaugh's works for the Utah show, employing his trademark style, is a photographic portrait of three Barbie dolls, one transgendered, another cross-dressed, standing in the glinting sun in front of the Salt Lake City-County Building.

Heuman says that Trobaugh made several of these photographs while on his last trip to Utah, including a piece in which a white and black woman, clearly a couple, stand arm in arm by the Great Salt Lake. Trobaugh tried to pose his army of gay Barbies in front of the Salt Lake Temple, but was quickly shooed away by security officers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints before he could complete his work.

Artwork such as Trobaugh's speaks to the issues that the Utah ACLU chapter has been devoted to. McCreary points to national revelations this week that the White House directly gave the CIA the written go-ahead approving torture of suspected al-Qaida detainees.

It's no stretch of the imagination to think that the newly discovered memos could become the subject of work by artists such as Jenny Holzer.

The artist's work, McCreary and Heuman point out, is a prime example of the kind of expression the ACLU has defended, for 50 years in Utah, and for nearly a century in the United States.

jcheckoway@sltrib.com