Alex Haworth thought he knew all about Salt Lake City's lung-pounding winter inversions. A downtown resident for nearly seven years, he'd pedaled through them more times than he cared to remember.

One night, putting his bicycle aside to walk through it, video camera in hand, he discovered just how unfamiliar the smog was. He saw the murky light as beautiful and decided to capture it with his camera.

The 25-year-old filmmaker couldn't have picked a better night than Jan. 14, two days after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared northern Utah's air worst in the nation.

But where others saw a gray soup hanging over Salt Lake City like medieval chain mail, Haworth saw luminous, context-rich scenes of downtown for the taking. Set to a shuffling jazz beat is Haworth's 3-minute, 40-second short film, "Smog Lake City: Main Street," which turned proverbial lemons into lemonade by giving the inversion a warm, but still eerie, narrative of its own.

On Jan. 15, he posted his latest short on YouTube and the "Dada Robotnik" Web site he maintains with film-production studio partner David E. Davis. "Smog Lake City: Main" serves as a harbinger of a trend, that of local artists using Utah's execrable air quality as a creative launching pad.

In a coincidental partnership with Haworth's film, the downtown Bayleaf Cafe will open "The Smog Show," an exhibition of works by five Utah artists who've also managed to find aesthetic statements lurking in the valley's carcinogenic air.

"I don't think there's anything more immediately relevant to our place and time here in Salt Lake City than air quality," said Adrian J. Anderton, the 30-year-old clay artist who curated "The Smog Show." "When I started talking to people about this, the first thing I noticed was how disparate and fun the conversation was. People who don't have cars and walk or bike talk about how hard it is on their lungs. Then you had people who could see the beauty in it."

After capturing wave after wave of smog rolling over Temple Square and Brigham Young's statue, Haworth's short film turns its attention to ordinary people on the street, or at work through glass windows. "Smog Lake City: Main Street" maintains a warm, orange tone throughout, lending an intimate feel to the sight of strangers and even inanimate objects such as a bicycle lock and vandalized phone booth.

Although Haworth's filmic excursion into the thick of Salt Lake City smog was spontaneous, his talent is not. A previous short film he directed, "The Deep," was an official selection at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

Geralyn Dreyfous, executive director of the Salt Lake Film Center, knows Haworth from having worked with him on past projects and said his newest short reminded her of Edward Hopper's paintings of urban isolation. "I found myself going to other places while I watched it," Dreyfous said. "He's got a beautiful eye and knows how to tell a story without words."

Anderton said his sole criterion for "The Smog Show" was assembling the best artists he knew, then cutting them loose on the subject. The exhibition lineup includes two screen printers, Camron Bentley and Brian Taylor, painters Laura Decker and Jennifer Sorensen, plus glass sculptor Sarinda Jones.

Jones, a 38-year-old professional artist, said she wanted her piece to speak to the inversion's hidden effects. Besides closing the city off from full view, the bad air manifests itself in ways unseen inside the human body.

Titled "Closer," Jones' work comprises 15 portrait-size glass panels illuminated by LED light. Her choice of black- and white-colored glass, a polarizing metaphor, was deliberate. She also wanted her work to remind people of X-ray photographs of the lung.

"I wanted to take people's minds to the cellular level of how CO2 affects us," Jones said. "When a blanket of fog comes over our valley, it hides not just our city, but also the smog's impact on our bodies."

As for Haworth, he said his short film contains no overt agenda. He was more interested in revealing how the inversion alters light during the evening, and in capturing a sense of how people work and live in the smog. "It's a throwback to Victorian London, where you have a very thick atmosphere -- an aesthetic of mystery," he said.

At the same time, he's well aware of how air quality in Utah has become politically charged. Most recently, the Utah House approved a resolution that asks the Environmental Protection Agency to drop attempts to control CO2 emissions, and questions scientific studies that back climate change.

Haworth said the day after he shot his film he came down with a bad cold. Two weeks passed before he could shake it off.

"To say that our smog is 'beautiful' is, of course, a little misleading," the filmmaker said. "It's beautiful, but it's also killing you. Maybe in five or 10 years it will be a little less beautiful and a little more horrifying."

bfulton@sltrib.com