Exhibition of Rick Silva's video art series Dirt Nap, a collection of one-minute video excerpts of the artist napping in nature across the Western United States.
Rick Silva is showing Dirt Nap at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art through January 2, 2027. The exhibition opened on June 26, 2026, with a reception that ran from 6 to 9 PM.
Dirt Nap is a series of 46 one-minute video excerpts of Silva napping in nature across the Western United States. He recorded them between September 2024 and January 2026 and sequenced them in the order they were filmed, so the work unfolds as a durational record of rest, attention, and time spent in landscape. The title is a colloquial euphemism for death, which also literalizes the image of a living body returned to the ground.
Silva frames the project as a practice of deliberate rest rather than avoidance, and as a way of finding healing through sustained attention and physical connection to nature. The sleeping figure becomes a surrogate for the viewer, inviting a meditative, secondary experience of the landscape. Born in Brazil, Silva received his MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder and lives in Eugene, Oregon, where he is a professor at the University of Oregon.
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UMOCA is at 20 S. West Temple in Salt Lake City, and the exhibition runs through early January, so you've got plenty of time to catch it. There's a suggested donation of $10.
Date
16 October – 2 January
Price
Paid
Recommended Age
+14 years
