The Enso Artspace folks are mixing it up this time by offering their Garden City exhibit space to five artists outside the Enso collective.

“Five Corners” features new work by Ben Browne, Dave Darraugh, Todd Newman, Marcus Pierce and Cody Rutty — five artists who work or have worked behind the scenes at the Boise Art Museum.

The fact that they worked together is what connects them and gives the peg for the show, though the scope of their work is very different.

Since the show was planned, Rutty and Pierce have left BAM for opportunities to pursue art full time.

TODD NEWMAN

Boise Art Museum chief preparator Todd Newman has been installing exhibits for 16 years. Yet, with all the art he’s handled, the museum’s main influence on his work is one of simple practicality.

A decade ago, Newman was known for large air-brushed canvases. Today, he works on pieces of Masonite that are about letter-paper size.

He applies multiple layers of acrylic paint in different colors — 20 or 30 depending on the piece — on the hardboard. Then he grinds away paint until it reveals his image.

“I never know what I’m going to get,” Newman says. “When I’m grinding I have nothing to lose; I just go wild.”

His latest work, “Sanctuary Series,” offers glimpses of otherworldly landscapes.

“They’re a place you can get away from everything: people, your job, bills, war,” he says. “They’re a sanctuary.”

MARCUS PIERCE

Marcus Pierce worked as a security guard at the museum for a few years. His classical training led him into a new approach to portraiture. He paints his friends in oils on multiple layers of Plexiglass to create a multidimensional image.

“I’m looking at how we create infinite layers of our identities, and then we create infinite layers of networks through social media and other ways to connect,” Pierce says.

Pierce uses the Fibonacci sequence (a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers) to determine the sizes of each piece. Then he arranges them in what’s called whirling Fibonacci squares — think of the shape of a nautilus shell — that spiral in on themselves.

Pierce is currently working on a series of public art murals at the MK Nature Center.

CODY RUTTY

Cody Rutty uses his early study of architecture and fascination with fractals — the mathematical sequence that defines crystals — to create paintings that look more like drawings.

He also incorporates a personal mythology, symbolized by a horse that appears in many of his canvases.

“It’s usually an observer that also is immersed in the scene,” Rutty says. “The horse’s duality intrigues me. It is a beast of burden and it is a majestic and beautiful creature.”

In his painting, “Gladhand,” oil on canvas, he uses a photograph he took of the museum’s large gallery during the Nick Cave exhibit installation as its basis.

“It’s pretty dynamic when a show is going up,” says Rutty, who has taken about 200 photos of installations during his 18 months as a guard there.

“I can’t imagine a better place to spend my time. It’s peaceful, and you get to have intimate knowledge of this art that you spend six months to a year with,” Rutty says.

Rutty recently left BAM and moved to New Meadows, where he has a studio space and where almost everyone has a horse.

BEN BROWNE

BAM security guard Ben Browne’s latest work plays on the tension between himself and his love of color.

“I’ve always been interested in color, but as I learned more, I decided that color was too hot to handle,” Browne says. “I thought I would get trapped by it.”

So he came up with an approach that allows him to continue his colorful abstractions but makes the color less precious, he says.

He makes plaster casts of paintings and then paints over the casts with latex paint.

“I capture textures that suggest an image, then depending on how thickly the paint was applied on the original, it almost creates a relief,” Browne says.

He thinks of them almost as found colors, as he rifles through the color samples at home improvement and hardware stores.

DAVE DARRAUGH

Assistant preparator and multimedia artist Dave Darraugh finds his work more influenced by the time he spends in Houston, Texas, than building installations at the Boise Art Museum, he says.

His organic sculptures, paintings and drawings relate to and echo each other.

© 2012 Idaho Statesman