Recognition makes some artists want to go big. Al Denyer has gone microscopic.

In the past year Al Denyer has been busy. She’s had a solo show in New York, added her works to important public collections, been a featured artist in these pages, and even started a family. She also received one of the Utah Arts Council’s Fellowship Awards. Some artists might let an accolade like that go to their head and embark on an ego-stroking project of sizable propotions. Denyer, by contrast, has been busy fitting her work on to the head of a . . . well, not that small — she’s put her work on to the face of a computer chip.

Denyer already works relatively small. Her pieces, which evoke aerial views of landscapes, are painstakingly executed in graphite and pastel. For this current project she worked with Erik Brunvand (who’s known to most of our readers as a founder of Saltgrass Printmakers, but who actually has a more credible — and "geekier" — job at the U’s School of Computing) to create a micro-scale print edition of one of her works by using the layers of materials normally used for making transistors and electrical interconnections.

The work is now on exhibit at The Leonardo in Salt Lake. In this interview, recorded earlier this year, Denyer talked about the project. We added up some clips of the install and the final presentation. So, here you go.

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.