The magic of art has much to do with making one material convincingly impersonate another. In skilled hands bronze, marble, paint or paper can simulate something as subtle as flesh. One of the more unlikely magical acts seen in our time and place is that of Pam Gazale, […]
“Scruples,” a mixed-media collaboration by mid-career artist Namon Bills and promising neophyte Tyler Pierce, demonstrates the possibility that two very different artists, working side by side, can produce a coherent work of art. Appropriately enough, its design might be described as a Rococo Yin-and-Yang: a rectangle divided by […]
We’ve come a long way from the days when abstract expressionist Ad Reinhardt, famous for justifying his paintings in witty cartoons, explained that a sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at one of those paintings. The popular admission of women artists to […]
In her current show at Bountiful Davis Art Center, Marissa Albrecht uses two words that won’t be found in most dictionaries, though it’s not hard to grasp their meanings. One, “Restruction,” is the exhibition’s title; the other, “curation,” appears in her statement and names a step in her […]
One of the great stories of European art concerns Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished masterpiece, “The Adoration of the Magi,” which was abandoned, left lying face down in a stable, and nearly lost. Eventually it was recovered, repaired, and hangs today in the Uffizi Gallery. Note that it was […]
While discussion of a book often begins with a quotation, talking about art more often requires a description. The graphic art of Nancy Steele-Makasci, which grabs viewers by their eyes but speaks to them as well through the written word, requires both. A stark, high-contrast face with large, […]
In the first picture, the subject appears relaxed, reclining sideways on an upholstered chair, arms and legs uncrossed. He wears blue jeans and a stylishly casual, two-tone jacket with a vertical zippered pocket. He sports a paisley bow tie and a hip set: mustache and soul spot. In […]
In Sweet Hearts, Melanie Rae Thon has written the most complex and challenging book … Complex because she has densely stitched together five generations of the lives of the families she created, but also woven them into more than a century of eventful and unsettling Western history. And challenging not only because this is a history of relentless exploitation, marked by misadventure, injustice, and cruelty, but also because she refuses to shield herself or her readers from the true horror of the continuing conflict between the Native Americans who were driven from their lands again and again, and the interlopers from the east who always found, and continue to find, reasons why they still want to take for themselves even the desolate places they forced those defeated communities to take on.
Colorful. Full of life and energy. Radiant. Joyous. An explosion of color into form. All words and phrases that describe Untamed, the new body of work by Nicholas Wilton at Julie Nester Gallery in Park City. But walking into the gallery, surrounded by so many large and busy […]
There were times in the 20th century when the most compelling works of art came from the crafts end of the art spectrum. Some works that emphasized fundamental materials, be it wood or glass or ceramics or textiles, seemed closer to the essence of artistic expression than what […]
It was recently calculated by the University of Cambridge that the amount of electricity required by Bitcoin in a year would power all the tea kettles of the United Kingdom for 27 years. This startling assertion brings to mind two facts, both of which are part of the […]
At first glance, there’s something distressingly familiar about Nick Pedersen’s Slow Apocalypse, which — installed in the Exit gallery at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art — represents a traditional gallery, including an upholstered viewing bench surrounded by 14 framed-and-hung works. Initially it recalls, among other things, a […]
Together, two paintings hanging side by side in the Alice Gallery illustrate the paradoxical nature of language in general and titles in particular. Each features a large, single figure juxtaposed among smaller ones, and each is identified by a particular word. In “Society,” scale separates the lone figure […]
There’s something appropriate, even impressive when a newly-minted author chooses to write about auspicious beginnings, as Darrell Spencer does in the stories collected in his first book, Our Secret’s Out. When those stories go on to recount how often such promising openings falter, how anticipation of a grand […]
There any number of ways of looking at the painted world of Russell Case, but perhaps the most important one is that he paints real places. This fact was brought home to me while visiting his current exhibition at David Ericson’s splendid new gallery in the Avenues. First, […]
When I remember my favorite movie scenes, it’s often because of something particularly revealing that an actor does. But in the hands of a really good director, there is always another actor in the scene whose work I may not remember — may not even consciously notice — but whose work precedes those I do notice and may be far more telling. Perhaps the camera holds a shot for a several seconds, until I become aware that through its lens I am fixated, staring at something. Then it wheels about and fixes on something else, and I understand what the character sees and how they are thinking. The camera in those minutes reveals itself as the most important actor.
Working in a digital print medium, Jiyoun Lee-Lodge draws figure outlines — sophisticated cartoons, so to speak — of figures set for the most part in only slightly more detailed settings. Often she borrows the overall composition from an almost too-familiar image, like Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks,’ a Manhattan […]
