Technical language, used without regard to its actual meaning, has become a mainstay of entertainment. In just one example, the engines of the starship Enterprise were powered by “dilithium crystals.” Those words name two real states of matter that have nothing to do with each other, except as […]
Maia Cruz Palileo paints vivid and colorful scenes of life in remarkable detail, full of specific portraits of what are, however accurate, ultimately imaginary Philippine places and characters. Like her charming figure sculptures, they have not been drawn from life, but rather distilled from research into the history […]
Every museum or community art center needs a really big room. At the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the biggest gallery extends like an atrium up through the floor above, so when they wanted to showcase Salt Lake’s explosive mural art movement, which has decorated buildings of every […]
Located in the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art’s Codec Gallery, Shattering the Pictures in Our Heads uses multiple screens to deconstruct stereotypes of the “Mythic Indian.” Shattering the Pictures in Our Heads is the most sophisticated exhibit currently running at UMOCA, presented in a gallery that uses “codec” […]
It’s a common mistake in the digital age: one opens a browser and takes a look at the month’s gallery offerings, trusting that what looks good on a wall will reveal itself in a thumbnail. Take, for example, Chris Hayman’s Beyond Nature, her new show at Julie Nester […]
New work by Brian Kershisnik is always eagerly anticipated, and not just in Utah. Increasingly, his collectors fly in from around the country in February, hit the slopes, buy a painting or two, then head back. The art used to wait to follow them until the show was […]
In Black River, Charles Edward Williams tells a personal story of universal relevance through eloquent physical metaphors. He could have written it down in one of those dubious memoirs that became all the rage a few years ago: how the author fell into addiction or abuse, hurt loved […]
Sometimes it seems like the current desire to make art a tool of political activism and social change is threatening to displace its fundamental virtues. If a gallery show asks us to put on headphones and listen to anonymous speakers talking about their lives, does it augment a […]
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 […]
