Faced with Kristina Lenzi’s 11 wicked caricatures at Bountiful Davis Art Center, “subtle” might not be the first word that comes to mind. Such large, distorted heads sitting atop long necks that grow out of bodies so tiny a viewer may overlook them — it all feels less […]
When Mary Hutchings arrived at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center on March 4th to deliver a handmade landscape she’d been invited to show, titled “The Banks of the Susquehanna River,” the gallery was full of artists dropping off their own pieces, which would eventually number more than 50 […]
Aïsha Lehmann emerged on the art scene rather dramatically last October with Mixed, a sensational exhibition at Finch Lane Gallery. Mixed featured nine large portrait figures, and while “mixed media” may no longer be a useful term, due to its nearly universal use by artists today, in this […]
There’s a strong case to be made that the most unjustly neglected art form of the last two centuries is the graphic, serial narrative: i.e. the comic, or at it’s often put today, comix. What holds comics back among more traditional art studies is the matter of class. […]
Performance Art is a twentieth-century name for a twentieth-century art form. It is also the title of David Kranes’ most recent collection of short stories, symbolized by the jumbled letters of the title that, on the cover, have pulled themselves up into a human figure and stepped into […]
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 […]
