Geoff Wichert has degrees in critical writing and creative nonfiction. He writes about art to settle the arguments going on in his head.
As remarkable as the fiber art works of Judith Scott are in person, it adds another dimension to see her at work in the short film, Judith Scott in the Studio, that plays in rotation with five other short films in the Kimball galleries video space. Here there […]
When they hear the word “desert,” most people think of oceans of sand, dunes like waves following each other into the distance. In Utah, we know better: most of the world’s deserts, including ours, have little or no sand to see. Instead, they are made of rock. Bedrock […]
There are three levels at work in Bea Hurd’s It Was Their Third Cup of Coffee. At the bottom is physiology: the human body and the human brain, each in competition for the same resources. It’s well known that while the brain makes up only 2% of body […]
In addition to chapbooks and incidental publications, poet and Utah Valley University professor Rob Carney has published three volumes of poetry. His fourth and latest book, however, comprises 42 innovative prose chronicles, each suitable for dipping into to nourish and kick-start the imagination. Because the form of expository […]
In this identity-conscious age, people have found many new ways to identify themselves. You may find yourself in all sorts of cultural activities. Each of the seven artists participating in Modern West Fine Arts’ current exploration of the theme of identity, titled You May Find Yourself, has a […]
Author, master printer, multimedia artist and Weber State professor, Susan Makov was among the first artists to sound a warning about the plight of the natural environment, depicting things in her prints like birds beset by the trashy artifacts of human overpopulation. It fact, she arrived so early […]
Welcome, my cool cats and kittens, to the . . . Circus of Death After navigating the Ramp of Doom, you’ll be faced with the Beams of Peril! Survive that and be tested by the Balancing Ball of Fright! Lucky enough to live through that? Well, try making […]
“I’m not the artist my family members are, but I write.” What Ashley Marie Farmer almost certainly means is that she never felt the sense of vocation that led her grandmother, mom, and sister to paint, her brother to shape pottery, and her grandfather to build a house […]
With an unknown number works of art accepted, the Spring Salon at the Springville Museum of Art — far and away the exemplary annual show, at the definitive repository of homegrown Utah art and artists — defies imagination. Because it occupies almost the entire main floor, flowing from […]
“I could not do this in my head,” Jerrin Wagstaff says as he passes an open palm over “Ultrascape #21,” the latest of his new paintings. This is a man who has spent half his life doing something most people rarely do, which is to create pictures of […]
Walking into the small gallery at the Bountiful Davis Art Center where Paper Bandages is installed feels like departing on a road trip so early in the day that it’s still dark out. Silhouettes and familiar shapes can be made out at first, but as inky darkness gradually […]
On the one hand, the term “orb” might mean nothing more than a sphere, which is what McKenna Anderl, recently the Junior Artist in Residence at BDAC, chose to paint on a salvaged dictionary page. But then again, the word, primarily used in phrases like “the orb and […]
An influential art gallery doesn’t just record the history of art; they help make it. An excellent example is the current, primarily painting exhibition at Modern West, shared between gallery director and painter Shalee Cooper and Navajo sculptor and painter Sheldon Harvey. When the gallery’s founder and guiding […]
“I want to make the art that ends up in the history books. “With that remark, a local artist — who had gone to the Coast to polish some skills, only to return when it turned out that impressing the Big Pond is harder than it had looked […]
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 […]
