Can I Say Yes to That Dress is a brand new play, written in two exceptional creative bursts ten years apart, which Salt Lake audiences are fortunate to have premiered at a moment in time when love and laughter are welcome distractions. While it sprints through five hundred […]
Tom Howard has a gift for renewing language through its association with landscape. His painting, “The Long View,” takes a once-useful phrase, worn out by too many years of metaphorical urging (largely in an effort to motivate listeners to do something people are just not good at — […]
Not everyone takes an interest in the backstory of art. That said, Margaret Wilson Morris tells a story about her recent series of miniature quilts, how they came about and what they mean to her, that everyone who makes, cares about, or even thinks about art should be […]
Aside from “Please don’t touch,” it’s rare to see a warning posted in an art gallery. Perhaps, though, there should be more. For example, the exhibition of Oonju Chun this month as Phillips might fare better if there were a sign advising the viewer not to read the […]
At the edge of a forest, amid lush foliage punctuated with small blue, yellow, and white flowers, a barefoot woman with red hair lies sleeping on the grass. She wears black leggings and a blue blouse adorned with curlicues, and a planter’s trowel lying nearby identifies her as […]
There’s something familiar about this landscape, but it’s not quite right. Yes, the verdant, green foreground and the rounded, purple mountains in the distance speak of an abundance of water because, unlike the hard-edged verticals of the red rock, mesa country of southern Utah deserts, northern Utah took […]
“So many people have lost the proper way of living, but here it is.” The comment, delivered by someone contemplating two of the approximately 125 mostly woven works in The Threads That Bind Us, the annual exhibition by the Mary Meigs Atwater Weaver’s Guild at the Utah Cultural […]
We may be done here. From time to time, a new effort in a human enterprise so fully exceeds what has gone before that it becomes impossible to speak of the new in the language that was adequate to discuss what came before. Imagine trying to explain to […]
There’s a device filmmakers use to show the passage of time. It starts with a closeup of a calendar—the type where each day is a single page that is torn off to mark the arrival of a new day. On film, the pages slip off as if being […]
There are 11 paintings by Pablo Cruz-Ayala, collectively titled Intersections of an Immigrant, at Finch Lane Gallery and one at Salt Lake Community College, where it’s part of their 75th Anniversary Alumni Show. In them, Cruz-Ayala employs a wide variety of media, but the first impression they make […]
The Biblical Book of Genesis, with all its great visual tropes — the creation of all from nothing, division of light from dark, story of the Fall, and so on — has been enormously popular with artists at least since Medieval times. The third chapter begins with the […]
There’s not much to say about the Salt Lake Community College’s 75th Anniversary Alumni Show, currently open at the art gallery of the main campus on State Street. Not that there isn’t plenty to say about the 30 works it includes or the same number of artists who […]
In one photo, a man sits with one leg crossed over the other, the dark pants leg of his raised knee interrupting the solid white mass of the cape completely wrapping his torso. The barber stands behind him, trimming his hair with electric shears as he impassively submits […]
However illogical, it’s probably human nature to assume that the worst challenges and disasters happen rarely, while those that occur every day must be trivial. That said, nature cannot be made to follow our thinking. One example: Covid-19, a close relative of the common cold, touched the lives […]
Photographers have a name for it: the Decisive Moment. For painters, the power to lend a timeless dimension to life is part of what validates portraits and figure studies. So it makes sense that one of each — Provo’s journeyman photographer Justin Hackworth, who describes his work simply: […]
The eyes of the “Spell Caster” gaze forth from a countenance at once as ancient as the gnarled forest that surrounds it and as conceptually modern as its nonbinary gender. Bewitching is one word for it, spellbinding another. Much of the portrait’s power comes from its elusive smile: […]
Two of Colour Maisch’s favorite materials reveal particular insight into why she makes the kind of art she does, or for that matter, why she makes art at all. One, which refers back to the influence of critical history and art education, is porcelain: a celebrated, durable, even […]
