Rebecca Pyle is a writer and an artist with work in dozens of art/literary journals, in the United States and also in journals (in the English language) in Hong Kong and the U.K. and Northern Ireland, Belgium, India, France, and Germany. She graduated from the university the Wizard of Oz adored, the University of Kansas, where she studied art and lit. See rebeccapyleartist.com.
This book of essays opens with a memory of a song sung by the writer’s grandmother. “A voice that could make people cry,” the writer writes. Her grandmother was asked to sing a popular song as an emotional blessing or benediction at a celebration of the Boulder (Hoover) […]
Nothing’s more full of promise than a prop room in a theater, and that’s what this corner of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art feels like, filled with Mitsu Salmon’s paintings on raw muslin. All six of Salmon’s big paintings (approximately 4 x 5 feet) are happy explosions […]
Allen Smith’s set for Annie Baker’s play Body Awareness at Pygmalion Theater is a kitchen and a bedroom — as Ikea-perfect as a dollhouse. There is something so orderly about the kitchen it’s startling; it ‘s too precious to be real. It seems it’s still a drawing on […]
Stephen Trimble’s 25th book is called The Mike File. The sound of the word mike trips certain thoughts: a sound-amplifying device; the beginning of the name Michaelangelo; that Mike is a nickname for a boy’s name common around the world. Memories: what-to-name-your-baby books tell new parents the name […]
You felt your car was honorary among elephants, that you were where a Thai dignitary or king or queen would be, or, surely, had been: while an elephant mural was still there, at the restaurant on State street in Salt Lake City called Thai Siam. Once, when it […]
On Dec. 17, Park City’s Gallery MAR will open an exhibition by Sarah Winkler titled Mountain Glow. Winkler, a Manchester, England native who also grew up in Malawi and Brunei, studied Art and Earth Science at William Paterson University. Working from a studio at 9000 feet in the […]
Crosses, again and again, appear in most of these paintings by just-returned-from-Chicago Art Institute Navajo artist Patrick Dean Hubbell. They’re referencing stars, say Modern West gallery assistants. Stars, they point out, appear again and again in Hubbell’s titles. But every small cross, and every large cross, in these […]
Helper is like a movie set, a town of moving, repeating stills: repeated rows of paintings; repeating storefronts. It is full of movie-set tropes, like the Balance Rock Eatery servers, daily dressed in identical red sateen dancing-hall dresses; or the rainbow-colored marquee at the Strand Theater; or Marilyn […]
Playwright Alexandra Petri, a Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, a Washington Post columnist and a humorist (author of A Field Guide to Awkward Silences, New American Library, 2016), must have wanted to gather misery like a bouquet. So she gives us — and in some ways it seems […]
Corinne Geertsen’s many-layered art images, which begin as photographs, are magic tricks. They contain ghosts of the photographed past, people wearing clothing time has almost forgotten — derby hats and waistcoats, huge hats covered with flowers, children in proper attire — people, largely, in awe of being photographed, […]
There’s one life-size, cast-bronze golfer in the middle of this gallery, and a mysterious cut-out of a doorway, which staff-only can enter, behind a counter. Which leads one to feel that a mysterious and dreamy, miniature game of golf is being played here, in/at Salt Lake City’s Brushworks […]
At this show, you’ve really, for all effects and purposes, been invited into Brent Godfrey’s studio. Postponed for over a year by the pandemic, the exhibit contains Godfrey’s social-statement (“social studies”) paintings, enormous abstracts, small and large figurative paintings, woven canvas pieces, works on paper. Called Matter of […]
Since retiring from a career working as a graphic designer for KUED-TV, Doug Wildfoerster has given full rein to his personal artistic vision. The self-taught watercolorist has had his work featured in solo shows at Alpine Art, the Chapman Library, the Day-Riverside Library and the Duchesne County Library, […]
Paige Anderson’s paintings are a trip into high order. All is arranged, undone, arranged again. In “A Map of Salt and Stars” and “Heavens Clothed in Earthly Vestments” pointed star-shapes repeat very, very methodically, but with squinting shimmer-gleam, like the modulated light emanating from a crop of night […]
If ever a group of paintings of trees could bring you close to tears, it might be these paintings by Silas Thompson, in his new show, The Hidden Forest. Thompson, still a young painter, is a sort of forest spy/messenger. One who can be trusted, because he resists […]
