Utah Exhibition Reviews published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine, including reviews of local Utah artists, regional artists, group exhibitions and traveling exhibits of national and international artists.
You don’t take a photograph, you make it. —Ansel Adams In a decade shy of 200 years—since its invention by British artists seeking a faster, easier way to draw from life—photography has joined those two great clichés of human invention, fire and the wheel, as […]
The great 20th-century American photographer Paul Caponigro once remarked, “It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are.” Though initially it may have been lauded for its functionality, portraiture quickly became one of […]
From time to time, artists redirect the trajectory of art. Sometimes they make huge changes: ones that large parts of the art world then follow. At other times, subtle, self-contained discoveries stand alone, changing the way we think about art more than the way it’s done. And while […]
What if you loved England or Japan, and you could no longer live there, it isn’t/wasn’t possible: you are marooned in America, land of tea dumped into a Boston harbor by men dressed like Indian braves. You might paint multiple crash-courses of teacups, sunlight spilling over them, […]
What does it mean to die well? With honor? With purpose? Bountiful Davis Art Center (BDAC) explores these questions with a new exhibit curated by Chauncey Secrist: Ars Moriendi. This latin term, literally “the art of dying,” refers to upheavals in Europe after the Black Death, and the […]
Linnie Brown’s approximately two dozen pieces in her show Retrace at A Gallery, with titles like “Often Requires Additional Building,” “Need Only to Reattach,” and “The Line Between Now and Then,” make you think of nothing more than — what if all these paintings, with their flanges and […]
Reflected subway systems, upside-down metropoli, bomb threat questionnaires—these are just a few of the elements at play in Daniel Everett’s Security Questions, currently at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition includes a range of media, from looping videos to installations that, according to Everett, “address the […]
At the opening of Line Paintings, I noticed a tall man standing by one of the works, seeming to dance with a young girl. He looked at her, then pirouetted with one hand out, asking with his eyes if she understood. And I knew, without seeing it, which […]
As our most dynamic organ, the brain is at once remarkably expansive and persistently conservative, constantly aiming to preserve its energy. The ever-increasing pace of social media has nurtured this trend of mental conservation—instead of reading and prioritizing media according to its supposed importance or significance, we are […]
For all intents and purposes, statuary was invented in ancient Egypt. These earliest figures, meant to provide a home for the soul in case the body was lost after death, took the cautious form of virtually indestructible cubes of stone. The Greeks took over the idea and, using […]
When confronted by a broadly-brushed lampoon such as Kelsey Harrison’s New Luxury Art Show in Downtown Salt Lake City, it’s tempting to sustain the illusion, play along, which in this case would be writing an ironic review: one that used the same hyperbolic, vacant language, touched on the […]
Working Hard to Be Useless, currently on display at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, is framed as a revisiting of the ideas of the Situationist International. Though art and artists were integral to its earliest phases, Situationism (1957-1972) was, at its heart, a revolutionary movement that, among […]
