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.
There is a perplexing mix of styles in the landscape show at Phillips through March 11th: stark collages by Liberty Blake and scenic works by Joe Carter don’t blend particularly well on the walls of the Main Gallery and disprove the usual idea that opposites can be attractively […]
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 […]
In a postscript to an email I sent, in my capacity as editor, to the staff of 15 Bytes at the beginning of this year, I mentioned that my email responses — never arriving at a whiplash pace — might, for a while, be slower than normal: during […]
Four rows of colossal ceramic heads line the right wall of the gallery, arranged in an inverted pyramid shape. While each has been crafted from the same model, every head is conferred with a distinctive color or adorned stenciled designs, ranging in patterns and words. The various symbols […]
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 […]
In Finch Lane’s west gallery, past Casey Lou Miller’s intricate wood cutouts of desert plants, Elpitha Tsoutsounakis’ exhibition, Unknown Prospect: Body, Pigment, Swatch, creates a space for the expansion of thoughts and ideas concerning earth. Throughout the space, Tsoutsounakis explores and ponders the multifaceted roles and forms of […]
Wood cutouts of desert plants — mainly agave — colored with oil paints and accented with carved details fill the first room at Finch Lane Gallery. The work in Casey Lou Miller’s Intrinsic Nature is inspired by her experiences exploring the desert landscape of southern Utah. She celebrates […]
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, […]
Schenck’s Utah: A Land Less Traveled, Billy Schenck’s astonishing all-landscape solo exhibit — a first in his successful 52-year career as a Western artist — is already half sold out, says Modern West Fine Art’s director Shalee Cooper, who conceived the strictly landscape motif and convinced the artist of […]
