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.
“I think that if a song isn’t about something, it ought to be an instrumental.” With that advice, spoken often in concert, the great American jazz poet and performer Gil Scott-Heron, author of “Winter in America,” “Johannesburg,” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” never failed to bring […]
Early in the new millennium, a couple of inauspicious things occurred locally. Shawn Rossiter, a linguist turned painter, decided to start something he felt Utah needed: an arts magazine. 15 Bytes struggled for a few years, then hit its stride in 2005. Same applies to glass master Dan […]
In a painting titled “I Will Hold You Above the Treetops,” a parent standing on the crest of a ridge embraces and lifts a child. A viewer might casually assume this is a father, but on closer approach, the pair could just as well be a mother and […]
It’s unlikely anyone has tried to count the number of art students who begin their practice by drawing or painting people, though it’s possible a majority do. Then again, one of 15 Bytes better writers, Hannah Sandorf Davis, was able to track how art schools typically respond when […]
Many siblings see their artwork hanging side by side, but that’s usually on their parents’ fridge. For James and John Rees, it’s at the Utah Valley University Museum of Art. Born Into This is a small show featuring recent works by James and John. Rather than centering around […]
At first glance, it seems the key to poignant feeling in art is simplicity. Surely Randee Levine’s “Empty Vessels,” one of 18 mixed-media impressions now at Phillips, could hardly be more simple or more striking. Two monochrome items of tableware, perhaps a cruet and a small bowl or […]
The water cycle—traditionally how seawater loses its salt as it evaporates from the ocean, falls as rain on the land, and returns to the sea in rivers—is getting a new level of attention under the pressure of climate change. Hydrologists, the experts on this process, are taking the […]
When we care about our message, no matter what it is, we will also care about its delivery. —from the exhibition statement by Jason Lanegan There are times when a viewer can stand before a work of art and see that it’s real, yet be unable to understand […]
Humanity is the species that travels, and paves our environment to expedite our journeys. When we aren’t able, or don’t want to go in person, we can transport just about anything to anywhere, and all this deliberate motion has resulted in whole industries that respond to the belief […]
You’d be forgiven if you didn’t associate these first, heavy paintings in oil with everything else that follows in the Harrison Museum of Art’s retrospective exhibition of Logan artist Jane Catlin. In this small alcove, a half-dozen eerie paintings in thick oil; throughout the rest of the gallery, […]
The exhilarating, devastating, and undeniable truth at the center of the art world is that everybody’s taste is different. In many cases, what is good or even great to one viewer barely registers with another, regardless of any of a thousand distinguishing factors between each artwork and each […]
Surely no one can be unaware of the strife along the border between the United States and Mexico. It seems a wall is going to be built, no matter how we feel about it. Two architect-designers, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, who collaborate under the name Rael […]
Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey began her journey in Los Angeles in 1932, where and when she recalls feeling she was an American. She would soon learn, however, that her Japanese family background marked her in ways she did not understand, and she still refuses to accept. Forced at […]
The exhibition’s title, Home Is Never Dead, It Isn’t Even Home, is a reference to a quote from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, which goes, “the past is never dead, it isn’t even past”—and in this installation by SLC artists and partners Julian Croft and HALO, the […]
So many of Utah’s storied art venues have lost their homes, or are in danger of losingthem, that you could be excused for thinking we must have too many of them. Why are they among the first places developers think of when looking for somewhere to build? The […]
A statewide exhibition brings an opportunity to show work to an audience that may not be reachable otherwise, but the work should accurately represent the artist’s materials, style, and subject matter, not create expectations that additional explorations of the artist’s body of work will not fulfill. Or should […]
A visitor to Phillips Gallery during what are becoming their annual showings of the art of Melinda and Joseph Ostraff (see last year’s here) might initially have the impression that the artists work in two formats. One, the more common by far this year, is about the size […]
