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.
On a bookshelf a few feet from where I’m writing this sits a volume that claims to contain “the complete paintings of Vincent van Gogh”—(it should say “surviving,” his mother having burned half his work when she became discouraged). It’s a large and rather heavy book. Nearby, a […]
In “Reflections on Lake Powell,” printmaker Rob Chipman could be said to have reversed a common but popular natural sight. Beneath a classic desert sky of clouds too ephemeral to ever produce rain, a red rock landscape is doubled by its reflection on the reservoir’s surface. Normally, a […]
It’s a well-known fact that while comedy doesn’t always produce outright laughter, it does require a happy ending. So if the paintings of Lucky Tuck, now on view upstairs in the Utah State Capitol, are comedies — some of them are deliberately funny — can they be said […]
Brigham Young was a visionary and entrepreneur who crossed mountains and found dreams on the other side. His most celebrated find is well known, but not everyone knows about what followed: the opening of the hidden valley that came to be known as Sanpete County. Located at the […]
One word can make the case. For example, as a direction, west is an abstraction — that is, a thought or idea with noconcrete, physical presence. As a place, on the other hand, “the West” is one of the more common and evocative locations in space: one which […]
There are places in the world, some of them in the United States, where the “Religion and Spirituality” show, as it is fondly known in so many Utah galleries, would not be allowed. Once upon a time, that might have been because of institutional hostility to all religious […]
Provo-based artist Havoc Hendricks calls his pattern-based paintings “detailed minimalism.” The often large-scale paintings recreate linear patterns found in nature, line upon line. Lines and patterns are something Hendricks has observed his whole life. From his childhood in Idaho, he remembers being fascinated by his”grandfather’s geode collection, watching […]
You know you’re dealing with successful assemblage when scavenged and repurposed parts unite to transcend their reality as fragments, though without erasing your awareness of them as such, and instead create a totally convincing alternative interpretation in your senses. Such an object is Sylvia Ohara’s “Perspective,” a three-legged […]
The largest work in Utah Arts & Museum’s Statewide Annual at Ogden Contemporary Arts is Cody Chamberlain’s “Procession,” an almost mural-sized, hyper-realistic depiction of a place somewhere in the vast Utah desert. It’s an accepted convention not to reveal the locations of rock art, for fear that if […]
The big sturdy abstracts by the artist Carlisle, placed in as vast an interior space as Kiln, a “co-working office space,” in the Gateway complex, become almost small paintings, though many are five feet tall. Kiln itself looks deceptively small from the outside: it’s many-chambered, many-halled, full of […]
The actress, the model, the bird-girl, the queen, the naturalist — Emily Christensen McPhie’s portraits of women in her Nature as a Goddess show at David Ericson racks them all in, in a way the old-time illustrator Arthur Rackham would like, in the way Cindy Sherman the modern […]
Throughout the Covid pandemic, public conversation made much of the experience of isolation. Recent art exhibits, several reviewed on this site, included interpretations of solitude and of its consequences. Still, for such a commonplace source of suffering, it didn’t seem all that well illustrated — perhaps because it […]
If the word “pandemic” is spoken, it may bring many things to mind, like fear, anxiety, isolation, frustration, even shame: stories of mortality, the loss of several years of life, and the setbacks that may make that loss permanent. All these elements are on display right now at […]
In her video installation, Who’s Coming to Save You? artist Christy Chan undermines what has become a too-familiar impulse in the population at large. That is, as her title suggests, the assumption that salvation, either political or something stronger, is our only hope for the future and so must […]
The paintings of Heydar Rasoulpur include some of the most vivid dreamscapes, capturing the most telling and painful memories, to have emerged from the ship-wreckage of nations that have literally cast so many homeless millions onto stormy seas in the decades since the Millennium. It should perhaps come […]
