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.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when photography was in its infancy, the questions – What is photography? Documentation or art? – were hotly debated. Photographer Shalee Cooper revisits these questions in her latest series of photographs on display at Rose Wagner Art Center through October. […]
Some artists embrace their background. Others flee it. Chad Crane does something in between. Though he is a rural Utah boy who grew up watching Westerns and surrounded by the cowboy life, Crane hates cowboy paintings. Which is precisely why he started to paint them. These aren’t the […]
Art galleries can turn up in unexpected places. If you happened to stop by the Neighborhood House on September 17th or 18th you saw the latest incarnation of Urban Gallery, a collaboration between the west side day care center and Salt Lake Art Center’s 337 Project, where […]
Earlier this year Ernesto Pujol’s Awaiting captured our community’s attention as dozens of participants joined the artist in a 12-hour site specific performance at Utah’s State Capitol (see our April edition). Tonight, Gary Vlasic’s 48-hour performance at the Salt Lake Art Center — entitled “Dark Horse: Fallen Shadow” […]
It is not unusual for an artist to layer paint in a way that allows parts of the underpainting to show through in the final work. Nathan Florence, whose work is currently on display at the Kimball Art Centerin Park City, has taken this process a step further: He uses […]
“Of Two Minds” by Emily McPhie The predicament of art that takes the human figure as subject matter today recalls Dickens on pre-revolutionary Europe: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” On the one hand, with reading on the decline and the graphic […]
“Those Pretty Arches,” a wall-mounted sculpture by Nadra Haffar on view as part of The Face of Utah Sculpture VI, is made of enamel pit-fired onto several long, battered, torn, and twisted strips of galvanized roofing. The use of ‘arches’ in the title tells us that it rises—rather than […]
Perhaps it’s my fascination with layering paint that attracted me to the printmaking work of Erik Waterkotte, a recent printmaker-in-residence at Saltgrass Printmakers. With a lecture at the Salt Lake Art Center, and a class at Saltgrass, as well as an opening reception for his exhibition there, I had […]
In Utah’s Dixie a unique piece of public art was recently installed by artist Edward Hlavka. “The Mustangs” features five equestrian statues that encircle the Snow Canyon Roundabout in Ivins, Utah. The five mustangs, one featuring a rider, are placed around the large rocks in the center of […]
A successful printmaker and key figure among local artists, Stefanie Dykes insists she doesn’t like to question appearances. Instead of digging in search of concealed causes, she prefers the commonsense approach: assume things are largely as they seem and try to see them clearly. That’s probably why her prints have […]
Take the best line from each of the ten best poems and print them on this page. They may produce ten splendid images in our minds as we read them, but they will not become a poem, and if they do, it will not have anything like the […]
A group show is rarely as popular as one devoted to a favorite artist, but even an assortment of mixed successes can usually beat a uniformly mediocre solo show. While it’s hard to imagine how three rooms full of abstract and representational sculpture that incorporate marble, bronze, clay, […]
Edie Roberson is the sort of painter who would rather not settle for one accomplishment when she can manage three, or six, or so many that viewers may never spot them all, let alone count them, even as she makes an audience feel that far from showing off, she […]
This month at Art at the Main Layton artist Terrece Beesley brings her brightly colored and densely organized watercolors to a Salt Lake audience. Beesley’s compositions are so animated with compositional energy that it seems difficult to call them “still” lifes. The backgrounds of her paintings have as much importance as any […]
This month at Gallery MAR you can view Randall Lake’s “Blue” paintings, a group of work first explored in our profile of the artist in the January edition of 15 Bytes. These deeply personal and stridently polemical paintings reveal a rarely seen aspect of the Utah artist best known for his […]
What happens when you sign a contract – with yourself – to produce an ambitious quantity of work in a year? It’s positively life changing, as Midway artist Susette Gertsch will tell you. On a meandering painting trip through Europe in 2009, Gertsch stopped in the UK to […]
by Kasey Boone, Geoff Wichert, Shawn Rossiter While not everything, context is something in a work of art and these three reviews of current shows in Salt Lake examine various ways in which what goes on once a work has left the studio can influence what we call “art.” Erin Berrett […]
