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 your way to Squatters for a drink, or while catching a show at the Rose Wagner, you can’t miss them: the Temporary Museum of Permanent Change’s 14 placards, each 7-feet high, featuring the striking aerial photographs of Western landscapes deeply scarred by heavy industry and severe drought. […]
Big, glossy images of majestic panoramas, colors punched with saturation. With today’s portable technology and the state’s majestic landscapes these shots are easy to take: you’ll find them on just about anyone’s Instagram page. But not on Andrew McAllister’s. As if in reaction to these landscape glamour shots, […]
For centuries, Western artists labored to understand and reproduce the appearance of the natural world. Art created in the 19th-century academies of Europe testifies to their eventual success, so that by 1905, Picasso could move on, reminding writer and collector Gertrude Stein that, according to previous standards, the […]
As you probably are aware, the place currently called Utah represents a large and diverse landscape. With its arbitrarily drawn borders, this almost-a-rectangle state in the middle of the American West encompasses a remarkably diverse geography. From Rich, Cache, and Box Elder counties in the north to Washington, […]
The story told in Collectable Memories rightly begins with “Swim Lessons,” in which the self-taught artist reveals an intuitive feeling for composition by crowding together five children, one of them her own daughter, in the shallow end of the pool — as well as in the lower left […]
It’s fairly obvious to the discerning that our environment is changing in challenging ways. It’s also apparent that so far, the process remains deniable. Each new degree of temperature, each addition to the severity of storms, soon becomes the “new normal,” so that the continuing slide into inhospitality remains concealed. What Jensen seeks to do in her art is to elevate that almost subliminal transition until it becomes ominous, but to do so without losing track of the appeal of the places she represents. …
What is surely one of the most thought-provoking, suggestive, and yet elusive titles attached to a work of art this season may currently be seen on the walls of Phillips Gallery. As a title, “In Between Dreams” draws much of its power from being an original turn of […]
When she was four years old, MyLoan Dinh fled Vietnam with her family. Her mother packed a small bag with provisions. Her father burned all his identifying documents. They boarded the “Lam Giang,” the last South Vietnamese Navy ship to leave Saigon. Nearly half a century later, these […]
You could consider it the immigrant dream. Since coming to Utah from Mexico with her parents as a young teenager, Nancy Rivera has gone to university, embarked on a promising career and found a partner to share her life. She has made Utah her home. But the plaintive, […]
As the gates of heaven are opened and dead relatives reunite with their families, Day of the Dead celebrations can turn into festive events. At the many exhibitions celebrating the holiday throughout the state, including at the St. George Art Museum, you’ll find rollicking skeletons, multi-colored flags, dance […]
In commercial advertisements, everything is “new.” The artists who staff Phillips Gallery know only too well that the components of art are rarely all that new, and so they change one letter of that adjective, transposing an e for an o and saying “now.” Or more formally, they […]
“Haptikos #3: (Missoula Blue)” is only one part of an expansive collection of new works by Heidi Moller Somsen, showing currently at Phillips Gallery. But it makes a big point: one that may have surprised even the artist. Technophiles and those who pay close attention to their cellphones […]
If neo-classicism was the architecture of the American republic, brutalism became the style of the American empire. Under John F. Kennedy’s administration, the federal government prioritized funding for public buildings, infrastructure, and urban renewal projects at a time when the stripped-down, imposing style was in vogue in architectural […]
In the literally titled “Facing South,” the Utah State Capitol appears not as we usually see it, as the climax of passing through the sprawl of Point of the Mountain, the Jordans, Murray, South Salt Lake, and so on, ascending the cove-like northern end of the Wasatch Front […]
Your intuition might suggest otherwise, but abstraction has been the rule and realism the exception in art. From the caves of Chauvet to the walls of Canyon de Chelly, artists have always extrapolated from the material world to create a pictorial language. (And a written one: most of […]
The title says it all. In September of 2022, at the AAUW Utah Women’s Art Exhibition, among nearly a hundred professional quality works of art, the Marie Eccles Caine Student Honor was awarded to Allie Wheeler for “Presence,” which celebrates not only the domestic roles of women, but […]
Many art exhibitions now include a video as part of the display, often showing the work in progress. Picasso was probably the first artist with the confidence to paint in front of a camera, brushing an image on his side of a pane of glass while the camera […]
