For their July Digest, loveDANCEmore intern Sofia Sant’Anna-Skites spoke with Bashaun Williams from Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company and Jaclyn Brown from Repertory Dance Theatre, both of whom are retiring from their respective companies. At a young age, Williams was passionate about basketball but began dancing in his junior year […]
Heresies of Nature, Margaret Blair Young’s 2002 novel about a Mormon family gripped by a chronic, unpredictable illness, begins with a bit of authorial slight-of-hand. A narrator’s voice and an author’s voice are easy to confuse, and Young takes advantage of it by starting out as herself, speaking […]
This past weekend, Tori Meyer and Arin Lynn invited Salt Lake City to their “housewarming” party, an evening-length, multidisciplinary Flash Project at Finch Lane Gallery that playfully engaged audiences in disrupting the border between public and private spaces, and that explored the absurdly, sweetly repetitive nature of the […]
The semicircular handle of a wicker basket frames the angelic face of a young woman, which is doubled by reflection from the silvery surface of its contents. A pair of blue-gloved hands supports the basket’s bowl, while concentric pink ovals of satin and roses, a pink lace bow […]
News that one of the world’s most exciting landscape painters has moved to Utah, adding the Rockies and Wasatch mountains to an already stunning resumé, sounds a little like saying another ship full of coal has arrived in Newcastle. After all, no other paintable subject is more popular […]
Up close and personal, the audience mingled with the members of the Ogden Movemeant Collective at the Monarch in downtown Ogden Saturday night. We were inside an experience — entitled Social Undistance — that could only be witnessed in the present moment. We were invited to realize that […]
After contemplating Dominica Greene’s questions in a recent loveDANCEmore podcast regarding the purpose of dance reviews in our community, I craft this review of RDT’s Homage from a perplexed place. What is the role of the loveDANCEmore reviewer, considering the intimate and delicate bonds in the Salt Lake […]
June is Pride Month and a few galleries along the Wasatch Front are taking the opportunity to showcase the works of local LGBTQIA+ artists. One of these is Salt Lake City’s Urban Arts Gallery, located in the Gateway. The Gateway itself seems to be rebranding as a queer-friendly […]
Provo’s Writ & Vision is holding an exhibition to celebrate pride featuring the work of six local Utah County artists, some exhibiting for the first time. The works in Queer Expressions range from photography and painting to collage, with artists focusing on themes of identity, transition and individuality. […]
The muggy summer air was just beginning to cool as the colors of the sunset bathed Liberty Park in golden light. I dialed in on my cell phone to join the zoom call, ready for Halie Bahr’s voice to guide me through an innovative technological experience. After a […]
In a few weeks it will be ten years since Jorge Rojas first showed his art in Salt Lake City, bringing him to 15 Bytes’ attention and eventual inclusion in Utah’s 15. Since then, as one of the foremost arts activists in Utah, he has alternated between showing […]
From everyone here at 15 Bytes: Happy LGBTQ+ Pride Month and welcome to our June installment of READ LOCAL First — the world’s most extensive repository of Utah-related poets and writers. Today, we are proud to introduce award-winning poet Britt Allen. In May of 2020, Allen completed her Master […]
Dana Costello: Myths in the Headlines
Costello, a California native, says that though she was considered the “class artist” she never pursued any formal art studies, which she found too “limiting.” She had a “varied liberal arts higher education” and graduated from the University of California/Santa Barbara with a BA in Sociology and Psychology. After graduating, she worked in a number of different professions but remained unsatisfied. During this time, she began to paint more regularly and felt the drive to pursue her art more vigorously…”
Lydia Gravis, b. 1981, is an emerging artist living and working in Ogden, Utah. She earned a BA in Painting and Drawing from Warren Wilson College and a MFA in interdisciplinary visual art from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University.
“What unifies us? What perpetuates a sense of otherness? I’m inspired by experiences beyond our control that distill our egos and feel psychologically enigmatic, but leave us with a simultaneous sense of our own mortality and human connectedness. Making art is my way of making sense of it all, or rather, the result of my inability to make sense of any of it and my simple desire to respond. Mark making is an empathic activity for me, a way for me to connect to the world around me and the world within me. I create colonies of marks and lines and in my mind they become personified and assume individual behaviors. Can I re-write troubling human narratives with them? Can I make them cooperate? As I try to sort out reality, I create a new reality on paper. I eventually relinquish my initial intention of control and it is with this surrender that an unpredictable creative process unfolds. Ultimately driven by a desire for engagement, and sustained by the meditative act of making, I hope to pass on a sense of wonder and resonance to those who view my work.”
To discover more artists, visit our Utah Artists Directory
Recent Comments