“I could not do this in my head,” Jerrin Wagstaff says as he passes an open palm over “Ultrascape #21,” the latest of his new paintings. This is a man who has spent half his life doing something most people rarely do, which is to create pictures of […]
For many of us, our first experiences with art come in the form of crayons, markers, or chalk. We would crudely draw stick figures, flowers and animals, which we then displayed, proudly, to friends and family. But this experience is not the case for artist Sara Lynne Lindsay, […]
A small animal’s skeleton is visible from inside a domed sphere at the center of an elaborate golden frame. The adornment evokes the gilded macabre of a medieval Christian reliquary. Throughout And No Birds Sing at Nox Contemporary, one sees Frank McEntire’s love of interesting and unusual found […]
The act of pairing in a diptych offers the artist a diverse set of methods for storytelling: there is room for direct comparison, but also for extension. In the case of the latter, the structure allows for further exploration of a theme unbound by a singular canvas. Simply […]
Lenka Konopasek is always blowing things up or burning them down. Her beguiling works in paint or sculpted paper, now in a solo show at Nox Contemporary, make manifest that disaster is her thing, her oeuvre — but why is that? We arranged to meet at Nox to […]
We all can relate to the idea of the inner child, the concept introduced by Freud that everyone possesses a “childlike aspect” within the unconscious mind. This inner child manifests as a subpersonality, an aspect of one’s character that is shown during times of challenge. It is a […]
It’s a situation that will ring true for many of the artists who make their living as arts professionals: “I spend a lot of time helping other artists show their work and have opportunities, and I love my job,” says Lydia Gravis, director of Weber State University’s Mary […]
The history of photography is bound up in chemical and technical overhauls, and when artists combine and tweak these photographic processes, new levels of expression emerge. Contemporary photographers Christine Baczek and David Hyams, co-founders of Luminaria in Salt Lake City, are reviving alternative photographic agents and playing with […]
I have to admit it: I had no idea landscape arches vibrate and thus create sound (albeit through frequencies inaudible to the human ear). Learning this fact alone makes attending Displacing Vibrations, on view at Nox Contemporary through April 5, worthwhile. Ambitious in its scope and message, the […]
“I want to take a viewer somewhere”—Roland Thompson There’s something that in theory can happen to any artist, but is particularly wonderful when it happens to one who has chosen an arduous path: one that imposes some external standards of its own on the craft of art making. […]
This is ART, Not a Sign is a fitting title for Tanner Lenart’s exhibition at Nox Contemporary, which opened Nov. 16. The barrage of commercial signs, posted grid-like on the wall, and reading alternately “This is a Restaurant, not a Bar” or “This is a Bar, not a […]
When confronted by a broadly-brushed lampoon such as Kelsey Harrison’s New Luxury Art Show in Downtown Salt Lake City, it’s tempting to sustain the illusion, play along, which in this case would be writing an ironic review: one that used the same hyperbolic, vacant language, touched on the […]
People tend to see something one way until someone shows them another. —Frank McEntire Anyone who knows the art of Frank McEntire, whether sculpture, mixed media, or assemblage, will have witnessed his technique of bringing together found objects, often in the presence of natural materials like stone […]
“Dinner Napkin No 1” Things were going swimmingly in the Garden of Eden before a sinister serpent offered Eve, Earth’s first woman, an apple. Though such a partaking was expressly off limits, Eve simply couldn’t resist the seduction of the deliciously bright and crisp fruit. Letting her selfish […]
The problem with contemporary art, post-modern art, call it what temporary label you will, the problem with new art is always that it doesn’t look like art. Two of the signature schools of late modernism—found art and assemblage—exemplify this dilemma. How can a jumble, not just of familiar […]
Technically the MFA Maisch is finishing at the University of Utah is in ceramics, but clay makes up just a portion of her work. The objects in Maisch’s studio are a combination of organic and industrial materials, with a mixture of created and found elements. All share a […]
“When I look back as a child, I was always making big 3-dimentional projects, although I did not see it as art,” says Stephanie Leitch, a Salt Lake City artist preparing for an upcoming exhibit at Nox Contemporary. While studying for her art degree at the University of […]
