11/22 Current Work Announces It is Closing Its Gallery Tiffini Porter, founder and owner of Current Work in Salt Lake City, has announced that as 2023 comes to a close the gallery will close its programming and focus on consulting projects and independent projects. Launched last summer, Current […]
Walking through As You Are, the assembly of 35 recent paintings by John Sproul that make up his latest outing at Salt Lake City’s Current Work, it occasionally feels as though one of Utah’s most skillful and imaginative artists has set out to add “The Painter of Halloween” […]
Will it matter to you to know that these winding, twisted orgies of positive and negative space, these three-dimensional doodles spiraling and folding onto each other, these rigid stacks of competing planes frozen in time and space, were made from old skateboards? It would explain some things, like […]
Paintings and drawings by Andrew Alba travel with you. Even his signature leaves an echo in your head: a pale white loop-the-loop signature, alba all lower-case and cursive, no letter superior to another in size or emphasis or speed. Eyes, in his paintings, are blobs-of-darkness, curiously suggesting blindness, […]
Tiffini Porter couldn’t not do this. “This” being a crisp new gallery space — sharp white walls, weathered concrete floors — tucked into a nondescript warehouse space in Salt Lake City’s Granary district. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long, long time,” says the newly minted gallerist. […]
Alexandra Giannell’s works can feel expansive even when they are only a few inches tall. Though her works are abstracted, the numerous, detailed marks that expand across the surface may conjure waves, hills or even urban settings. They are created through a process of addition and subtraction, often […]
For Laurie Lisonbee, art is a meditative, almost metaphysical process. “Art is a fascinating search for something that is coming into consciousness and making itself known,” she explains. “The process of artmaking then gives physicality to what was formerly intangible and unknown.” Her paintings combine traditional realism with […]
We feel everything she needed to know she learned as a writer for 15 Bytes (from 2018 to 2019), but there’s a chance Brigham Young University Museum of Art’s new Curator of Religious Art picked up a thing or two in other places. Like in Heather Belnap’s Women […]
The main gallery at Phillips is large enough to allow viewing a painting from a moderate distance, a point of view where one current work presents as a charming landscape, featuring a cottage beneath two large trees that resemble tulips. On a clothesline from one of the trees […]
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 […]
Symbols being slippery things, you don’t have to believe Joshua Luther when he tells you his current works are about the transmission of knowledge and wisdom. Or, believe him, Luther being the hand that drew these images and the mind that conceived them. But don’t feel constrained by […]
Early in her career, Grayce Cutler painted traditional landscapes and floral works. At the end of it, with a nudge from Hans Hofman, she produced water scenes in forceful, expressionistic modes. In between, when the Utah art world was experimenting with new and often controversial idioms, she painted […]
Salt Lake City, and Utah more generally, needs more housing. It’s indisputable. But one suspects that in five or ten years, or even less, all these apartment dwellers embracing urban life are going to be like, “You know what would be really cool? If this neighborhood had an […]
The venue has the vibe of a Zen retreat, seasoned with a pinch of the speakeasy. It’s downstairs at the split level, mid-century modern building across H Street from the Glendinning Mansion. Once home to Alderwood Fine Art, it’s now the headquarters of real estate and interior design […]
I’ve been thinking about Colour Maisch’s porcelain pieces ever since I saw them at Current Work in the fall. Not sure why. Maybe because they remind me of a philosopher’s stone (as in the Chinese Gongshi, not as in Harry Potter). I just think I’d like to look at them for a long while. Sculpture isn’t cheap, though (Go big or go home, is how I’m feeling this year), and I don’t really hang with a wealthy crowd, so, here’s what I’m thinking: she’s got a show going up at the Kimball In Park City on December 9. Hang out in their parking lot next week and while she’s loading the pieces in and out …
Connie Borup’s decision to foreground water in her current work is timely, given the combination of threats coming from drought, the draining of the aquifers, the unequal division of a dwindling supply, and the ongoing fight over rights to it, all contributing to unprecedented water insecurity. But it’s […]
As a follow up to our article on the history of the serigraph in Utah, we take a look at three Utah artists working with screen prints. University of Utah professor Justin Diggle is known for the deep, rich qualities of his etchings, so you wouldn’t think that […]
