At the edge of a forest, amid lush foliage punctuated with small blue, yellow, and white flowers, a barefoot woman with red hair lies sleeping on the grass. She wears black leggings and a blue blouse adorned with curlicues, and a planter’s trowel lying nearby identifies her as […]
There’s something familiar about this landscape, but it’s not quite right. Yes, the verdant, green foreground and the rounded, purple mountains in the distance speak of an abundance of water because, unlike the hard-edged verticals of the red rock, mesa country of southern Utah deserts, northern Utah took […]
“So many people have lost the proper way of living, but here it is.” The comment, delivered by someone contemplating two of the approximately 125 mostly woven works in The Threads That Bind Us, the annual exhibition by the Mary Meigs Atwater Weaver’s Guild at the Utah Cultural […]
We may be done here. From time to time, a new effort in a human enterprise so fully exceeds what has gone before that it becomes impossible to speak of the new in the language that was adequate to discuss what came before. Imagine trying to explain to […]
There’s a device filmmakers use to show the passage of time. It starts with a closeup of a calendar—the type where each day is a single page that is torn off to mark the arrival of a new day. On film, the pages slip off as if being […]
There are 11 paintings by Pablo Cruz-Ayala, collectively titled Intersections of an Immigrant, at Finch Lane Gallery and one at Salt Lake Community College, where it’s part of their 75th Anniversary Alumni Show. In them, Cruz-Ayala employs a wide variety of media, but the first impression they make […]
The Biblical Book of Genesis, with all its great visual tropes — the creation of all from nothing, division of light from dark, story of the Fall, and so on — has been enormously popular with artists at least since Medieval times. The third chapter begins with the […]
There’s not much to say about the Salt Lake Community College’s 75th Anniversary Alumni Show, currently open at the art gallery of the main campus on State Street. Not that there isn’t plenty to say about the 30 works it includes or the same number of artists who […]
In one photo, a man sits with one leg crossed over the other, the dark pants leg of his raised knee interrupting the solid white mass of the cape completely wrapping his torso. The barber stands behind him, trimming his hair with electric shears as he impassively submits […]
However illogical, it’s probably human nature to assume that the worst challenges and disasters happen rarely, while those that occur every day must be trivial. That said, nature cannot be made to follow our thinking. One example: Covid-19, a close relative of the common cold, touched the lives […]
Photographers have a name for it: the Decisive Moment. For painters, the power to lend a timeless dimension to life is part of what validates portraits and figure studies. So it makes sense that one of each — Provo’s journeyman photographer Justin Hackworth, who describes his work simply: […]
The eyes of the “Spell Caster” gaze forth from a countenance at once as ancient as the gnarled forest that surrounds it and as conceptually modern as its nonbinary gender. Bewitching is one word for it, spellbinding another. Much of the portrait’s power comes from its elusive smile: […]
Two of Colour Maisch’s favorite materials reveal particular insight into why she makes the kind of art she does, or for that matter, why she makes art at all. One, which refers back to the influence of critical history and art education, is porcelain: a celebrated, durable, even […]
Numerous photographs of the great American folksinger and human rights activist Woody Guthrie lend an unexpected insight into an enigmatic project by photographer Lindsay Godin, part of which is currently on display at the Bountiful Davis Art Center. Futurisms, which Godin began assembling in 2019, contains apparently documentary […]
Three’s the charm this week as a third socially committed art exhibition joins two already in progress, one at UMOCA and another at Phillips. As it happens, Crisis is also the third part of Between Life and Land, a year-long survey of environmentally concerned art at the Kimball […]
Consider this familiar fact: we know that water arranges grains of sand more tightly together, so that when they dry, the sand has become solid, recalling the rock from which it was abraded. Pro sculptors, amateurs on holiday, and even children at play can carve the most remarkable […]
“Running With Scissors” demonstrates several characteristic things about this artist’s sensibility and methods. A rondel — as are about 20% of her works on display — its imagery harks back half a century or more and includes the initially disturbing sight of an animated, stylishly-dressed woman with no […]
There’s always much to see at the annual Face of Utah Sculpture show, especially since its recovery from pandemic closures. A fair amount of virtual ink has been spent on it over two decades, but it may be that not enough of that has concerned the individual most […]
If air is colorless, how is the sky blue? During the pandemic, faced with isolation, some people turned to television for companionship, while others got a dog. Artists tend to be loners, a useful skill for the solitary hours they must put in, but even their survival skills […]
