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 […]
At the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, response to Nobody Likes It Here, the installation by Alexis Rausch in the Projects Gallery (near the entrance), has been spilling over into the adjacent Street Gallery, where the Utah Division of Arts and Museum’s Statewide Annual is on display. It’s […]
In spite of the relatively narrow design principles Sunny Taylor has chosen to follow for two decades now, she somehow manages to mix up the results so that within her large body of work, while every Sunny Taylor could only be a Sunny Taylor, each one manages to […]
Maura Segal isn’t the first artist to settle on a paradigm or format to repeat in a series of variations, nor is she the most extreme proponent of a fundamental modern, indeed Minimalist or Conceptual, approach. Donald Judd, for instance, designed the same metal box — technically described […]
The 13 new paintings by Hayden White at Finch Lane Gallery challenge an audience and a community used to sharing broad assumptions with its indigenous circle of artists. By skillfully employing representational techniques, such as the behavior of light on materials and surfaces, White makes his work visually […]
When Trishelle Jeffery enrolled in the printmaking program at Snow College, it was clear that she was already an accomplished artist who had come to art school to add some essential skills to her tool belt. She wasn’t the first artist to admit that she lives with periodic […]
Two small panels among her nearly 30 works currently in the Dibble space at Phillips Gallery may represent a moment of freedom and spontaneity that Nancy Vorm needed to make for herself amidst the meticulously controlled efforts seen around them. Their titles, “Sojourn 1” and “Sojourn 2,” confirm […]
The history of art, like the structure of the physical universe, has become a settled matter — a grand paradigm — in the last few years. Each now has a story that will stand the test of time, or until a new age demands a different theory: whichever […]
Like the classic notion of beauty, traditions of craftsmanship were often rejected by modern art. For much of the last century, artists felt a need to make works that were not only ugly by conventional standards, but crude. Many still do, but clearly Dan Toone is not one […]
If a doorway is seen to be standing all by itself, without a building or even a single wall to justify its presence, it’s probably either a ruin or a monument. Or both. Door frames are normally built stronger in order to survive despite their inherent weakness, since […]
The Springville Museum of Art’s Spring Salon is the largest annual exhibition of work by Utah artists in the state. More than 1000 works are entered for consideration each year. From these, the museum manages to hang several hundred on their ground floor galleries. The Salon is too […]
“Regina is a compact, trapezoid-shaped tower, like a slender version of a ziggurat, the temple structure that spread across the Fertile Crescent three thousand years BC, which almost certainly inspired the story of the Tower of Babylon. Where ziggurats were made of sun-dried clay bricks, however, this tower […]
