Every genre of art comes, if not with rules exactly, then with expectations. Religious images are not permitted to be funny, while landscapes are expected to focus on land rather than the people living on it. Judging from endless corridors lined with countless monotonous examples, portraits must be […]
On a bookshelf a few feet from where I’m writing this sits a volume that claims to contain “the complete paintings of Vincent van Gogh”—(it should say “surviving,” his mother having burned half his work when she became discouraged). It’s a large and rather heavy book. Nearby, a […]
In “Reflections on Lake Powell,” printmaker Rob Chipman could be said to have reversed a common but popular natural sight. Beneath a classic desert sky of clouds too ephemeral to ever produce rain, a red rock landscape is doubled by its reflection on the reservoir’s surface. Normally, a […]
It’s a well-known fact that while comedy doesn’t always produce outright laughter, it does require a happy ending. So if the paintings of Lucky Tuck, now on view upstairs in the Utah State Capitol, are comedies — some of them are deliberately funny — can they be said […]
Brigham Young was a visionary and entrepreneur who crossed mountains and found dreams on the other side. His most celebrated find is well known, but not everyone knows about what followed: the opening of the hidden valley that came to be known as Sanpete County. Located at the […]
One word can make the case. For example, as a direction, west is an abstraction — that is, a thought or idea with noconcrete, physical presence. As a place, on the other hand, “the West” is one of the more common and evocative locations in space: one which […]
There are places in the world, some of them in the United States, where the “Religion and Spirituality” show, as it is fondly known in so many Utah galleries, would not be allowed. Once upon a time, that might have been because of institutional hostility to all religious […]
You know you’re dealing with successful assemblage when scavenged and repurposed parts unite to transcend their reality as fragments, though without erasing your awareness of them as such, and instead create a totally convincing alternative interpretation in your senses. Such an object is Sylvia Ohara’s “Perspective,” a three-legged […]
Regular readers of 15 Bytes will have read about the Ogden Contemporary Art Gallery, known succinctly as the OCA. Anyone who followed up a review or event notice by visiting won’t need to be told what a wonderful venue it is, with its modernist, two-story, open plan gallery […]
The largest work in Utah Arts & Museum’s Statewide Annual at Ogden Contemporary Arts is Cody Chamberlain’s “Procession,” an almost mural-sized, hyper-realistic depiction of a place somewhere in the vast Utah desert. It’s an accepted convention not to reveal the locations of rock art, for fear that if […]
Throughout the Covid pandemic, public conversation made much of the experience of isolation. Recent art exhibits, several reviewed on this site, included interpretations of solitude and of its consequences. Still, for such a commonplace source of suffering, it didn’t seem all that well illustrated — perhaps because it […]
If the word “pandemic” is spoken, it may bring many things to mind, like fear, anxiety, isolation, frustration, even shame: stories of mortality, the loss of several years of life, and the setbacks that may make that loss permanent. All these elements are on display right now at […]
In her video installation, Who’s Coming to Save You? artist Christy Chan undermines what has become a too-familiar impulse in the population at large. That is, as her title suggests, the assumption that salvation, either political or something stronger, is our only hope for the future and so must […]
The paintings of Heydar Rasoulpur include some of the most vivid dreamscapes, capturing the most telling and painful memories, to have emerged from the ship-wreckage of nations that have literally cast so many homeless millions onto stormy seas in the decades since the Millennium. It should perhaps come […]
The main upstairs gallery at UMOCA boasts a long front room, in which two dozen or so vibrantly colorful paintings of sumptuous foodstuffs currently hang. They surround a couple of tables placed end to end, on which are arranged a dozen pairs of clamshell take-out boxes. The congruence […]
We now use the less meaningful term “mixed media” in preference to more precise words that range from “oil on canvas” to “Expandable foam, epoxy clay, epoxy gel, resin, wood, steel, acrylic paint, quartz, glass rhinestones, and pencil”—a description that was posted next to a recent work in […]
