The Greeks had a word for it. They called it Symmetry, which today often means a mirror-image. For an older society, one less needing to simplify an overly stimulating world, it meant balance. A symmetrical composition presented a balanced image. They may have found this concept in the […]
Minneapolis Institute of Art shares with Utah Museum of Fine Arts the advantages that come with not being located in Paris, London, New York, or other locales requiring a presence on the international art scene. Instead of always keeping one eye on their competitors, MIA and UMFA can […]
Stefanie Dykes has a busy fall. She has curated Poesis, a group exhibition of printmakers at Art Access (see our review) timed to coincide with the Rocky Mountain Printmaking Alliance Symposium (Oct. 9 – 12); and her work appears in In Good Company, an exhibition at the Simmons Pioneer Memorial Theatre’s […]
Jason Lanegan’s “Ancestral Reliquary II: Sylvina Belle Frohlich” could be described as a geometric assemblage that, hanging on a wall, establishes a context that literally connects it to architecture. The reference is underscored by hints in its shape: complex, house-like, but initially disorienting, not least because of the […]
Half a century ago, the children of Frank McEntire’s generation studied science in classrooms that self-consciously resembled laboratories: microscopes stood on tables and gas jets protruded from black, plastic-topped counters. On the walls hung graphic summations of fundamental scientific knowledge: evidence of taxonomy, the original business of sorting, […]
“By the Sea,” the characteristically collectible catalog Susan Meyer put together for her annual presentation of Brian Kershisnik’s new directions for 2019, includes a challenge from the artist to everyone who’s ever written, or even thought about, his art: The heavy symbolic weight of books in my […]
“The artist Guy Dill has carved out a unique niche for himself on the borderline between abstract and figurative sculpture.” That’s the metaphor that first comes to mind, but the thing is, it doesn’t really work, because he doesn’t carve. They’re assembled in that distinctly American geometric style, […]
With so much political art being made and shown these days, it would be easy enough to conclude that social criticism and satire are about the only ways art can help in troubling times. Yet however much contemporary art’s moralizing encourages its fan base, it’s far from being […]
“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. […]
You don’t take a photograph, you make it. —Ansel Adams In a decade shy of 200 years—since its invention by British artists seeking a faster, easier way to draw from life—photography has joined those two great clichés of human invention, fire and the wheel, as […]
From time to time, artists redirect the trajectory of art. Sometimes they make huge changes: ones that large parts of the art world then follow. At other times, subtle, self-contained discoveries stand alone, changing the way we think about art more than the way it’s done. And while […]
[dropcap]At[/dropcap] the opening of Line Paintings, I noticed a tall man standing by one of the works, seeming to dance with a young girl. He looked at her, then pirouetted with one hand out, asking with his eyes if she understood. And I knew, without seeing it, which […]
For all intents and purposes, statuary was invented in ancient Egypt. These earliest figures, meant to provide a home for the soul in case the body was lost after death, took the cautious form of virtually indestructible cubes of stone. The Greeks took over the idea and, using […]
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 […]
[dropcap]One[/dropcap] of the most compelling breakthroughs in modern linguistics, and a necessary step on the way to proving that language has become genetically programmed in humans, was the realization that all people everywhere speak essentially the same language. Made up of words and rules for combining them, it […]
[dropcap]When [/dropcap]the towers—there were more than two—of the World Trade Center fell on 9/11, emergency medical personnel anticipated an avalanche of critical injuries. While the survivors on that day were never counted, responders knew from experience what to expect: eight years before, when a bomb exploded beneath one […]
[dropcap]A [/dropcap]sometimes helpful way to conceptualize Modern Art is “old wine in new bottles.” James Joyce, the essential modernist, took a 2,500-year-old epic poem, the “Odyssey,” and repackaged it as a novel—a literary form only a couple of centuries old—that he called “Ulysses,” after the poem’s protagonist, even […]
There isn’t any rule against making art from a personal, as opposed to universal, point of view. Indeed, it could be argued that most good art started out with something private in it that energized the man or woman who made it. But it’s also true that, for […]
[dropcap]In[/dropcap] biology, circumstances—what scientists call “niches”—summon particular organisms into being. So it may have been inevitable that BYU and Snow College, two of the principal breeding grounds of Utah art, would each possess a teacher who is also a prolific artist, a keen student of local culture, a […]
