Longtime followers of UMOCA, going back to the days when it was called the Salt Lake Art Center, have known to check out the room all but hidden in the back, at the northeast corner of the large, downstairs gallery. Here gems often can be found: small collections […]
Tyrone Davies’ In Camera comprises more than a dozen television sets arranged in deliberate, symmetrical spatial compositions around an altar-like pair that much of the time places an image of religious meditation in close proximity to a giant sports arena. Symbolism noted. All the sets are playing, a […]
Shelley, given like all Romantic poets to overstatement, wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Two centuries later, Auden replied that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Presuming that what they said of poetry can stand for all of art, their argument addresses the essential question […]
The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art has become one of Salt Lake City’s most reliable venues for the art of our time, and its ambitious program, combined with the number and variety of its galleries, can challenge the capacity of the local art press. As this is being […]
Among my favorite qualities in art, two perennial activities stand out. One is drawing, an essential human activity that too often goes entirely under-appreciated, thought of as nothing more than the practiced trick of outlining visible forms. The fact that computers, with their mind-boggling computational powers, cannot recognize […]
On a wall edging a Bogotá, Colombia, street, music and theater posters vie with fight cards and bullfight notices pasted cheek-by-jowl to a rough, stucco wall. Over them are stenciled images of balaclava-clad guerrillas and the scrawled brigade name, M19, alternating with random graffiti, the surface peeling open […]
“Patterns of Resistance,” the title piece of UMOCA’s latest foray into “forward-thinking art” is a very large, intricate painting in blue and gray. In the midst of imposing space, created by joining two of what were probably the largest sheets of paper the artist could find, it depicts […]
Glass, like painting, sculpture, or any other art medium, flourishes in a variety of techniques. Just as an artist can paint in oil, acrylic, watercolor, with spray paint and stencils, or any number of other innovations, and just as a sculptor can build up clay to be cast […]
On a partition amid the downstairs gallery of the Harrison Museum in Logan hang three hand-woven Hopi plaques, or flat dishes. The backwards-F motif of the central disc repeats six times, as if rotating rapidly around its center. To the left, a woven black-and-white pattern suggests a hoop, […]
A small oil, less than a foot square, says a lot about the man who painted it. Juan Pablo Gasca, who was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, but has made his home in the United States since 1998, calls it “What Do You See?” The title is no joke; […]
The novel and (actually, several) films of The Talented Mr. Ripley are readily available in Salt Lake, but until this week the play has not been. A first step in rectifying that omission was made on Monday night, when Weller Booksworks, as part of both its Free Play Reading Series and the Utah Humanities Book Festival, staged a free reading in the bookstore. Although presented without costumes or scenery and only minimal action, the actors prepared as they would for any staging, rehearsing and working together to develop characters and impart the right voices.
For three months, from Sept.12 until Dec.12, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, on the campus of Utah State University in Logan, will be showing more than 50 superb examples of Aboriginal art by 33 artists, who together span the history of indigenous Australian painting. In seven […]
Of all the brilliant theatrical tropes that Repertory Dance Theatre has introduced over half a century, one of the best comes right at the start of each performance. As the house lights dim and the roses on the curtain fade from sight, anticipation calls the audience to order. […]
When 15 Bytes first encountered Casey Jex Smith almost a decade ago, he seemed exactly the sort of artist the world craves and Utah schools, almost alone in academe, excel in producing. At the premier U.S. art schools, from Yale to the RISD (the proximity of Yale to […]
It would be helpful if words could capture the sequence of impressions created by a first encounter with Confetti and Distress, Honey and Suspicion. We know what to expect with paintings and sculpture, and increasingly now with performance, installation, video—all the newer media that have become familiar […]
In a vintage wisecrack, Ad Reinhardt once defined a sculpture as “something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.” Gallery owner Thomas J. Howa knows the sentiment, but disagrees. Himself a painter, Howa doesn’t see how showcasing two artists in the same medium […]
Amalia Ulman’s anti-war installation is an ambitious, multimedia work in which the artist clearly has invested much of herself. In a dark room, three independent elements—wire sculptures that can be felt and navigated around as well as seen; recorded music from an unseen source; and in an […]
The current controversy over art’s funding, precipitated by the apparently politically-motivated firing of Utah Division of Arts and Museums director Lynnette Hiskey, exposes two fundamentally different ideals of how art should operate in modern society. To be fair, it’s not that the Tea Party-types don’t like art; […]
The right title can do a lot to empower an exhibition. The best name on a show in recent memory belongs to Lizze Määttälä’s exhibit in the Artists-Working-in-Utah gallery at UMOCA, which she calls Uphill / Both Ways. Of course the phrase isn’t original, having started life in […]
