Behind her charming bracelets, Haworth has something edgier to show. “She Was Not There” and “She Was Defined by Negative Spaces” comprise a symmetrical pair of mixed-media canvases that make their most telling point through their ambiguity: is this one woman, or two playing similar roles in familiar […]
The performance by Kristina Lenzi and Gretchen Reynolds, scheduled to overlap with Gallery Stroll on Friday, March 21st, was called a ‘Durational Draw Out,’ a name that suggests a sporting event or an endurance contest. And why not? Who says art works better when it’s pretentious? Flexing their […]
To non-specialists, the timeline of art history is marked by long periods when nothing happens, punctuated by sudden expansion. About half a million years ago, our part-ape, part-human ancestors noticed that certain things—rocks, branches, bits of bone—resembled other things, like faces or the bodies of animals, and took […]
When an artist writes the title of a painting on its front, it’s a safe bet he wants us to pay attention to its meaning, not just its visual impact. In good art, meaning is metaphorical, so a work can support more than one reading. A recent Brian […]
This is the second of a two-part essay on the work of James Christensen, Cassandra Barney and Emily McPhie now on exhibit at the Springville Museum of Art. The first part can be found in our February 2014 edition. Part II All good art is at once surface and […]
‘When evil comes into the world, it is the job of the witnesses to turn it into love.’ Statistically, when a child dies, more than half the time the parents end up by divorcing. The reason most often given is conflict over how to grieve. These differences aren’t […]
Size has always played a role in art. The scale of an artwork compared to its viewers matters, and its importance isn’t tacked on like some gradual development arrived at after all other sensations have been exhausted. In fact, while cave art, the earliest evidence for a fundamental […]
Down the Rabbit Hole Following Three Artists Into Their Burrows Part I Curiouser & Curiouser: The Artwork of James Christensen, Cassandra Barney, Emily McPhie, and Familyincludes sixty paintings by the three artists in the primary exhibition, with dozens more incidental works in the area set aside to […]
Forget Idealism. In the hands of an artist, hard truths can be made immortal. Goya’s “The Third of May, 1808” and Picasso’s “Guernica” continue to speak on behalf of murdered innocents long after convincing the world that it was the pretensions and excuses of their powerful, military butchers that were […]
In an interview with 15 Bytes on the occasion of the its publication, Max Werner explained that his fourth book, Evolved: Chronicles of a Pleistocene Mind, was actually written before the three that preceded it into print: Black River Dreams, a collection of literary essays about fishing, Crooked […]
If asked to name an artist they know something about, most people would probably reply, ‘Vincent.’ They might well defend their nomination by pointing out that he was precisely what comes to mind when someone says ‘artist.’ He was notoriously daft: inspired, driven mad by the very […]
Christmas is a time for traditions, mostly welcome, but we could do without a recent one: the culture clash that’s come to be known as the ‘Christmas Wars.’ The pattern will be familiar to anyone who has followed the national news, or for that matter ever been bullied, […]
“Money doesn’t talk; it swears” — Bob Dylan Money does a lot of things, and like swearing, they can be good or bad. Consider twenty-first century art, for example. Money attracts talent, and with unprecedented amounts of money flowing into the art market, there is so much wonderful […]
A few years ago, a Snow College graduate was nearly dropped from the BFA program at Weber State for submitting drawings that resembled photographic double exposures. In one, a woman had two heads; in another, an ear of one face burst through another’s cheek. Ironically, they would […]
There’s an old rule-of-thumb in galleries, more applicable than ever these days: ‘The more text on the wall, the worse the art.’ Without an injection of extraneous text, much of today’s art would offer viewers little for their trouble. But the rule cuts both ways, and Fifteen, the […]
It’s often said that fans confuse the characters in movies with the personalities of the celebrities who play them. Something similar must happen with art and artists. Surely no one was surprised to learn that Picasso, bawdiest of artists, was a shameless womanizer, but how many of Thomas […]
Once again, Saltgrass Printmakers has mounted a show that everyone in the Utah art community could profit from seeing, that UMFA or UMOCA might well feature for a season. It’s not just that Wayne Kimball and Bob Kleinschmidt are emeritus heads of two of Utah’s foremost print departments—Kimball […]
One of the best known, most extraordinary photographs of the heavens ever taken is called the Hubble Deep Field. It was made by pointing the orbiting Hubble telescope, surely one of the greatest achievements in human history, into a tiny segment of space, about 1/30 the area of […]
The Gaze: glass half-full . . . If you wanted to demonstrate that there is such a thing as a male gaze, different from the way a woman looks at the world, you might assemble pairs of photographs, one in each pair displaying a man’s perspective, one […]
