In 1968, the Scottish-Canadian experimental filmmaker Norman McLaren found a new use for an optical printer, a device that copies motion picture films. Any moving image will consist of a sequence of still images, each briefly flashed before the eye while the mind builds a version of the […]
The backpack is ubiquitous in twenty-first century America: it is, in fact, one of the few accessories that comfortably crosses both gender and generational lines. They vary in color and ornament, just enough for you to know your own, but they are close to interchangeable. Yet this one, […]
The problem with contemporary art, post-modern art, call it what temporary label you will, the problem with new art is always that it doesn’t look like art. Two of the signature schools of late modernism—found art and assemblage—exemplify this dilemma. How can a jumble, not just of familiar […]
Somewhere along his path, while growing up in his native Utah or later, studying illustration, painting, and graphic design at the prestigious Pacific Northwest College of Art, Anthony Granato acquired a genuinely idiosyncratic approach to making art. It’s not unusual for an artist to seek out vintage frames […]
The cover of the forthcoming New Yorker magazine invokes a familiar image: a blonde woman in a nightgown reacts in terror to the sight of a giant face at her window. It’s Fay Wray and King Kong, of course, but with a twist: the giant eyeball peering in […]
The new Whitespace gallery, across Wall Avenue from the Union Station in Ogden, opened with an impressive array of artworks emphasizing noteworthy materials rather than familiar names or genres. For instance, photographer Koh Sang Woo knows that documentary photographs are old news; his digitally manipulated color images, like […]
Art doesn’t ask questions: people do. So when Salt Lake Community College professor Lynn Kipatrick first saw the ‘blind’ drawings by John Sproul that form the visual half of their joint show at the City Library, questions came to mind as part of her response. Fortunately, Kilpatrick […]
Watercolor is perhaps the most versatile paint medium, its range running from the most ephemeral, barely perceptible stain all the way to the intensity and illusionism of oils, with an infinite register of effects between. While it would be absurd to say there are only two ways to […]
The librarian on the City Library’s fourth floor proffered a warning: there hadn’t been enough space to hang everything in the correct order. She referred to the thirteen poems by Lynn Kilpatrick and fifteen drawings by John Sproul that together comprise To Be Unnamed. Probably everyone has an […]
Maximilian Werner will read from and sign copies of his memoir Gravity Hill at the King’s English Bookshop 1511 S. 1500 E. Salt Lake City Friday May 10, 2013, 7 pm. Maximilian Werner’s memoir Gravity Hill contains stories nested inside other stories. In its framing tale, we meet […]
The ten paintings by Sam Wilson currently showing at the 15th Street Gallery all appear to have been made in the last five or six years. The dates are worth noting, because although Wilson has an unusually distinctive style of painting, one that seems as timeless as […]
The popularity of religion as a topic in art can easily conceal the true nature of its appeal. Generally speaking, large portions of the human race care about spirituality, but plenty of other things that are equally popular, if not more so, never inspire the outpouring of art […]
In a tense moment near the climax of The Ordinary Truth, a woman in her seventies wades across a rocky creek in a remote forest in the dark of night. As she feels her way, her senses heightened by danger, she conjures for readers the feeling of finding […]
It’s an open secret that outside the enormous industrial manufacture of paper for packaging and publishing, paper making remains one of the more prolific creative crafts in the world. Visitors to Saltgrass Press in Sugarhouse will have seen exotic papers, made in places like Japan from a range […]
German painter Gerard Richter has dominated world painting for half a century, from his beginnings in Pop to riveting-if-fuzzy images drawn from daily newspaper photos, then large abstracts shaped primarily with squeegees, and on to more radical experiments. Though we may not know its actual source, we all […]
Any exhibit of more than one artist has something in common with a double bill at the movie theater, including an implicit invitation to speculate about why these artists, or their gallery, chose to show these particular works together. In the case of Claire Wilson and Zack Pontious, […]
A bee at work in the cherry blossoms Gravity Hill, by Maximilian Werner For an essayist and fishing enthusiast, popular University of Utah writing professor Maximilian Werner didn’t do too badly with Crooked Creek, his first novel. Nominated for the Utah Book Award, it went up against In […]
Glass is the most contentious medium in art, and has been so since mid-way through the 20th century. Before that there were just as many arguments among glass artists and their audience, but they were tempests in so many blown glass teapots. What happened to change all that […]
Individual works in Bierstadt to Warhol: American Indians in the West at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) may include western scenery, desert skies, colorful iconography, ethnic clothing and possessions, horses, and assorted mythic activities, alone or in various combinations. Some contain none of these. But the one […]
