The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.
Pareidolia: It’s a term we rarely use for a process we frequently employ — the tendency to see forms in random, abstract patterns. It’s likely a survival instinct, since it is better to believe you see animals in the forest that are not there than not to see […]
“Part of what artists do is call attention to things that have been overlooked, and do so in a way that causes people to start noticing on their own,” Jim Frazer said in early 2018 while working on a project in which he transformed the trails of bark-beetle […]
Planning is useful. It provides structure, focuses energy. But, as Zachary Proctor’s new works at Park City’s Terzian Galleries attest, getting lost in the work has its advantages as well. In Destinations Unknown, Proctor is exhibiting with longtime friend and past exhibition partner Lane Bennion. The pair usually […]
Daisy Blake has waited 15 years for this role. It’s not an iconic one — Lady Macbeth or Blanche DuBois — nor even a lead; but it’s one she says is on her theatrical bucket list, the one she has chosen to embrace after a 5-year absence from […]
Professors may retire, artists don’t. For Wayne Kimball, a former professor of printmaking at Brigham Young University, the post-university years have been a flourishing period of artistic creativity. Pressing On, an exhibition of his most recent prints, collages, and boxes, on exhibit through Dec. 12 at his old […]
While working on the 337 Project in Salt Lake City in 2007, I learned about the “street art code” (though I don’t know that anyone called it by those three words). For aerosol and stencil artists, walls to work on, legally or not, are always in short supply, […]
Maybe they are too bulky or I’m wearing too many layers, but I’m having a hard time checking my biases at the door. When I see a Confederate flag hanging over two young boys playing in their front yard in one image, or, in another, the words “I’d […]
Ryan Perkins’ great-great-great-grandaddy may have been Brigham Young’s brother, but he’s not sure. So begins his artist statement for Parallel Lives, Misremembered Pasts, Revelation, Heartbreak & Lore, Perkins’ exhibit currently at the Gallery at Library Square. Which seems rather flippant or careless for an artist statement. And yes, […]
None of these works is exceptional. But they are not bad. On Friday, Nov. 9, the Church History Museum opened an exhibit of works by Henry B. Eyring, an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who has been serving in the governing body of […]
This isn’t likely to go over well. Sure, we took the team from New Orleans, a town with which we have little in common, and we couldn’t be bothered to change the name to something more Rocky Mountain-appropriate, but the Utah Jazz are definitely a local thing. Something […]
Early in Chalk hints of a fault line emerge, suggestions of a latent tension that will unfold throughout and disrupt the course of Joshua Rivkin’s rewarding excavation into the life of Cy Twombly. An alumnus of Black Mountain College in the 1950s, Twombly was a rising star in […]
In Desert Cabal, Amy Irvine hikes into the Sonoran Desert with coffee, liquor and a handgun to argue with a dead man. Published by Torrey House Press and subtitled “A New Season in the Wilderness,” it’s a narrative essay in 80 pages where the former professional rock climber […]
As Barry White will tell you, love ain’t easy (and seems to be getting more complicated). So the idea of sitting down to an evening devoted to a musical love letter, written a century ago by a young composer for the woman who would become his wife, has […]
If you were at Library Square a year ago this weekend, you may have seen him: a middle-aged man, at the base of the waterfall in Library Plaza, rolling out a scroll of paper, holding it down with rocks, then brushing and spilling ink and dirt across the […]
[dropcap]Almost[/dropcap] from the beginning, Diane Stewart’s Modern West Fine Art has been evolving away from the cowboys, American Indians and Western landscapes — however jazzed up or modernized — that threatened to define it at its inception. Gradual at first, the process has picked up steam in recent […]
[dropcap]Their[/dropcap] current exhibit, Utah Utah, is another visual treat from Mark Knudsen and Leslie Thomas, the pair of painters who, for the past decade, have been carpooling to work — call it Paint the Badlands, Inc. — before heading off to their individual departments for research and development. […]
Early on in our relationship, Tom Alder had to convince me on an important point: a lack of evidence should not get in the way of a good story. Evidence should be sought, Tom conceded, arguments for plausibility laid out, but ultimately, if nothing disproved a story or […]
It’s always easier to tell a story when it’s over, when you’ve arrived at a place recognizable as a destination, to have things tidily wrapped up despite whatever struggle or confusion might have preceded it, to know what it was all about, what it means. This isn’t one […]
Staying relevant can be difficult for a museum gallery. Exhibitions of a certain caliber take time to put together and the original impetus for a show may become, if not history, at least yesterday’s news by the time the wine and cheese are brought out for the artist’s […]
