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.
Shawn Porter knows materials and how to use them, but in art, he says, the idea comes first. Porter has always worked with his hands. He says he doesn’t really understand something unless he can see the mechanics of it and his mind can communicate with his hands. […]
This Friday, December 3rd, Utah’s newest space for contemporary art in Salt Lake opens with a group show entitled Prime: The First Exhibit. Works by John Sproul and his wife Emily Plewe, the forces behind Nox Contemporary, will be joined by Shawn Porter, Jen Harmon Allen, Tom Aaron […]
(In this video Art Access Assistant Director Sheryl Gillilan discusses the pleasures and philosophies of her work at the non-profit.) Most would-be artists face it: the fork in the road, one path leading to the pursuit of artistic passion (and likely financial turmoil and various renunciations), the other […]
If you’ve visited Artspace City Center (home of Art Access Gallery, Tanner Frames Gallery and uaf Gallery) you’ve probably seen the work of Blue Critchfield. For years his large paintings mixing realistically rendered figures with surreal elements and abstracted styles caused visitors to stare through the glass walls […]
“I really like stuff,” Gretchen Dietrich tells me, her emphasis on the last word suggesting an orthographic marker somewhere between italics and ALLCAPS. “And I like order.” We are seated at a small round table in Dietrich’s office on the top floor of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Her […]
The Utah Cultural Celebration Center’s exhibit The Face of Utah Sculpture VI, opening this month and continuing through August 26, gives Utahns the opportunity to take a look at the work of over fifty Utah sculptors working in a variety of media. As a primer for the exhibit, […]
Shawn RossiterThe 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.
This month at Art at the Main Layton artist Terrece Beesley brings her brightly colored and densely organized watercolors to a Salt Lake audience. Beesley’s compositions are so animated with compositional energy that it seems difficult to call them “still” lifes. The backgrounds of her paintings have as much importance as any […]
This month at Gallery MAR you can view Randall Lake’s “Blue” paintings, a group of work first explored in our profile of the artist in the January edition of 15 Bytes. These deeply personal and stridently polemical paintings reveal a rarely seen aspect of the Utah artist best known for his […]
Josh and Catherine Kanter stand in an installaiton at the Salt Lake Art Center. In most families certain things are givens. Religious affiliation in some. Political parties in others. Even which sports team to root for can be an unspoken bond in a household. At the Chicago home […]
Kerry Transtrum places a piece of glass in the kiln. It’s a brisk Sunday morning in March. We’re in a large warehouse in South Salt Lake where Kerry Transtrumis demonstrating a technique that we can’t properly describe in these pages without the fear of internet filters shutting out our […]
This month at Kayo Gallery Salt Lake City artists Cara Despain and Mary Toscano open an exhibit of individually executed drawings, as well as a collaborative installation piece, entitled Into the White. The relatively young artists share a similar aesthetic, with an interest in expressive line executed on sparse […]
On a recent trip I picked up two books about the contemporary art world, Everything You Wanted to Know About Gallerists But Were Afraid to Ask, an interview format book dealing with fifty-one gallerists from all over the world that seemed a light enough read to flip through […]
Poetry readings are tricky things. At a reading you are a prisoner to the artist in ways you rarely are at exhibitions. A poet’s reading of a poem can give thunder and lightning to the written word (Dylan Thomas reading a credit card contract could make it a […]
A native Californian, sculptor Rod Heiss came to Utah fourteen years ago to apply his skills as a craftsman during the state’s building boom. When the housing market collapsed three years ago, Heiss encountered a moment of crisis. He made the most of the opportunity and threw himself […]
Art & Copy is a great ad for the advertising world. Watch it and you’ll be ready to give up your day job, no matter how profitable or prestigious, to join the revolutionaries and visionaries who craft the messages that bombard us everyday. Art & Copy does for advertising what Objectified — […]
The Forger’s Spell by Edward Dolnick The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathen Lopez Art forgers have frustrated and fascinated the art world for years. The critics whose reputations can be ruined by false attributions, and the collectors who find themselves holding a painting worth less than […]
“Space Heater” Utah State University art professor Christopher Terry is exhibiting a new body of work this month at the University’s Studio 102 Gallery. Executed while the artist was on a year-long sabbatical in Essen, Germany, these paintings are filled with Terry’s iconic interior settings — open spaces […]
Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art Laney Salisbury Penguin Press 2009 352pp You couldn’t write a better story line if you were dealing with fiction. John Drewe, a working-class chameleon of a racconteur passes himself off as a posh nuclear […]
