Utah Exhibition Reviews published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine, including reviews of local Utah artists, regional artists, group exhibitions and traveling exhibits of national and international artists.
It may be difficult today to understand how important the artist Gordon Matta-Clark was, prior to his premature death 45 years ago. His career coincides with Earth Art, which can be dated to the show of that name held at Cornell University in 1969, when the curator, Willoughby […]
Seen across David Ericson’s luminously sunlit gallery, Clay Wagstaff’s “Light on the Rock,” a landscape of two trees that join at their crowns so the space between them forms an arch, clearly reveals a vertical line that is not part of the image, but appears to divide the […]
An artist who complained that everyone he drew ended up looking like him was told, “That’s what makes it art.” Every true work of art is a self-portrait, someone said. It’s not the worst definition of what distinguishes art from other uses of the same materials and techniques. […]
Paintings and drawings by Andrew Alba travel with you. Even his signature leaves an echo in your head: a pale white loop-the-loop signature, alba all lower-case and cursive, no letter superior to another in size or emphasis or speed. Eyes, in his paintings, are blobs-of-darkness, curiously suggesting blindness, […]
Before it became Utah’s contemporary art museum, UMOCA was known as the Salt Lake Art Center. Art centers became a thing around the country in the late 20th century, possibly beginning in the 1970s, when an art center in Portland, Oregon, became the first such facility to secure […]
It looks like a blanket, though it might be a flag. There’s an image on it, taken from the most famous work of Josiah Wedgwood, the English potter, entrepreneur and abolitionist who founded the Wedgwood pottery works, with its signature cameo effect, in 1759. In 1787, he made […]
The title of a not-to-be-missed exhibition that opened in December at the Kimball and will extend through 2023, “Between Life and Land,” could be interpreted at least two ways. On the one hand, plants and animals could be seen as playing out their lives on whatever land they […]
There’s a novel waiting to be written in the basement of the Harold B. Lee Library. Or — considering the visuals — maybe a film or limited series for the small screen. The essential treatment is ripe for development. At the start of the 20th century, two young […]
We could say that art of the landscape is always concerned with scale. Land art was so revolutionary precisely because it brought us out of the gallery and restored us to the immense scale of the actual landscape. But we make a distinction between Land and landscape art […]
A pair of photographs give an idea of the large size and high quality of the homestead. “Casa” captures several buildings, a large tree, and a couple of late-model cars parked in a yard. Another, “Second Floor,” looks out into a central courtyard bounded by stairs rising to […]
I began by asking myself, “When was the last time I walked into a gallery and immediately burst out laughing?” The conclusion I finally arrived at was, “Never happened before.” There are rare times when we all laugh on emerging from a gallery, unable to believe what we’ve […]
At present, the main space at Modern West is devoted to a single artist, the Diné master Shonto Begay, whose primarily acrylic-on-canvas paintings have a unique way of showing the interconnection between, on one side, people who live their lives in complete partnership with the land and, on […]
So light and airy, transparent even, is Claudia Casarino’s “El Otro Abrazo,” you might miss it, tucked away in the corner of the BYU Museum of Art’s exhibition Monumental Matters. A tulle blouse scaled up to fit an individual who would be several stories tall, it has been […]
For instance, I hold life, pressing thunder, another breakdown and through A simple whisper darling I press the trigger on the limbs of another day. —Nicole LaRue, “For Instance” Poetry is an art form, but one that essentially stands in opposition to visual art. Calligraphy might be shown […]
Painters and dancers alike make their arts in space: visual design and movement through three dimensions are essential tasks they face in common, skills they must possess. Painters create imaginary space and choose the optical illusions that take place within it. For dancers, real space is the primary […]
“…My salad days, / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood/To say as I said then!” The speaker is Cleopatra, but the words come from Shakespeare, who invented more words and phrases than any other English speaker. He intends his Egyptian queen to mean in her […]
In a brilliantly luminous and subtly surreal oil painting, titled “Pink Lake (Where Will She Go?),” Holly Hind places a young lady, or perhaps a child, on the near shore of a sizable lake, under a livid red sky — perhaps the sunset to end all sunsets — […]
“Everything is Gray,” a photo-realist oil painting by Nicole Woodruff, doesn’t resemble an ordinary photograph; it looks like a camera error, a multiple exposure in which the same couple, the man sitting on a sofa and the woman reclining across both the couch and his lap, are seen […]
Chrysalis Jiri’s untitled watercolor depicts a rooster strutting on a grassy field, with a fence, a river, and a mountain range in the distance, all beneath a scrubbily-brushed, cloudy sky. Nowhere does the painting technique approach optical realism, but everything is clearly identifiable — not least the rooster, […]
