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.
What does it mean to die well? With honor? With purpose? Bountiful Davis Art Center (BDAC) explores these questions with a new exhibit curated by Chauncey Secrist: Ars Moriendi. This latin term, literally “the art of dying,” refers to upheavals in Europe after the Black Death, and the […]
Linnie Brown’s approximately two dozen pieces in her show Retrace at A Gallery, with titles like “Often Requires Additional Building,” “Need Only to Reattach,” and “The Line Between Now and Then,” make you think of nothing more than — what if all these paintings, with their flanges and […]
[dropcap]Reflected[/dropcap] subway systems, upside-down metropoli, bomb threat questionnaires—these are just a few of the elements at play in Daniel Everett’s Security Questions, currently at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition includes a range of media, from looping videos to installations that, according to Everett, “address the […]
[dropcap]At[/dropcap] the opening of Line Paintings, I noticed a tall man standing by one of the works, seeming to dance with a young girl. He looked at her, then pirouetted with one hand out, asking with his eyes if she understood. And I knew, without seeing it, which […]
As our most dynamic organ, the brain is at once remarkably expansive and persistently conservative, constantly aiming to preserve its energy. The ever-increasing pace of social media has nurtured this trend of mental conservation—instead of reading and prioritizing media according to its supposed importance or significance, we often […]
For all intents and purposes, statuary was invented in ancient Egypt. These earliest figures, meant to provide a home for the soul in case the body was lost after death, took the cautious form of virtually indestructible cubes of stone. The Greeks took over the idea and, using […]
When confronted by a broadly-brushed lampoon such as Kelsey Harrison’s New Luxury Art Show in Downtown Salt Lake City, it’s tempting to sustain the illusion, play along, which in this case would be writing an ironic review: one that used the same hyperbolic, vacant language, touched on the […]
Working Hard to Be Useless, currently on display at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, is framed as a revisiting of the ideas of the Situationist International. Though art and artists were integral to its earliest phases, Situationism (1957-1972) was, at its heart, a revolutionary movement that, among […]
[dropcap]When[/dropcap] presented with a scenario involving what to rescue in the event of a natural disaster, most people say they would choose their photographs. Why? What makes a photograph so important? The former director of photography for The Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski, curated an exhibition in […]
[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 […]
You can’t grab a good cup of Jose to sip while viewing art at Mestizo anymore. For lots of reasons, not many of them particularly interesting, the Salt Lake City gallery has moved from the popular North Temple coffeehouse where it has been housed for more than a […]
[dropcap]For [/dropcap]many of us, “collage” has consisted of either a papier mâché project gone awry or the deposit of clumsily scrunched tissue paper on cardstock our kid brought home from kindergarten that we don’t have the heart to remove from the fridge. With its material mélange, the medium […]
[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. […]
[dropcap]One[/dropcap] of the most compelling breakthroughs in modern linguistics, and a necessary step on the way to proving that language has become genetically programmed in humans, was the realization that all people everywhere speak essentially the same language. Made up of words and rules for combining them, it […]
[dropcap]Freedom [/dropcap]Would Be Mine at the Kimball Art Center celebrates the career of feminist art heroine Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002), whose earliest sociopolitical artwork preceded the 1970s flourish of feminist artists. Because she was an initial outlier to the feminist art movement typically associated with names like […]
[dropcap]When [/dropcap]the towers—there were more than two—of the World Trade Center fell on 9/11, emergency medical personnel anticipated an avalanche of critical injuries. While the survivors on that day were never counted, responders knew from experience what to expect: eight years before, when a bomb exploded beneath one […]
[dropcap]A [/dropcap]sometimes helpful way to conceptualize Modern Art is “old wine in new bottles.” James Joyce, the essential modernist, took a 2,500-year-old epic poem, the “Odyssey,” and repackaged it as a novel—a literary form only a couple of centuries old—that he called “Ulysses,” after the poem’s protagonist, even […]
There isn’t any rule against making art from a personal, as opposed to universal, point of view. Indeed, it could be argued that most good art started out with something private in it that energized the man or woman who made it. But it’s also true that, for […]
[dropcap]In[/dropcap] biology, circumstances—what scientists call “niches”—summon particular organisms into being. So it may have been inevitable that BYU and Snow College, two of the principal breeding grounds of Utah art, would each possess a teacher who is also a prolific artist, a keen student of local culture, a […]
