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.
Sometime around 1970, feminist historians began to make all sorts of discoveries about the primacy of artistic and scientific discoveries during what has been called the Enlightenment. Among these was the realization that, just as artists often perform the difficult early stages of gentrification of urban areas, only […]
There is a neat taking-off trick here: two of Jennifer Rasmusson’s back-in-time representational paintings are here, separated from her New Abstracts now filling A Gallery’s white-on-white indoor sky-lit courtyard area. The pre-abstract “Collection of Blues” is eye-level; it’s very large; one bloom is the size of your head. […]
Whether it is upheld as an integral part of a religious belief system or simply acknowledged as myth by a more secular audience, what took place in the Garden of Eden continues to inform the way Western civilization has come to understand, represent, and feel about the body. […]
The past is becoming an increasingly hot topic in the present as scientific and technological advancements have made DNA analysis relatively simple and cheap, and the amassing of historical documents, journals and photos, easily accessible online. These developments have spurred interest in the individual aspect of the past, […]
The gallery on the fourth floor of the City Library includes not only a large interior space but also its exterior walls and the mezzanine-like floor space outside. Normally, it rewards two artists sharing the space. The sculptor Cordell Taylor has taken over all of it, as well […]
Secluded in a small, pitch-black viewing room in the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, a troubled musician suddenly breaks into a virtuosic drum solo. Both terrifying and impressive, the performance unleashes a combination of sounds that is just shy of chaos. After a few minutes of what seems […]
Once, after we had moved to a new city, I found it helpful to drive my daughter to and from school. In time, her inborn need to be independent led her to public transportation, which she still relies on four decades later, but our pleasure in each other’s […]
“Water Crossing,” 2016, triptych, charcoal on vellum mounted on board, 96″ x 165″ It’s not hard to see why, when BYU Museum of Art’s Curator of American Art Kenneth Hartvigsen and his staff set out to take the measure of artistic responses to the international refugee crisis, they […]
“Contemplating Weird Stages,” 1982. Stepping into the BDAC this past week was like stepping back in time. The work of Charles Keeling Lassiter feels like a transplant from nearly a half-century earlier when artists were experimenting with ideas of primitivism, tortured human forms, and crowded compositions. His works […]
A Sad Plight, October 8, 1942, ink over graphite on paper, 11 x 15 3/4 in., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, gift of the Graphic Arts Council, 2001.28.3 “In any circumstance, anywhere and anytime, take up your brush and express what you face and what […]
Dana Gluckstein, “Tribal Man in Transition.” Kenya, 1985. Sometimes numbers provide the best grasp of world history, of its sporadic progress and its frequent failures to move ahead. For example, World War II caused an estimated 60 million deaths, which is thought to be the greatest loss of […]
“Head in Snow,” mixed media on wood, 36” x 48” 2018 When Clement Greenberg wrote his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in 1939, he declared art as standing opposite kitsch, as a remedy to the dumbing down of taste in a consumer culture. In the decades since, however, many […]
When Madison Donnelly showed her sculpture, “User Centered Design,” at the 2017 Statewide Annual Exhibition, it was outstanding in a field of more conventional works. As a photo that ran in 15 Bytes at the time reveals, even the staff at Rio Gallery seemed to think so: in […]
It sometimes seems as though Lenka Konopasek can do anything. Using only plain paper as her medium, she meticulously models a 21st-century American suburb, spread across a tabletop like an architect’s dream. Stripped of distraction and camouflage and reduced to a bleached-white, monochromatic array, the poverty and redundancy […]
“Pretzel Meteor” Toilet paper hats, seatbelt selfies, and a performance by the Bee Gees normally don’t strike one as elements of an art exhibit, yet these are among the materials that make up the work of Nina Katchadourian in the BYU Museum of Art’s exhibition Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser. […]
People tend to see something one way until someone shows them another. —Frank McEntire Anyone who knows the art of Frank McEntire, whether sculpture, mixed media, or assemblage, will have witnessed his technique of bringing together found objects, often in the presence of natural materials like stone […]
Sarah Bown Roberts recently graduated from BYU, but she’s starting out strong with Head Lands. Like Noah’s Ark, her 10 mixed-media collages, three oil paintings, and six digital photos each carry paired aesthetic animals. Thematically, the first pair divides them into “archeological excavations” and “restorations.” In this, they recall […]
Exhibition view of Ditchbank at The Gallery at Library Square. Filling the gallery space at the Main Library in Salt Lake City with a vivid marriage of opposing elements — made and found, organic and human-made, real and reflected, flat and three-dimensional, natural and civilized — the exhibit […]
When the “blue nudes took themselves off the canvas,” writes poet Laura Stott, “It wasn’t easy getting out from behind the glass.” Blue Nude Migration: A Painting and Poetry Collaboration,an exhibit by Laura and her sister Katheryn Stott currently on display at the Anderson-Foothill Branch of Salt Lake City’s […]
