Yolande Harris at the Woodbury Museum of Art
In Yolande Harris’s current exhibit at the Woodbury Museum of Art the artist uses sound, light and installation to upend the senses.
Flora + Fauna at Alice Gallery
The weeks of August are truly the doldrums for art exhibitions, no less in Utah than elsewhere. For whatever reasons—the population crowding their vacations into what’s left of the summer, the colleges that house many of the nonprofit galleries being between semesters, perhaps some artists already looking ahead […]
The enduring power of art: Katie Marie Liechty at BYU
On July 16, in the Harris Fine Arts Building, a traditional showcase for BYU student projects, senior Katie Marie Liechty installed what might have been intended to be three separate ensembles, although the complete installation also works well as one compound work. Given the subject matter of this […]
You Are Here: Svavar Jonatansson and Jared Steffensen’s Takes on Place at the Kimball Art Center
We’ve all been guilty of it — visiting an exotic locale, taking a few shots of its iconic attractions, and feeling like we’ve captured the essence of the place. If we’re alert, we come home and realize that everyone else has a shot of Venice’s gondolas from St. Mark’s Square, or the winding streets of Montmartre (and that all the people in the shots are tourists) and wonder if there wasn’t something more to be discovered. Our backyard is such a locale for millions of tourists from across the country, many of whom visit the national parks as quickly as we might Rialto and St. Mark’s. Those of us who live here, though, know what the place looks like from within — the myriad attractions tucked away into cliffs and canyons far from the motorist’s gaze…
Eliding the Hypen: Nicholas Galanin’s video series at BYU examines cultural hybridity
Our country is increasingly becoming a place of hyphenated identities, in which we speak of ourselves in relation to the countries or continents our ancestors came from — African-American, Italian-American, Korean-American. This increased focus on cultural and ethnic identity is double-edged: the hyphen acts as both a bond, […]
Sean Morello’s Constellations & Supersymmetries at UMOCA
Aesthetic theory has always been a subset of Philosophy, a body of human thought that modern science has essentially rendered obsolete. The problem is that philosophers, be they Plato or Kant, want to legislate reality: to say, not Is this beautiful? but rather, What is beauty? The process […]
The Minutiae of Death: Jared Christensen’s Strange Environments at Sweet Branch Library
It’s hard to predict what thoughts and experiences will affect an artist’s work, but major life changes — birth, death, marriage, divorce — almost always surface in the work of creative individuals, whether explicitly or implicitly. One such example can be found this month at the Sweet Branch […]
Jann Haworth at Modern West Fine Art
The gallery titles this show Round Trip, a reference to life’s having taken Haworth from western America to Britain and back. Aside from the two bracelets and “Jewels and Ring,” a freestanding set of fabric jewels, Haworth, if she chose to follow Cindy Sherman’s example, might well call most of the works “film stills.”
Ring the Bell Until It Cracks: Scott Tsuchitani’s Internment in the Street Gallery at UMOCA
Perhaps the most important question that should be asked of any new work of art is this: So What? A work can do all sorts of things, some of them even unprecedented, but unless doing so serves a purpose, the accomplishment may be no more than a stunt. […]
Brian Lindley: From Custom Cars to Color Country
Though you won’t expect to find the owner of a Harley, custom-finished with devilish skulls, running in similar circles as the owner of a delicately rendered redrock landscape, they both may be getting their art from the same source: Brian Lindley. After a decade working as an […]
The Cost of Anything at Alice Gallery
The art world is full of strange processes, from the rituals artists use to give themselves ideas, to the crafts they employ in bringing these inspirations into being, and so on to the necessary habits and innovations employed by audiences in sorting out the results. One of the […]
Untamed Rebellion: The Custom Car Art of Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth
America has a way of normalizing rebellion. Beat poets in smoky coffee shops turned into hipster coders in Starbucks; the opt-outs of surf culture were transformed into commercial commodities packaged by Gidget and The Beach Boys; and the body art once reserved for sailors has become a rite of passage for 21st-century housewives. Mid-century hot-rod culture has gone through a similar domestication: vestiges of its fiery independence and outsider quality can be found in the low-rider tradition of Mexican Americans, but hot-rods are now a matter of nostalgic collecting for graying baby boomers, and the “weirdo” vibe of Kustom Kulture has become normalized to the point that the bulgy-eyed, adrenaline-fueled monsters that were once synonymous with the rebellious nature of the subculture have become part of the mainstream: you’ll see similar characters on almost any program of the Cartoon Network.
Et in Utah Ego at Mestizo
Utah houses some of the world’s most stunning geological wonders and Mestizo Institute of Culture and Art’s newest exhibition, Et in Utah Ego, acknowledges and challenges these markers of Utah’s local identity. The show, curated by Mestizo’s director Renato Olmedo-González, presents over 100 small photographs taken from locations across […]
Adjunct: Four Artists Who Show What They’ve Learned
Contemplating Karin Hodgin-Jones’ two remarkable machines, both titled “Tug,” what may well come to mind are the unquenchably popular inventions of Leonardo da Vinci: the ornithopter and the aerial screw that couldn’t fly, the parachute and the diving suit that would almost certainly have killed their users. […]
Both Sides of the Coin: ARTsySTEM’S exploration of art and science at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art
It’s not exactly nostalgia that makes antique scientific paraphernalia attractive. Not usually windows into our personal pasts, these carefully crafted tools and specimens take viewers on a journey into the collective history of exploring and deciphering the only planet we know. Two artists who have mined the aesthetic […]
Weaving the Unexpected: Navajo Pictorials from the Lucke Collection at BYU
Art maintains a remarkable ability to change and augment our perceptions of different cultures and traditions. As a title, “Weaving the Unexpected” anticipates the exhibition’s capacity for redefining what is typically known about this subject. The works contained in this show present remarkable craftsmanship and skill in their own right, made even more impressive when given the added layer of modernity…
Strata of Wax: Jeff Juhlin at A Gallery
Getting to Jeff Juhlin’s studio on Salt Lake City’s west side is an adventure, something of which the artist – nationally known for his encaustic and mixed-media work—is well aware. “You were only five minutes late,” he says with a smile. “The guy who came to see me […]
Levi Jackson’s Bushwacker
The work in Levi Jackson’s Bushwacker exhibition now on display at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art has a conflicted and ambivalent view of the West. This is in part due to two distinct and pervasive notions that permeate such depictions. The first is the West as an idealized and […]
‘. . . true / false / true . . .’ Claire Wilson and Nancy Vorm present mixed media collages and reliefs at the Dibble Gallery
Other than as categories, art terms like ‘representational’ and ‘realistic’ aren’t very helpful. The weightlessly floating, elongated figures of Byzantine mosaics ‘realistically represented’ the spiritual truth so important to those who lived in the dark age that followed the fall of Rome, that souls and eternity mattered more […]
