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.
In a technologically vibrant world, it is increasingly difficult to separate ourselves from our digital appendages, as screens, wires and gadgets serve as tangible reminders of the more complicated, invisible networks that surround us. History demonstrates that episodes of great progress like ours are met with a […]
It hasn’t been long since Laura Hope Mason graduated from the U of U. This becomes apparent during her opening lecture for her latest show, now up at the Salt Lake City Library, when questions asked by her audience turn into shared recollections of classes taken, particular professors, […]
“It’s about suburbia,” says Justin Wheatley of his newest work, on view beginning this week at Salt Lake’s 15th Street Gallery. “Suburbia is loaded with kitsch, we’re all living in this kitschy world where we try to make things look nice or beautiful or wonderful, but in reality, […]
“As a sculptor, my concern is for form,” Larry Elsner wrote in 1977, “a maddening search for the unity of space and mass.” An Idaho native and longtime Utah State University professor, Elsner would always choose form over function, regardless of the medium in which he was working: […]
One of the more perennially popular genres of art, often done in watercolors that are engraved and printed—sometimes bound in albums or books, at other times framed in sets hung together on a wall—is the ‘botanical,’ a characteristics-displaying portrait of a plant species shown through an exceptionally complete […]
Utah is often spoken of as a cultural monolith, even a theocracy, where church and state are inexorably intertwined. While recent legislation reminds us of the enormous sway the hierarchy of the LDS church does exert over state politics, it should not be forgotten that there has also […]
When you view Curtis Olson’s newest work, up this month at Park City’s JGO Gallery, you’re likely to sense something familiar: some of the pieces may remind you of the spirograph kits and t-shirt designs of your youth (if you are of a certain age), while in others […]
Those who are under the impression that plein air painting is a practice of subject and technique exclusive to the western United States may experience a reality check this month upon visiting Slusser Gallery, where for the March Gallery Stroll the work of owner Mark Slusser will […]
Denis Phillips is every sort of artist: he flows comfortably between abstraction and realism, moves easily from the Renaissance of restoration work and making frames to the Space Age of creating his own computer-generated prints and synthesizer music. “I like the change,” he once told me of […]
A Measure of Salt, the exhibition now up at the Granary Art Center, imbues the space with a sense of reverence. Walking into the clean gallery space of the old 1876 brick building, the first piece one encounters is a wrapped plaster Buddha figure sitting in a lotus position […]
OK. You may be convinced there is one authentic way of painting. One subject matter, perhaps, and one legitimate presentation. Like Clement Greenberg, you may think pure painting must be flat, call attention to itself as two-dimensional manipulation of color and form on a wall. You may associate […]
Culture has a powerful ability to shape many aspects of personal identity including political, social and familial interactions. Gender also plays a powerful role in this equation. Much has been made about how cultures structure male and female roles, but what happens when this culture is transplanted to […]
Art critic Clement Greenberg once said that “…for Western art in its Modernist phase ‘purity’ has been a useful idea and ideal, with a kind of logic to it that has worked, and still works, to generate aesthetic value and maintain aesthetic standards as nothing else in our […]
To consider oneself an American is to acknowledge an inherent lack of cultural homogeny. The nation is comprised of countless national ancestries, cultures, religions and customs. So much so that the traditional and hopeful “melting pot” metaphor has given way to the more realistic “tossed salad.” The Utah […]
Inspiration comes from many places, and what inspires an artist to create may not be the same thing that inspires a viewer to appreciate, but the power of good art is that ability to act as a mediator, as a go-between, from the source of initial artistic inspiration […]
Beginning this Friday, the Granary Art Center in Ephraim, Utah will be assaulted with a visual overwhelm of printed Instagram images for #Blessed: User-generated Content and Indexing Spirituality. The hashtag #blessed has been used over 34 million times since Instagramʼs inception. It was used well over 8,000 […]
A 2012 profile in Southwest Art tells the coming-of-age story of Billy Schenck, painter of the southwest now exhibiting at Modern West Fine Art: a Midwest boy who learned how to draw by copying comic books, in the mid-1960s he heads to art school, where he discovers the works […]
When Jena Schmidt saw ‘Black North’ written inside the lid of her grandfather’s brass compass, the words resonated with her painterly project as though she’d found a fellow explorer. While compass directions have rich associations for us, they don’t really have colors: north is no more black than […]
Narrative painting, in the form of history painting, was once the pinnacle of Western art, the zenith of Alberti’s 15th-century treatise on painting, and a prerequisite for anyone seeking access to prestigious academies in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the advent of modernism, narrative’s importance waned, while […]
