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.
Across the room, Nuala Creed’s “Lament for Fukushima” looks like a child’s well-worn doll, but up close he’s seen to be an adult: one so rounded and smooth as to be mistaken for a child. He sits on the ground with his legs folded in front of […]
Heliography, the 2013 solo exhibition at Finch Lane Gallery that introduced Matthew Allred to a wide Utah audience, was both revealing and limiting: it revealed an engaged mind with the ability to physically encapsulate abstract spatial and temporal concerns; but that single exhibit could not possibly begin […]
Lindsay Frei’s oeuvre, both past and present, has concentrated on still life and portraiture. It has always had an astonishing sense of reality, a reality that is not simply a technical approach to painting, but a total reality, one that captures the beautiful in the nuances of the […]
A group of faculty members dismissed from Florida’s Rollins College in the 1930s dreamed of a school where, in addition to excellent programs in history, literature and mathematics, students could take classes in dance from the likes of Merce Cunningham, music from John Cage, get lectures in engineering […]
Let’s perhaps take a minute to review how far we’ve come. Late in the twentieth century, a consensus arose that Modernism was dying, if not already dead. This is not as sad as it sounds: the first artist to be called modern was Dante, and he’s also […]
Edmund Burke, at the height of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, an era defined by learning and the intellect, began to look at the wonders of nature and considered the value of human sensibilities, not merely as means for scientific or artistic investigation, but for their own […]
‘If love is a story we tell ourselves then I had the story wrong. Or maybe passion is just, and always, a wrong-headed thing.’ — Anne Enright Either it’s becoming increasingly evident as we learn more about our species, or at least it’s become part of the […]
For her inaugural project as associate curator at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA), Rebecca Maksym envisioned an exhibition that sheds light on a nationality of immigrants not commonly referenced in American migrational history. Rather than a strictly historical chronology, Maksym preferred to think about migration in […]
The nature of perception, the artist’s vision and viewer responsiveness is a topic that concerns all of art, in every facet, from every place and time, from every artist, and from every viewer. From a visitor to a gallery or museum in Salt Lake City to a pedestrian […]
Driving back from Park City, where Brenda Mallory’s second exhibition at Julie Nester opened July 5th, the familiar but still disturbing sight of an elk lying dead on the median strip of I-80 brought into sharp focus the universal significance of the artworks just seen. Once broken, nothing […]
How many views does it take to depict the steady, human-formed creation of absence on the land? In the case of Utah Museum of Fine Art’s (UMFA) current exhibition Creation and Erasure: Art of the Bingham Canyon Mine, the answer is over one hundred. This well-researched, historical view of […]
Connectivity is an abstract term, a function that acts prolifically in multitudinous ways in all functioning of daily living. Through it, by connecting seemingly distant or unrelated terms or ideas, we create new meanings. Making art with meaning that is fundamentally based on connectivity requires a subject for […]
Emerging artist Denae Shanidiin, 21, wishes the emphasis wasn’t so much on “Navajo” for her show currently at Mestizo Gallery. “Because you call someone a Navajo artist and people expect traditional. I wish I were traditional, but I’m not,” she says with a smile. “I just don’t think […]
Every time art renews itself, there is the impression that something entirely new is taking place: something coming into being that has never been seen before. More likely, taking in the whole picture, the artists are actually narrowing the field, selecting a small part of what went before, […]
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things. —from Wild Geese by Mary Oliver The Alice Gallery offers one […]
This past weekend was a celebration of abstract art in Salt Lake City, with the top tier of the state’s abstractionists exhibiting at Salt Lake’s Rio Gallery. This dazzling exhibit of the brightest and best includes Dave Malone, who is also featured in a solo exhibit this month […]
Mil Mascaras prowls the large alcove at the corner of the gallery like a trapped, feral animal: circling, pacing, as though seeking a way out? Or a way in? His lithe, wrestler’s body is tense as he speaks earnestly, then suddenly strikes an aggressive pose, resumes pacing, then […]
There are two essential driving forces to the work of Woody Shepherd, but instead of an interrogation of which came first, we shall assume that in the context of his work they are married for an artistic synergy that results in the incredible and fantastical — two adjectives […]
A child with a predilection for solitude seeks a quiet corner for an uninterrupted afternoon’s reading or drawing, where the couch she settles on sneezes up an invisible spray of dust. Then, when a beam of sunshine enters a window and catches the motes still hanging in the […]
