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.
The problem with contemporary art, post-modern art, call it what temporary label you will, the problem with new art is always that it doesn’t look like art. Two of the signature schools of late modernism—found art and assemblage—exemplify this dilemma. How can a jumble, not just of familiar […]
As a silent epidemic, sexual violence is America’s elephant in the room. One is hard pressed to find a citizen unaffected by such crimes. Certainly this topic is not a common one within visual art, nor a student art show for that matter. The predominant silence-or likewise apprehension-to […]
Somewhere along his path, while growing up in his native Utah or later, studying illustration, painting, and graphic design at the prestigious Pacific Northwest College of Art, Anthony Granato acquired a genuinely idiosyncratic approach to making art. It’s not unusual for an artist to seek out vintage frames […]
The new Whitespace gallery, across Wall Avenue from the Union Station in Ogden, opened with an impressive array of artworks emphasizing noteworthy materials rather than familiar names or genres. For instance, photographer Koh Sang Woo knows that documentary photographs are old news; his digitally manipulated color images, like […]
The drive from Salt Lake up to Eden can take you over Trappers Loop near Snowbasin Ski Resort and is an inspiring prelude to the equally inspiring plein air oils and watercolors exhibit by Hadley Rampton now through July 6 at the Free Spirit Spa & Yoga […]
In 1975, British feminist artist Mary Kelly, along with Margaret Harrison and Kay Hunt, completed a comprehensive conceptual art project called Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry. Part sociological study, part conceptual art, the book and documentation indexed the lives and daily schedules […]
Art doesn’t ask questions: people do. So when Salt Lake Community College professor Lynn Kipatrick first saw the ‘blind’ drawings by John Sproul that form the visual half of their joint show at the City Library, questions came to mind as part of her response. Fortunately, Kilpatrick […]
by Chris Cutri BYU professor of art Sunny Belliston Taylor likes shapes. For the past decade she has built an increasingly sophisticated body of work that explores the “objecthood” of painting. Her abstracted paintings make overt references to their own structure, to the boundaries of the panel’s dimensions, […]
One culture’s culinary pleasure is another culture’s entrenched taboo. Which can come in handy if, say, you’re a young maritime Republic looking for divine protection and a little tourist industry: legend has it the Venetians swiped the relics of St. Mark, their patron saint, by layering them […]
As spring rushes into summer in Utah, the time spent out of doors each day has increased exponentially: we want to be surrounded by bright light, warm air, and beautiful landscapes. Utah offers an abundance of varied, even verdant environments we can inhabit and enjoy. Solitude can be […]
It might be easiest to call Tom Bettin a painter, but his studio practice is just as dependent on printmaking, sophisticated forms of collage and other multi-media approaches, making it difficult to define just “what kind of art” Bettin makes. Whatever the mechanics, it is art that transcends […]
“Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty,” said Edmund Burke in his seminal “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” Burke might have appreciated the work of Chauncey Secrist as few are able: for it is easy to look […]
Watercolor is perhaps the most versatile paint medium, its range running from the most ephemeral, barely perceptible stain all the way to the intensity and illusionism of oils, with an infinite register of effects between. While it would be absurd to say there are only two ways to […]
Andrea Jensen is a masterful articulator of boundaries — not the pretty kind, the ones you were told not to venture outside of with your crayon, but the boundaries where phenomena collide at force, where humanity is compelled to acknowledge itself. These boundaries are “truth moments” for […]
The librarian on the City Library’s fourth floor proffered a warning: there hadn’t been enough space to hang everything in the correct order. She referred to the thirteen poems by Lynn Kilpatrick and fifteen drawings by John Sproul that together comprise To Be Unnamed. Probably everyone has an […]
Mondo Utah, the inaugural Utah Biennial that opened at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art last week, is all about Utah’s traditional parallel types, says museum Senior Curator of Exhibitions Aaron Moulton — the distinctive genres like landscape or outsider art that interact to form the state’s cultural […]
The ten paintings by Sam Wilson currently showing at the 15th Street Gallery all appear to have been made in the last five or six years. The dates are worth noting, because although Wilson has an unusually distinctive style of painting, one that seems as timeless as […]
Traci O’Very Covey’s sinuous line, which dances across the surface of her paintings to create overlapping and interlocking planes of color, will be familiar to fans of the Utah Opera, where for four years Covey used her unique graphic style to interpret the storylines of the company’s […]
The popularity of religion as a topic in art can easily conceal the true nature of its appeal. Generally speaking, large portions of the human race care about spirituality, but plenty of other things that are equally popular, if not more so, never inspire the outpouring of art […]
