Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
Four rows of colossal ceramic heads line the right wall of the gallery, arranged in an inverted pyramid shape. While each has been crafted from the same model, every head is conferred with a distinctive color or adorned stenciled designs, ranging in patterns and words. The various symbols […]
New work by Brian Kershisnik is always eagerly anticipated, and not just in Utah. Increasingly, his collectors fly in from around the country in February, hit the slopes, buy a painting or two, then head back. The art used to wait to follow them until the show was […]
“Drawing is at the center of what I do,” says Suzanne Bybee, a Salt Lake City artist who relocated to Utah after living in Washington, D.C. for many years. “[My] pieces are conversations; my aim is to listen and be a part of the dialogue developing, learning from […]
In Black River, Charles Edward Williams tells a personal story of universal relevance through eloquent physical metaphors. He could have written it down in one of those dubious memoirs that became all the rage a few years ago: how the author fell into addiction or abuse, hurt loved […]
When Richard Taylor scrawls mathematical equations across a canvas, as he does in his 2019 piece “Schwarzschild and all that,” or invokes a German physicist and astronomer in the title, it’s not some form of intellectual posing, an aesthete veering sharply out of his lane. The Salt Lake […]
Sometimes it seems like the current desire to make art a tool of political activism and social change is threatening to displace its fundamental virtues. If a gallery show asks us to put on headphones and listen to anonymous speakers talking about their lives, does it augment a […]
In Finch Lane’s west gallery, past Casey Lou Miller’s intricate wood cutouts of desert plants, Elpitha Tsoutsounakis’ exhibition, Unknown Prospect: Body, Pigment, Swatch, creates a space for the expansion of thoughts and ideas concerning earth. Throughout the space, Tsoutsounakis explores and ponders the multifaceted roles and forms of […]
Wood cutouts of desert plants — mainly agave — colored with oil paints and accented with carved details fill the first room at Finch Lane Gallery. The work in Casey Lou Miller’s Intrinsic Nature is inspired by her experiences exploring the desert landscape of southern Utah. She celebrates […]
Ten years ago, Nathan Florence, a Salt Lake City artist known for his figurative and landscape work, announced his newest project, a documentary film that would explore the Art & Belief movement — a group of Brigham Young University art students in the late 1960s who, dissatisfied with […]
The magic of art has much to do with making one material convincingly impersonate another. In skilled hands bronze, marble, paint or paper can simulate something as subtle as flesh. One of the more unlikely magical acts seen in our time and place is that of Pam Gazale, […]
Born in Mexico City, Nancy Rivera is a Salt Lake City-based artist, curator, and arts administrator. An interdisciplinary artist, she utilizes photography, video, sculpture, and installation to explore themes of dual cultural identity and its effects, such as code-switching, cultural assimilation, and displacement. Her work has been selected […]
Schenck’s Utah: A Land Less Traveled, Billy Schenck’s astonishing all-landscape solo exhibit — a first in his successful 52-year career as a Western artist — is already half sold out, says Modern West Fine Art’s director Shalee Cooper, who conceived the strictly landscape motif and convinced the artist of […]
“Scruples,” a mixed-media collaboration by mid-career artist Namon Bills and promising neophyte Tyler Pierce, demonstrates the possibility that two very different artists, working side by side, can produce a coherent work of art. Appropriately enough, its design might be described as a Rococo Yin-and-Yang: a rectangle divided by […]
We’ve come a long way from the days when abstract expressionist Ad Reinhardt, famous for justifying his paintings in witty cartoons, explained that a sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at one of those paintings. The popular admission of women artists to […]
In her current show at Bountiful Davis Art Center, Marissa Albrecht uses two words that won’t be found in most dictionaries, though it’s not hard to grasp their meanings. One, “Restruction,” is the exhibition’s title; the other, “curation,” appears in her statement and names a step in her […]
One of the great stories of European art concerns Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished masterpiece, “The Adoration of the Magi,” which was abandoned, left lying face down in a stable, and nearly lost. Eventually it was recovered, repaired, and hangs today in the Uffizi Gallery. Note that it was […]
While discussion of a book often begins with a quotation, talking about art more often requires a description. The graphic art of Nancy Steele-Makasci, which grabs viewers by their eyes but speaks to them as well through the written word, requires both. A stark, high-contrast face with large, […]
Newest of all in Anna Pottier’s art-world is her studio, just built in the backyard of her home in West Valley City. The 12 x 16-foot purpose-built space replaces a derelict 40 x 22-foot chicken coop/horse stable. It contained pale turquoise and peacock blue woodwork dating from at […]
Memories of a Future Life, her current exhibit at Provo’s Writ & Vision, is only one of several projects Paola Bidinelli is birthing (or rebirthing) in 2022. The exhibit, a series of sculptural and relief works that uses natural found materials like stones, branches, nutshells and bark, reflects […]
