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.
There are places in the world, some of them in the United States, where the “Religion and Spirituality” show, as it is fondly known in so many Utah galleries, would not be allowed. Once upon a time, that might have been because of institutional hostility to all religious […]
Provo-based artist Havoc Hendricks calls his pattern-based paintings “detailed minimalism.” The often large-scale paintings recreate linear patterns found in nature, line upon line. Lines and patterns are something Hendricks has observed his whole life. From his childhood in Idaho, he remembers being fascinated by his”grandfather’s geode collection, watching […]
You know you’re dealing with successful assemblage when scavenged and repurposed parts unite to transcend their reality as fragments, though without erasing your awareness of them as such, and instead create a totally convincing alternative interpretation in your senses. Such an object is Sylvia Ohara’s “Perspective,” a three-legged […]
The largest work in Utah Arts & Museum’s Statewide Annual at Ogden Contemporary Arts is Cody Chamberlain’s “Procession,” an almost mural-sized, hyper-realistic depiction of a place somewhere in the vast Utah desert. It’s an accepted convention not to reveal the locations of rock art, for fear that if […]
The big sturdy abstracts by the artist Carlisle, placed in as vast an interior space as Kiln, a “co-working office space,” in the Gateway complex, become almost small paintings, though many are five feet tall. Kiln itself looks deceptively small from the outside: it’s many-chambered, many-halled, full of […]
The actress, the model, the bird-girl, the queen, the naturalist — Emily Christensen McPhie’s portraits of women in her Nature as a Goddess show at David Ericson racks them all in, in a way the old-time illustrator Arthur Rackham would like, in the way Cindy Sherman the modern […]
Throughout the Covid pandemic, public conversation made much of the experience of isolation. Recent art exhibits, several reviewed on this site, included interpretations of solitude and of its consequences. Still, for such a commonplace source of suffering, it didn’t seem all that well illustrated — perhaps because it […]
If the word “pandemic” is spoken, it may bring many things to mind, like fear, anxiety, isolation, frustration, even shame: stories of mortality, the loss of several years of life, and the setbacks that may make that loss permanent. All these elements are on display right now at […]
In her video installation, Who’s Coming to Save You? artist Christy Chan undermines what has become a too-familiar impulse in the population at large. That is, as her title suggests, the assumption that salvation, either political or something stronger, is our only hope for the future and so must […]
The paintings of Heydar Rasoulpur include some of the most vivid dreamscapes, capturing the most telling and painful memories, to have emerged from the ship-wreckage of nations that have literally cast so many homeless millions onto stormy seas in the decades since the Millennium. It should perhaps come […]
The main upstairs gallery at UMOCA boasts a long front room, in which two dozen or so vibrantly colorful paintings of sumptuous foodstuffs currently hang. They surround a couple of tables placed end to end, on which are arranged a dozen pairs of clamshell take-out boxes. The congruence […]
In Alpine Gallery, situated on South Temple Street between a pastry shop and a bridal boutique, Samantha daSilva’s works on canvas have the feel of a trip into and out of the depths of a mine. Exactly what any bakery or bridal shop (or mine) must dread most […]
Like so much that has to do with Ukraine, the Southern Utah Museum of Art’s exhibition of Ukrainian photographers, up through Dec. 23, can’t help but be subsumed by the massive pain and destruction caused by the Russian aggression against the country. In May of this year, when […]
We now use the less meaningful term “mixed media” in preference to more precise words that range from “oil on canvas” to “Expandable foam, epoxy clay, epoxy gel, resin, wood, steel, acrylic paint, quartz, glass rhinestones, and pencil”—a description that was posted next to a recent work in […]
Connie Borup’s decision to foreground water in her current work is timely, given the combination of threats coming from drought, the draining of the aquifers, the unequal division of a dwindling supply, and the ongoing fight over rights to it, all contributing to unprecedented water insecurity. But it’s […]
Probably all the important essences of human life in this world can be summed up by the works at 15th Street Gallery: paintings of humans’ cities, paintings of humans, paintings just for the joy of painting and vessels made from clay. Most of Aaron Memmott’s paintings (“State Street […]
The earliest clear warnings of the coming environment crisis, fifty years ago, included the horrific-sounding, and indeed horrific, acid rain. Pollution from coal-fired electrical generation and similar industrial activity was filling the atmosphere with sulfuric and nitric acids, which fell with the rain, killing plants and polluting rivers […]
Are We Here For Ourselves Alone? With this question, artist Christine Atkinson introduces a new, holistic way to looking at our environmental predicament, one that asks how we got to this dire point by asking us to consider where we went wrong in the first place, and arguably […]
First, let’s begin by acknowledging that there is no more important work being done by human beings than that undertaken every day by our mothers. In high school, I studied Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, which has saved countless millions of lives. Alexander Fleming had a mother. Like […]
