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.
Efflorescent Interference, Sarina Villareal’s current exhibit at the Gallery at Library Square, explores the fine balance between the control one has over one’s life and those things out of one’s control, between what can be gained and what can be lost by life in the world. With paintings […]
One of the Old World’s grand definitions of art—that art is craft in the service of inspiration—seemingly went out of service when fashionable insistence by artists on absolute creative freedom trumped the audience’s taste for demonstrations of skill. But the pendulum continues to swing, and ironically enough, new, […]
In response to the famed “Four Freedoms” speech given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January, 1941, American painter Norman Rockwell created an iconic series of paintings by the same name (finished in 1943). The first painting, entitled Freedom of Speech, features a man engaged in offering a […]
This summer the Kimball Art Center (KAC) abandoned its longtime location in Old Town Park City, a decision resulting from a dispute with city leaders about what was architecturally appropriate for the resort town’s Main Street and the Kimball’s long-term plans for a new permanent home. KAC has […]
Longtime followers of UMOCA, going back to the days when it was called the Salt Lake Art Center, have known to check out the room all but hidden in the back, at the northeast corner of the large, downstairs gallery. Here gems often can be found: small collections […]
Tyrone Davies’ In Camera comprises more than a dozen television sets arranged in deliberate, symmetrical spatial compositions around an altar-like pair that much of the time places an image of religious meditation in close proximity to a giant sports arena. Symbolism noted. All the sets are playing, a […]
Shelley, given like all Romantic poets to overstatement, wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Two centuries later, Auden replied that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Presuming that what they said of poetry can stand for all of art, their argument addresses the essential question […]
The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art has become one of Salt Lake City’s most reliable venues for the art of our time, and its ambitious program, combined with the number and variety of its galleries, can challenge the capacity of the local art press. As this is being […]
Modern West Fine Art is showing a new collection of work from photographer Michael Coles and paintings by Renaissance man, Nathan Florence, who’s certainly no stranger to the pages of 15 Bytes. The artists’ work, while stylistically different, complements each other well and creates an insightful window into […]
Among my favorite qualities in art, two perennial activities stand out. One is drawing, an essential human activity that too often goes entirely under-appreciated, thought of as nothing more than the practiced trick of outlining visible forms. The fact that computers, with their mind-boggling computational powers, cannot recognize […]
On a wall edging a Bogotá, Colombia, street, music and theater posters vie with fight cards and bullfight notices pasted cheek-by-jowl to a rough, stucco wall. Over them are stenciled images of balaclava-clad guerrillas and the scrawled brigade name, M19, alternating with random graffiti, the surface peeling open […]
“Patterns of Resistance,” the title piece of UMOCA’s latest foray into “forward-thinking art” is a very large, intricate painting in blue and gray. In the midst of imposing space, created by joining two of what were probably the largest sheets of paper the artist could find, it depicts […]
A triangle on top of a rectangle: it’s an easily recognizable symbol, a complex form in the repertoire of millions of preliterate children making sense of their world with paper and crayon; and it’s a shape ubiquitous in a major exhibition now at Brigham Young University’s Museum of […]
If you’ve watched Darryl Erdmann’s career over the years, you may have come to suspect that there’s a good dose of the frustrated sculptor in this consummate painter. By incorporating found and constructed elements in some of his works, Erdmann has at times branched out into the physically […]
In today’s heterogeneous world of art, there are, generally speaking, two fundamental vehicles for connecting with a work: the emotional and the conceptual. The two create structures of meaning and the basis for fundamental interpretation. As the viewer comes to understand a work, an emotional response is as […]
Glass, like painting, sculpture, or any other art medium, flourishes in a variety of techniques. Just as an artist can paint in oil, acrylic, watercolor, with spray paint and stencils, or any number of other innovations, and just as a sculptor can build up clay to be cast […]
On a partition amid the downstairs gallery of the Harrison Museum in Logan hang three hand-woven Hopi plaques, or flat dishes. The backwards-F motif of the central disc repeats six times, as if rotating rapidly around its center. To the left, a woven black-and-white pattern suggests a hoop, […]
Paper airplanes are a recurring motif in Kendra Fehr’s current show at Art Access Gallery: lying in a farm field a woman reaches her hand out toward a white paper airplane that sails away toward a stormy sky; a woman dances on an expansive ground, holding strings that […]
A tree, with its trunk and ever-expanding branches, is composed of lines, but there is no regularity to them: they are a natural system of creation with a beauty and structure of their own, speaking to their innate essence. Certain artists are like this: they honestly express the […]
