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 work in Levi Jackson’s Bushwacker exhibition now on display at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art has a conflicted and ambivalent view of the West. This is in part due to two distinct and pervasive notions that permeate such depictions. The first is the West as an idealized and […]
Other than as categories, art terms like ‘representational’ and ‘realistic’ aren’t very helpful. The weightlessly floating, elongated figures of Byzantine mosaics ‘realistically represented’ the spiritual truth so important to those who lived in the dark age that followed the fall of Rome, that souls and eternity mattered more […]
Ansel Adams, the first photographer to insist that photographs are artworks, blurred another boundary when he compared the making of a photograph to the composition of music. The negative, he said, was like a score, and the print was like a performance. Marcel Duchamp, the pioneering gender-bender who […]
Each time I am lucky enough to chat with Randall Lake I come away more impressed. It’s not just his art, it’s his intellect, his curiosity, his willingness to challenge himself by trying new palettes, new brushstrokes, by reading biographies of artists he admires, and experimenting with their […]
As with all juried shows, this year’s annual Utah Ties exhibition is an inconsistent mixed bag —some works evoke the grotesque and the abject, while others are quietly beautiful and even majestic. As a collective, the show includes a select number of truly remarkable pieces here and there […]
You’d expect an art show about Alzheimer’s to be dreary, depressing and certainly just for people of an age to be facing the disease. But What’s My Name? at Art Access turns out to be an exhibition that will fascinate most anyone. As executive director Sheryl Gillilan says, […]
Hard to believe we’re at salt 11 already, but here we are, and Duane Linklater, an Omaskêko Cree from Moose Cree First Nation in present-day Northern Ontario, Canada, is the artist at hand. These semi-annual “salt” exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, showcasing work by emerging […]
Liberty Blake makes music with visual art. The UK native turned UT resident blends together pieces of found, salvaged and purchased paper to create works of simplistic profundity. Her current show at Phillips, in which more than 20 new works are displayed in the downstairs Dibble Gallery, are […]
In a technologically vibrant world, it is increasingly difficult to separate ourselves from our digital appendages, as screens, wires and gadgets serve as tangible reminders of the more complicated, invisible networks that surround us. History demonstrates that episodes of great progress like ours are met with a […]
It hasn’t been long since Laura Hope Mason graduated from the U of U. This becomes apparent during her opening lecture for her latest show, now up at the Salt Lake City Library, when questions asked by her audience turn into shared recollections of classes taken, particular professors, […]
“It’s about suburbia,” says Justin Wheatley of his newest work, on view beginning this week at Salt Lake’s 15th Street Gallery. “Suburbia is loaded with kitsch, we’re all living in this kitschy world where we try to make things look nice or beautiful or wonderful, but in reality, […]
“As a sculptor, my concern is for form,” Larry Elsner wrote in 1977, “a maddening search for the unity of space and mass.” An Idaho native and longtime Utah State University professor, Elsner would always choose form over function, regardless of the medium in which he was working: […]
One of the more perennially popular genres of art, often done in watercolors that are engraved and printed—sometimes bound in albums or books, at other times framed in sets hung together on a wall—is the ‘botanical,’ a characteristics-displaying portrait of a plant species shown through an exceptionally complete […]
Utah is often spoken of as a cultural monolith, even a theocracy, where church and state are inexorably intertwined. While recent legislation reminds us of the enormous sway the hierarchy of the LDS church does exert over state politics, it should not be forgotten that there has also […]
When you view Curtis Olson’s newest work, up this month at Park City’s JGO Gallery, you’re likely to sense something familiar: some of the pieces may remind you of the spirograph kits and t-shirt designs of your youth (if you are of a certain age), while in others […]
Those who are under the impression that plein air painting is a practice of subject and technique exclusive to the western United States may experience a reality check this month upon visiting Slusser Gallery, where for the March Gallery Stroll the work of owner Mark Slusser will […]
Denis Phillips is every sort of artist: he flows comfortably between abstraction and realism, moves easily from the Renaissance of restoration work and making frames to the Space Age of creating his own computer-generated prints and synthesizer music. “I like the change,” he once told me of […]
A Measure of Salt, the exhibition now up at the Granary Art Center, imbues the space with a sense of reverence. Walking into the clean gallery space of the old 1876 brick building, the first piece one encounters is a wrapped plaster Buddha figure sitting in a lotus position […]
OK. You may be convinced there is one authentic way of painting. One subject matter, perhaps, and one legitimate presentation. Like Clement Greenberg, you may think pure painting must be flat, call attention to itself as two-dimensional manipulation of color and form on a wall. You may associate […]
