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.
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 […]
The large exhibit space in the back of the SLC Photo Collective is the ideal housing for Yale MA fine art graduate Albert Fallick-Wang’s large-scale photographs, lending not only the proper physical proportions, but also an allowance of space that encourages the type of expansive cognitive connection this […]
When the University of Utah chose to cancel its fiber arts program in the early ’90s, a group of dedicated students decided to form their own organization, to continue learning new techniques and encourage each other’s artwork. The Utah Surface Design Group (USDG) was born. Part of an […]
Between 1853 and 1870, under the direction of Napoleon III, Baron von Haussmann modernized a majority of inner-city Paris by transforming neglected neighborhoods into the tree-lined grand boulevards that characterize the city today. Although not on the scale of what would come to be known to history […]
German painter Gerard Richter has dominated world painting for half a century, from his beginnings in Pop to riveting-if-fuzzy images drawn from daily newspaper photos, then large abstracts shaped primarily with squeegees, and on to more radical experiments. Though we may not know its actual source, we all […]
With their focus on texture, Bernard’s work can feel crude and raw, but his pieces do not arrive by accident. His array of roller brushes, each for its own specific texture and painterly result, attest to Bernard’s expertise in the field of painterly tactility, the material substance and […]
The government may be watching you. So may Louise Åkebrand. But she’s also got her eye on the government. For the past three years Åkebrand’s art has been exploring the nature of surveillance. From a suite of works exploring “the most dangerous city in the world” to her […]
The word cinematic most commonly makes reference to a relationship with, a suggestion of or being suitable for motion pictures. Yet, the diversity of media in CUAC’s most recent exhibition Cinematic makes evident that filmic culture has far reaching effects that spill well beyond its original parameters: it informs and […]
It’s not exactly the Bloods and the Crips; it’s not even the Jets vs. the Sharks; but hang around a university’s art department or the local gallery scene long enough and you’ll notice the tension — that unstated battle between the “artists” and the “illustrators.” The latter are […]
Local artist and writer Bridgette Meinhold can capture the nuts and bolts of a place, as well as its mood. Both skills lend themselves to her latest endeavors. She recently published her first book, Urgent Architecture – 40 Sustainable Housing Solutions for a Changing World, where she writes about […]
Any exhibit of more than one artist has something in common with a double bill at the movie theater, including an implicit invitation to speculate about why these artists, or their gallery, chose to show these particular works together. In the case of Claire Wilson and Zack Pontious, […]
