Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
For centuries, “installing” art meant screwing a painting to the wall or a sculpture to a block of stone. Installation wasn’t art, or even something unique to art. Then Marcel Duchamp hung a lot of art high on the walls of a pitch-black room full of ladders and […]
I cannot go out, so I sit in the room. The window that I access the world through is my phone screen, which also confines me. The information I see in it, true and false, floods my world My belief system changes fast as I try to form […]
“Jane’s Casserole” was my mother’s go-to contribution to Boy Scout picnics, neighborhood parties, potlucks, and sometimes even a casual family meal. It was distinctive, a standout in her repertoire. I learned early that it was named for the woman who gave it to my mom; a neighbor so […]
Utah’s governor made national news when, faced with a historic drought years in the making, dire predictions for the upcoming wildfire season and vastly depleted reservoirs, he asked his fellow citizens to pray for rain. (He did also urge land owners to let their yards and parking strips […]
The return of Pink Floyd helped herald the opening of one of Salt Lake City’s newest multi-use art galleries. Pink Floyd is the iconic pink flamingo that around 2004 escaped from an aviary and made his home at Great Salt Lake. For a number of months several attempts […]
Al Denyer came here from England, a place celebrated for its paradigmatic topography: hills and dales, lakes and rivers, cliffs and footpaths. Since she departed that small country — physically for the expanses of Utah and cognitively for even larger landscapes, like the Amazon rain forest — her […]
Paige Anderson’s paintings are a trip into high order. All is arranged, undone, arranged again. In “A Map of Salt and Stars” and “Heavens Clothed in Earthly Vestments” pointed star-shapes repeat very, very methodically, but with squinting shimmer-gleam, like the modulated light emanating from a crop of night […]
If ever a group of paintings of trees could bring you close to tears, it might be these paintings by Silas Thompson, in his new show, The Hidden Forest. Thompson, still a young painter, is a sort of forest spy/messenger. One who can be trusted, because he resists […]
Decades before the Covid pandemic, when Climate Change was a theory only scientists and those who value their work accepted as truth, artists were already calling themselves “canaries in the coal mine.” There were past centuries, when little was understood about air quality and the effects of gasses like carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide on the atmosphere and beyond, when miners took caged canaries down with them. Even if the miners felt fine, if the far more sensitive canary lost consciousness, it meant the air was bad and those digging were in danger.
There is an art to science, and science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole. — Isaac Asimov Collaboration is at the heart of Granary Arts’ current exhibit, Evaporated: Explorations in Art, Science, and Salt. Conceived and executed by visual artist Wendy […]
Chris Peterson (@chrispetersonstudio) is at work on a mural on the south side of the Cameron Wellness Center, which will be visible in all its visual splendor from the parking lot of the United States Post Office at 1953 South 1100 East. The mural features peacocks, which have […]
The puzzle throb in the work by painter Steven Stradley at “A” Gallery is asking for solution, and, at the same time, for no solution but gravity. You feel drop from North to South, continual ambitious crossing from East to West. And back. And, unraveledness, exasperation. Through them […]
Sixteen months ago, art galleries were among the social venues that shut down in the face of the Covid pandemic. Now they’re successfully reopening, primarily for small or solo shows. More challenging is a survey, like Face of Utah Sculpture, now in its 17th edition, which presents logistic […]
Aside from Greg Ragland’s many outdoor installations in several states is a series of intimate, hyperrealistic portraits of animals, many but not all of them birds. He depicts them among highly abstracted fragments of their natural environments that may initially appear as gestural, almost calligraphic swirls of rich […]
Edward Bateman’s latest work makes manifest the adage that one can create mountains out of molehills — molehills made from little bits of plastic and representing real-life Utah mountains. The artist provides small models of his molehills cum mountains (or is it the reverse?) at Phillips Gallery, where a fine […]
Hadley Rampton, who paints en plein air accompanied by her dog, Phoebe, primarily in the Rocky Mountain wilderness she loves but also (sans dog) in town squares and picturesque alleyways around the world, learned a couple new lessons about (and from) Utah’s scenic backcountry during the Pandemic: that […]
Not every artist gets to see herself become the solo subject of a television documentary, let alone one that takes a retrospective look over her art and its critical reception by one of the nation’s best-known and most-cited journalist-critics. But then Jean Lowe is not just any artist, […]
The semicircular handle of a wicker basket frames the angelic face of a young woman, which is doubled by reflection from the silvery surface of its contents. A pair of blue-gloved hands supports the basket’s bowl, while concentric pink ovals of satin and roses, a pink lace bow […]
News that one of the world’s most exciting landscape painters has moved to Utah, adding the Rockies and Wasatch mountains to an already stunning resumé, sounds a little like saying another ship full of coal has arrived in Newcastle. After all, no other paintable subject is more popular […]
