Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
If you were at Library Square a year ago this weekend, you may have seen him: a middle-aged man, at the base of the waterfall in Library Plaza, rolling out a scroll of paper, holding it down with rocks, then brushing and spilling ink and dirt across the […]
During lunch at Kyoto, painter Oonju Chun asks, “Why do we say, ‘If I were . . .’ instead of ‘If I was . . .?”’ — one of those nitpicky English questions a writer hates to answer with “Ummmm . . .“ * But does. So, it […]
[dropcap]Reflected[/dropcap] subway systems, upside-down metropoli, bomb threat questionnaires—these are just a few of the elements at play in Daniel Everett’s Security Questions, currently at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition includes a range of media, from looping videos to installations that, according to Everett, “address the […]
[dropcap]At[/dropcap] the opening of Line Paintings, I noticed a tall man standing by one of the works, seeming to dance with a young girl. He looked at her, then pirouetted with one hand out, asking with his eyes if she understood. And I knew, without seeing it, which […]
As our most dynamic organ, the brain is at once remarkably expansive and persistently conservative, constantly aiming to preserve its energy. The ever-increasing pace of social media has nurtured this trend of mental conservation—instead of reading and prioritizing media according to its supposed importance or significance, we often […]
For all intents and purposes, statuary was invented in ancient Egypt. These earliest figures, meant to provide a home for the soul in case the body was lost after death, took the cautious form of virtually indestructible cubes of stone. The Greeks took over the idea and, using […]
When confronted by a broadly-brushed lampoon such as Kelsey Harrison’s New Luxury Art Show in Downtown Salt Lake City, it’s tempting to sustain the illusion, play along, which in this case would be writing an ironic review: one that used the same hyperbolic, vacant language, touched on the […]
We are pleased to announce that Hikmet Sidney Loe’s innovative exploration of Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork, The Spiral Jetty Encyclo, has won the 15 Bytes Book Award for Art Book for 2018. David Habben’s steampunk coloring book and Mary Lee Fulkerson’s survey of women artists of the Great […]
A half-mile of masking tape, gallons of exterior paint, dozens of rollers and brushes and some not-entirely-successful lessons in operating a scissor lift — that’s what it took Jann Haworth to create her recently completed mural facing the Pictureline parking lot in Salt Lake City’s Granary District. Haworth’s […]
Working Hard to Be Useless, currently on display at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, is framed as a revisiting of the ideas of the Situationist International. Though art and artists were integral to its earliest phases, Situationism (1957-1972) was, at its heart, a revolutionary movement that, among […]
From fishing in streams and running with cousins, flying high on a swing or laying under the trees, childhood memories play an important role in the paintings of Colby Sanford. His most recent explorations focus extensively on memory and its metamorphosis in our minds to become something particularly […]
[dropcap]When[/dropcap] presented with a scenario involving what to rescue in the event of a natural disaster, most people say they would choose their photographs. Why? What makes a photograph so important? The former director of photography for The Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski, curated an exhibition in […]
[dropcap]Almost[/dropcap] from the beginning, Diane Stewart’s Modern West Fine Art has been evolving away from the cowboys, American Indians and Western landscapes — however jazzed up or modernized — that threatened to define it at its inception. Gradual at first, the process has picked up steam in recent […]
[dropcap]U[/dropcap]tah painter and sculptor Franz M. Johansen, who died Aug. 23 in Provo, found his artistic mission on an LDS church mission in the British Isles. There, his wife Josie Morris confirms, he learned about William Blake, who as a boy said he had seen God through a […]
You can’t grab a good cup of Jose to sip while viewing art at Mestizo anymore. For lots of reasons, not many of them particularly interesting, the Salt Lake City gallery has moved from the popular North Temple coffeehouse where it has been housed for more than a […]
[dropcap]For [/dropcap]many of us, “collage” has consisted of either a papier mâché project gone awry or the deposit of clumsily scrunched tissue paper on cardstock our kid brought home from kindergarten that we don’t have the heart to remove from the fridge. With its material mélange, the medium […]
[dropcap]Their[/dropcap] current exhibit, Utah Utah, is another visual treat from Mark Knudsen and Leslie Thomas, the pair of painters who, for the past decade, have been carpooling to work — call it Paint the Badlands, Inc. — before heading off to their individual departments for research and development. […]
[dropcap]One[/dropcap] of the most compelling breakthroughs in modern linguistics, and a necessary step on the way to proving that language has become genetically programmed in humans, was the realization that all people everywhere speak essentially the same language. Made up of words and rules for combining them, it […]
[dropcap]Freedom [/dropcap]Would Be Mine at the Kimball Art Center celebrates the career of feminist art heroine Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002), whose earliest sociopolitical artwork preceded the 1970s flourish of feminist artists. Because she was an initial outlier to the feminist art movement typically associated with names like […]
