“…My salad days, / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood/To say as I said then!” The speaker is Cleopatra, but the words come from Shakespeare, who invented more words and phrases than any other English speaker. He intends his Egyptian queen to mean in her […]
In a brilliantly luminous and subtly surreal oil painting, titled “Pink Lake (Where Will She Go?),” Holly Hind places a young lady, or perhaps a child, on the near shore of a sizable lake, under a livid red sky — perhaps the sunset to end all sunsets — […]
“Everything is Gray,” a photo-realist oil painting by Nicole Woodruff, doesn’t resemble an ordinary photograph; it looks like a camera error, a multiple exposure in which the same couple, the man sitting on a sofa and the woman reclining across both the couch and his lap, are seen […]
Chrysalis Jiri’s untitled watercolor depicts a rooster strutting on a grassy field, with a fence, a river, and a mountain range in the distance, all beneath a scrubbily-brushed, cloudy sky. Nowhere does the painting technique approach optical realism, but everything is clearly identifiable — not least the rooster, […]
Susan Klinker’s assemblage, variously titled “Scarab Piece” or “Desert Transformation,” recounts what she describes as her “transformative experience during a desert meditation” while she was “on a three-day prayer retreat at Christ in the Desert Monastery, Abiquiu, New Mexico.” The work initially seems to resemble a rugged, weathered […]
Personal identity is one of the most influential issues of the day, one with its essence to be found in memory. Recalling not only what has happened, but what we felt like then is how we create a durable sense of who we are. In the 21st century […]
Every genre of art comes, if not with rules exactly, then with expectations. Religious images are not permitted to be funny, while landscapes are expected to focus on land rather than the people living on it. Judging from endless corridors lined with countless monotonous examples, portraits must be […]
On a bookshelf a few feet from where I’m writing this sits a volume that claims to contain “the complete paintings of Vincent van Gogh”—(it should say “surviving,” his mother having burned half his work when she became discouraged). It’s a large and rather heavy book. Nearby, a […]
In “Reflections on Lake Powell,” printmaker Rob Chipman could be said to have reversed a common but popular natural sight. Beneath a classic desert sky of clouds too ephemeral to ever produce rain, a red rock landscape is doubled by its reflection on the reservoir’s surface. Normally, a […]
It’s a well-known fact that while comedy doesn’t always produce outright laughter, it does require a happy ending. So if the paintings of Lucky Tuck, now on view upstairs in the Utah State Capitol, are comedies — some of them are deliberately funny — can they be said […]
Brigham Young was a visionary and entrepreneur who crossed mountains and found dreams on the other side. His most celebrated find is well known, but not everyone knows about what followed: the opening of the hidden valley that came to be known as Sanpete County. Located at the […]
One word can make the case. For example, as a direction, west is an abstraction — that is, a thought or idea with noconcrete, physical presence. As a place, on the other hand, “the West” is one of the more common and evocative locations in space: one which […]
There are places in the world, some of them in the United States, where the “Religion and Spirituality” show, as it is fondly known in so many Utah galleries, would not be allowed. Once upon a time, that might have been because of institutional hostility to all religious […]
You know you’re dealing with successful assemblage when scavenged and repurposed parts unite to transcend their reality as fragments, though without erasing your awareness of them as such, and instead create a totally convincing alternative interpretation in your senses. Such an object is Sylvia Ohara’s “Perspective,” a three-legged […]
Regular readers of 15 Bytes will have read about the Ogden Contemporary Art Gallery, known succinctly as the OCA. Anyone who followed up a review or event notice by visiting won’t need to be told what a wonderful venue it is, with its modernist, two-story, open plan gallery […]
The largest work in Utah Arts & Museum’s Statewide Annual at Ogden Contemporary Arts is Cody Chamberlain’s “Procession,” an almost mural-sized, hyper-realistic depiction of a place somewhere in the vast Utah desert. It’s an accepted convention not to reveal the locations of rock art, for fear that if […]
Throughout the Covid pandemic, public conversation made much of the experience of isolation. Recent art exhibits, several reviewed on this site, included interpretations of solitude and of its consequences. Still, for such a commonplace source of suffering, it didn’t seem all that well illustrated — perhaps because it […]
If the word “pandemic” is spoken, it may bring many things to mind, like fear, anxiety, isolation, frustration, even shame: stories of mortality, the loss of several years of life, and the setbacks that may make that loss permanent. All these elements are on display right now at […]
