The title piece of Taylor Wright’s collection of ten paintings at Bountiful Davis Art Center is The Bell That Never Rings, a verbal paradox that labels a visual riddle. To be sure, there is a heavy brass bell, its shiny surface reflecting the view out a window where […]
Sweetheart, because your letters make me feel “that certain way” please don’t fail to write them often ‘cause I love them The above is from a hand-written love letter that Sue Bradford used as the background for a solarplate relief and chine colle print, titled “Sweetheart,” of a […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
Sometime in the 1980s, an edition of Douglas H. Thayer’s Summer Fire was published bearing a jacket blurb, written by Orson Scott Card, reading, “I have never read a better Mormon novel.” His calling it a “Mormon novel” makes Summer Fire a problem for a critic like me, […]
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 […]
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, […]
Heresies of Nature, Margaret Blair Young’s 2002 novel about a Mormon family gripped by a chronic, unpredictable illness, begins with a bit of authorial slight-of-hand. A narrator’s voice and an author’s voice are easy to confuse, and Young takes advantage of it by starting out as herself, speaking […]
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 […]
In a few weeks it will be ten years since Jorge Rojas first showed his art in Salt Lake City, bringing him to 15 Bytes’ attention and eventual inclusion in Utah’s 15. Since then, as one of the foremost arts activists in Utah, he has alternated between showing […]
“He could have been almost anything he wanted, but he chose to be a bad artist. Nobody will ever know why.” The “bad artist” that Buckdancer Skinner refers to here was his father, Adam Skinner, whose disappearance and possible demise reunites his three sons, 33 year-old Jacob, 27 […]
Downy Doxey-Marshall introduces the baker’s dozen large oil paintings in Immerse, her current show in the Phillips’ Dibble Gallery, with a twice-relevant quotation from Pablo Picasso: The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. The key here is “washing,” a word that […]
In “Charity,” a clichéd old man — straw hat, glasses, cane, bag of bird seed — stands in shallow water at the beach, feeding a large gull that hovers in midair to take seed from his open hand, both seemingly oblivious to the wave: a wall of water […]
