“It is better by far to remain silent and be thought a fool…than to speak and erase all doubt.” This popular paraphrase of Proverbs 17:28 has nothing to do with the art of Hunter Bailey, now showing at Bountiful Davis Art Center, but it does support an element […]
“I heard him say, ‘The bigger the brush the bigger the rush.’ ” John Erickson presents the statement for his current show at Phillips Gallery as a conversation between his family cats, Emmaline and Cecily. Speaking of the artist’s creative struggles as they witnessed them from underfoot—endeavors that […]
“Doomscroller invites viewers to reflect on whether our compulsion to engage with constant data streams is a survival strategy or a path to self-destruction.” These words, which conclude the introduction to Doomscroller, an exhibition currently at Ogden Contemporary Arts, posit an intriguing dilemma. The audience will likely identify […]
In Europe, art enthusiasts occasionally come across dismantled fragments of some major, long-gone work of art in a museum or gallery. Often these are surviving parts of some noteworthy, even famous architectural commission from a building that was subsequently damaged in war or otherwise demolished. This might include […]
In The Second Sex, her indispensable survey of the status of women, Simone de Beauvoir dispenses with the romantic notion that once upon a time women ruled the world, pointing out that men were always larger and stronger, and a less civilized time in history than ours was […]
For much of its history, and even today in many places, art has been considered a craft and not a profession. Now, our artists are required to provide themselves with the benchmarks of professional status. One of the details in such an artist’s resumé is where the individual […]
The late novelist and essayist Martin Amis called it “The War Against Cliché.” Visual artists don’t talk about it so much, but particularly in Contemporary Art there’s been a move away from the predictable format of years past, though by no means has that familiar version disappeared. Yet […]
One of the rarest and yet most compelling phases in an artist’s career is the time when she emerges like the universe from the chaos of limitless possibilities and begins to find her best direction forward: the work that will fulfill her potential. Antra Sinha has been working […]
There’s a nifty bit of architectural symbolism going down at the Bountiful-Davis Art Center this month. Around the periphery of the building’s main space, three separate artists have set up works that address the ever-present dilemma of how a society feeds its members. What’s in the middle, instead […]
Each of the three satellite galleries at BDAC currently offers an individual artist’s view on the theme of what we eat: how it’s grown, harvested, and handled. It’s not a common theme in art, but these artists have found creative ways to explore it, and the staff at […]
One of the more charming and inspiring stories to be told in paint recently has only a couple of weeks remaining at the South City Campus of Salt Lake Community College. Old Man and His Mountains: The Trail of Tails, Trials, and Triumphs is the work of Robert […]
Artists identify so well with the insults their critics hurl at them, that some of those eventually became the proper names of the most popular and respected artistic styles in history: “Impressionism,” “Cubism,” and “Baroque” come to mind. Meanwhile, Americans have always had ambivalent feelings about intellectual pursuits: […]
One of the things that women are generally better at than men is building a community. Get men together and many compete for status, want to be at the top of whatever they make. Women are more likely to seek connection and bond over their experiences than try […]
The answer to the question, “What is a lake?” depends on whom you ask. To a farmer, it might be a reservoir, storage for irrigation water. To a politician, a recreational resource for marinas full of boats. To the Romantic painters of the 19th century, a lake was […]
It’s hard to dispute painter Jennifer Nehrbass’s assertion that, from a female point of view, the popular story of the European exploration of the West doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s not just that women’s essential roles, and even their presence, are largely written out of that […]
In viewing photographs, we tend to look right through or past the photo itself, with all its elaborate technical background information, and imagine we are seeing the object in the picture as if it were actually present. In her piece “Poised Compression,” Rosa Barba short-circuits that impulse by […]
Leonardo da Vinci taught that a portrait should begin with the skeleton, to which muscles, flesh, and if appropriate, clothing would be added. The point was to be aware of the presence within the subject of those parts that gave form to the person: the form that became […]
Artworks are vessels of mystery. How could they not be when no one really knows where they come from or how they get here? Even so, there’s an uncommon amount of mystery in the front gallery at BDAC this month. Artist Antra Sinha and musician Megan Simper have […]
