Utah artists like what they do. If any of them feels tortured, they’ve kept it to themselves. Some see their art as a prayer, others feel like telling a story. Some see art as a challenge to take on. A popular gallery like Phillips can pull together three […]
The floor of a dark room sprouts fifteen narrow white pillars, three rows of five, laid out like an orchard. Each slightly more than waist-high pedestal supports a different object; some are large and protrude into the surrounding space, balanced in defiance of gravity, while others are compact, […]
A canal, or perhaps a river — in any event, a long, narrow seam of water — runs alongside a forest, divided from it by a bank of snow. We recognize the water because of its intense blue color and how it reflects the trees. We know them […]
There’s a scene from playwright David Kranes’ 1971 novel, Margins, set in densely populated New York City, that might appeal to a 15 Bytes reader today. Here we witness a man falling in love with a woman through the medium of art: They walked unhurriedly down Madison Avenue. […]
The Kimball Art Center may have been liberated by its new location at the back of the Yard — a warren of working-class haunts across the street from Park City’s cemetery — full of 19th-century miners and bar-keeps. A case in point is the current show, When Evening […]
“Out of characters struggling between religious convictions and emotional contradictions, Peterson manages to create an intense vision of Mormon life in the Mormon West.” —Page Stegner In the 19th century, Utah communities collaborated to send their most promising artists to Europe to be trained to the standards of […]
For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13:12) “Coming Through” represents a familiar Asian face, close up, one of nine small portraits of Buddha […]
In the upper right-hand corner of a canvas seven feet high and a little over five feet wide, rectangles of gold and orange overlap a mottled patch of sky blue. In front, or so it appears, a series of black loops suggest spirals rising, while a similar figure […]
There’s a small problem with Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal’s first book, and while it doesn’t adversely affect her sophisticated and engaging essays, it could discourage potential readers, which is clearly the opposite of what the publishers intended when they packaged the collection 20 years ago. First, the […]
“I was planning to fail in my own way. I thought that was the point.” Among the benefits of public radio, which began half a century ago seeking, unsuccessfully, to liberate the airwaves from corporate control, were the many outlets it created for telling intimate stories to a […]
No self-respecting dramatist would set a Biblical Apocalypse in the parking lot of a shopping center; it’s too mundane, too much a whimper and not a bang, to produce the proper sense of doom. Yet today it’s a routine event to carry the groceries out to the car, […]
Despite appearances to the contrary, group exhibitions of art are the norm, and should be. A theme, familiar or exotic, or a location, a medium, even a gender can provide the opportunity to compare how different artists handle the same materials: physical, emotional, contextual. From landscapes featuring Mt. […]
News broke in December of one of the great, unanticipated art discoveries in our lifetimes. Found in a remote, uninhabited wilderness location that preserved it in a pristine state for years, it is large, mysterious, and unlikely ever to be explained or understood. Discovered by scientists working in […]
In order to enter Material Issues, the pieces of which can be seen from above, spread invitingly across the ground level gallery of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, you must cross the familiar steel bridge and descend the switchbacks of the staircase, first walking away, into the […]
Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World collects fifteen personal essays written by Jennifer Sinor over about that many years. The collection opens with “Headwaters,” an account linking a family death and a coincidental birth, one life ending and another continuing in its place. By comparison […]
It’s early summer and the water is high. My mother grasps the handles of two wooden oars and feels the Colorado River surge through her arms. A gray ring of raft surrounds her, sixteen feet from bow to stern, and beyond it, the mud-red river roils. Near the […]
I am a different kind of lover of truth now Since his death in 2011, Edwin Parker ‘Cy’ Twombly, Jr. has emerged as a key figure of 20th-century art, even as many of his contemporaries and followers have fallen behind. Ironic confirmation of his importance comes from […]
The Greeks had a word for it. They called it Symmetry, which today often means a mirror-image. For an older society, one less needing to simplify an overly stimulating world, it meant balance. A symmetrical composition presented a balanced image. They may have found this concept in the […]
