What does it mean when a work of art so upsets a member of the audience that it becomes impossible to talk about it in that person’s presence? Does it necessarily mark the work as a failure, or can it be an ironic sign of success? Does the […]
Abstract art is like an inflammation: concentrated at various art market hotspots, but fading in influence with distance from the site of the infection. In Utah — a conservative state, yes, but also the home of a thriving school of narrative figuration — it’s a particularly tough sell. […]
“Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.” The great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was that rare individual who could retain the feeling of being young until he had lived long enough and acquired enough artistry to capture it. The […]
In a photographic portrait we see Alley, a young woman with olive skin and black hair, in a white room that doubles as kitchen and dining room. Her stance is too energetic to call a pose: she pivots on one foot like a dancing figure carved on a […]
Public vs. Private: Who Owns the Light? Sean Slemon and Herman Dutoit at CUAC by Geoff Wichert From ten feet away it appears that in Tied Up/Tied Down, Sean Slemon has filled a shadow box with bits of leafy foliage and then overlaid lengths of orange ribbon in […]
Art Access is a gallery with a purpose: a mission abbreviated in its name and personified by the photo of collaborating artists Joe Adams and Brian Kershisnik displayed in their foyer. Yet because of the generous interpretation of that goal—a reading as broad-minded as the mission itself—pursued by director […]
Laura Boardman recently invited some of her fellow artists to participate in an informal experiment to find out whether women as artists differ from men, and what the differences might be. Those invited were full-time painters with BFA or MFA degrees. Experience ranged from five to twenty-five years, […]
Eva Jorgensen is an artist in motion. This month she will complete her fellowship-fueled post-graduate program in printmaking and add an M.F.A. from the University of Utah to her B.F.A. from B.Y.U. Then later this summer she moves to Ohio, where her husband will study Slavic languages. Utah […]
Forty-five years is a lifetime on the job: long enough to stretch from school to retirement. It is also the age of the American studio glass movement, which began in the 1960s with glass blowing breakthroughs by Harvey Littleton at the University of Wisconsin. Since then, increasing control […]
After a hundred and fifty years of unparalleled innovation, the most far-reaching development in art hasn’t turned out to be the splatter elbowing aside the brush, or performance taking the place of the object, or even abstraction replacing representation. Since 1912, when Picasso glued a picture of chair […]
Some years ago I was standing with a friend, looking up at the night sky, when she suddenly announced that she could see a face in the full moon’s disk. Yes, I replied: the Man in the Moon. Then she explained that in her forties she still thought […]
Chad Tolley & Members Show continues at Saltgrass Printmakers through the end of May. A postcard from SaltGrass Printmakers announcing a members’ show always gets posted by my door: a “must-see” event that by itself justifies a trip to Sugarhouse and the downtown environs. The collective of artists that make up the […]
Bill Viola, this year’s Tanner lecturer on human values, is the best known and most critically admired video artist. He has the kind of all-but-exclusive prominence held by Nam June Paik in closed-circuit TV and Robert Smithson in earthworks, that Dale Chihuly has in glass or, for that […]
It’s hard to imagine how two bodies of work by two established artists, each making original and mature art and each working at the top of her form, could look more comfortable together than these two. When artists show together they sometimes divide the gallery between them […]
The camera looks out through a small, square window set high in a wall overlooking some trees and what might be a garden run wild. Through it we see an odd figure shamble into view, walking away from us. His shapeless clothing and bucket-like hat hide any sense […]
Art Czar, a recent biography of the dominant critic of modern American art, is sub-titled “The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg.” I take pleasure in these words, and particularly in the word fall. Every critic dies, every critic is diminished by subsequent discourse; but not every critic […]
The documents on display in Amy Jorgensen’s The Body Archive: Residual Evidence must be among the most gregariously challenging photographs ever shown. (At the Central Utah Art Center in Ephraim through December 6 and at Art Access from 15 June through July 30, 2007.) Large and colorful, they are full of the optical pleasures […]
A long time ago in a gallery far, far away, rebels banded together to create an art with a new relation to reality. They called their art “Realism,” but we know it today as merely the opening engagement of a movement that came to be called “Modernism.” The […]
