There are 11 paintings by Pablo Cruz-Ayala, collectively titled Intersections of an Immigrant, at Finch Lane Gallery and one at Salt Lake Community College, where it’s part of their 75th Anniversary Alumni Show. In them, Cruz-Ayala employs a wide variety of media, but the first impression they make […]
The Biblical Book of Genesis, with all its great visual tropes — the creation of all from nothing, division of light from dark, story of the Fall, and so on — has been enormously popular with artists at least since Medieval times. The third chapter begins with the […]
There’s not much to say about the Salt Lake Community College’s 75th Anniversary Alumni Show, currently open at the art gallery of the main campus on State Street. Not that there isn’t plenty to say about the 30 works it includes or the same number of artists who […]
In one photo, a man sits with one leg crossed over the other, the dark pants leg of his raised knee interrupting the solid white mass of the cape completely wrapping his torso. The barber stands behind him, trimming his hair with electric shears as he impassively submits […]
However illogical, it’s probably human nature to assume that the worst challenges and disasters happen rarely, while those that occur every day must be trivial. That said, nature cannot be made to follow our thinking. One example: Covid-19, a close relative of the common cold, touched the lives […]
Photographers have a name for it: the Decisive Moment. For painters, the power to lend a timeless dimension to life is part of what validates portraits and figure studies. So it makes sense that one of each — Provo’s journeyman photographer Justin Hackworth, who describes his work simply: […]
The eyes of the “Spell Caster” gaze forth from a countenance at once as ancient as the gnarled forest that surrounds it and as conceptually modern as its nonbinary gender. Bewitching is one word for it, spellbinding another. Much of the portrait’s power comes from its elusive smile: […]
Two of Colour Maisch’s favorite materials reveal particular insight into why she makes the kind of art she does, or for that matter, why she makes art at all. One, which refers back to the influence of critical history and art education, is porcelain: a celebrated, durable, even […]
Numerous photographs of the great American folksinger and human rights activist Woody Guthrie lend an unexpected insight into an enigmatic project by photographer Lindsay Godin, part of which is currently on display at the Bountiful Davis Art Center. Futurisms, which Godin began assembling in 2019, contains apparently documentary […]
Three’s the charm this week as a third socially committed art exhibition joins two already in progress, one at UMOCA and another at Phillips. As it happens, Crisis is also the third part of Between Life and Land, a year-long survey of environmentally concerned art at the Kimball […]
Consider this familiar fact: we know that water arranges grains of sand more tightly together, so that when they dry, the sand has become solid, recalling the rock from which it was abraded. Pro sculptors, amateurs on holiday, and even children at play can carve the most remarkable […]
“Running With Scissors” demonstrates several characteristic things about this artist’s sensibility and methods. A rondel — as are about 20% of her works on display — its imagery harks back half a century or more and includes the initially disturbing sight of an animated, stylishly-dressed woman with no […]
There’s always much to see at the annual Face of Utah Sculpture show, especially since its recovery from pandemic closures. A fair amount of virtual ink has been spent on it over two decades, but it may be that not enough of that has concerned the individual most […]
If air is colorless, how is the sky blue? During the pandemic, faced with isolation, some people turned to television for companionship, while others got a dog. Artists tend to be loners, a useful skill for the solitary hours they must put in, but even their survival skills […]
At the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, response to Nobody Likes It Here, the installation by Alexis Rausch in the Projects Gallery (near the entrance), has been spilling over into the adjacent Street Gallery, where the Utah Division of Arts and Museum’s Statewide Annual is on display. It’s […]
In spite of the relatively narrow design principles Sunny Taylor has chosen to follow for two decades now, she somehow manages to mix up the results so that within her large body of work, while every Sunny Taylor could only be a Sunny Taylor, each one manages to […]
Maura Segal isn’t the first artist to settle on a paradigm or format to repeat in a series of variations, nor is she the most extreme proponent of a fundamental modern, indeed Minimalist or Conceptual, approach. Donald Judd, for instance, designed the same metal box — technically described […]