Rebecca Pyle is a writer and an artist with work in dozens of art/literary journals, in the United States and also in journals (in the English language) in Hong Kong and the U.K. and Northern Ireland, Belgium, India, France, and Germany. She graduated from the university the Wizard of Oz adored, the University of Kansas, where she studied art and lit. See rebeccapyleartist.com.
Helper is like a movie set, a town of moving, repeating stills: repeated rows of paintings; repeating storefronts. It is full of movie-set tropes, like the Balance Rock Eatery servers, daily dressed in identical red sateen dancing-hall dresses; or the rainbow-colored marquee at the Strand Theater; or Marilyn […]
Playwright Alexandra Petri, a Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, a Washington Post columnist and a humorist (author of A Field Guide to Awkward Silences, New American Library, 2016), must have wanted to gather misery like a bouquet. So she gives us — and in some ways it seems […]
Corinne Geertsen’s many-layered art images, which begin as photographs, are magic tricks. They contain ghosts of the photographed past, people wearing clothing time has almost forgotten — derby hats and waistcoats, huge hats covered with flowers, children in proper attire — people, largely, in awe of being photographed, […]
There’s one life-size, cast-bronze golfer in the middle of this gallery, and a mysterious cut-out of a doorway, which staff-only can enter, behind a counter. Which leads one to feel that a mysterious and dreamy, miniature game of golf is being played here, in/at Salt Lake City’s Brushworks […]
At this show, you’ve really, for all effects and purposes, been invited into Brent Godfrey’s studio. Postponed for over a year by the pandemic, the exhibit contains Godfrey’s social-statement (“social studies”) paintings, enormous abstracts, small and large figurative paintings, woven canvas pieces, works on paper. Called Matter of […]
Since retiring from a career working as a graphic designer for KUED-TV, Doug Wildfoerster has given full rein to his personal artistic vision. The self-taught watercolorist has had his work featured in solo shows at Alpine Art, the Chapman Library, the Day-Riverside Library and the Duchesne County Library, […]
Paige Anderson’s paintings are a trip into high order. All is arranged, undone, arranged again. In “A Map of Salt and Stars” and “Heavens Clothed in Earthly Vestments” pointed star-shapes repeat very, very methodically, but with squinting shimmer-gleam, like the modulated light emanating from a crop of night […]
If ever a group of paintings of trees could bring you close to tears, it might be these paintings by Silas Thompson, in his new show, The Hidden Forest. Thompson, still a young painter, is a sort of forest spy/messenger. One who can be trusted, because he resists […]
The puzzle throb in the work by painter Steven Stradley at “A” Gallery is asking for solution, and, at the same time, for no solution but gravity. You feel drop from North to South, continual ambitious crossing from East to West. And back. And, unraveledness, exasperation. Through them […]
Face it, Katherine Indermauer’s chapbook Facing the Mirror says: since mirrors arrived, people, and our world, have never been the same. So powerful are mirrors, says this small spell of a book — an essay which also has, mildly, sometimes, the feel of a scientific/alchemic journal – that […]
“There is much in the scenery to admire; mountain rising above mountain, precipice rising above precipice.” — Samuel Parker, Journal of an Exploring Tour: Beyond the Rocky Mountains in 1835 How do you review mountains, or paintings of mountains? Mountains too formidably, completely, contain all opposites: in paintings, every […]
At the top of the winter hill in the old mountain mining town made of buildings of warmed old wood and cold glass are wood sculptures and glass pieces created by David LeCheminant. Looking at his work upstairs in the Meyer Gallery, you feel you’re in a snow […]
What would you come back to see if you could, after death? Would you want to sit in your favorite restaurant? The one you’d been in hundreds of times, with servers who you knew by name, even your own kin at the table? They wouldn’t be able to […]
A feeling of almost baronial formality falls over you as you approach paintings by Heather Barron, a feeling you should straighten your clothes as you approach framed mirrors. Petits fours, anyone? In America, petits fours are received as a gift in a long, very shallow box: they’re a […]
Going out into the big world: that’s Sam Walker’s paintings in this exhibit called SOIL SAND SURFACE. Danielle Susi, the fiber artist whose work appears like crafted landmasses between Walker’s large paintings, tells us with her embroideries that all our life continues due to continents, continents which hold […]
A jewelry display by Kristie Krumbach (bracelets, earrings) glowing center-stage beneath the halogen at Phillips Gallery is a perfect counterpoint to the paintings of women by Megan Gibbons: not a one of the several lone women in the latter’s large oils on canvas is wearing a ring. Or […]
As you approach the sunlit clerestory of Salt Lake City’s A Gallery, the first of Toni Doilney’s paintings you see, “Old Town,” prepares you for the dare and ski-run of all these paintings — a rising and falling series of moving terrestrial lines, suggesting terracing, the magic of […]
There’s a lot for the heart and mind and mental taste buds in the Art Access II Gallery, where the color palettes used by painters are almost merry-go-round rich. Most unforgettable is Tess Cook’s oil-on-panel “Smooshed,” where a tropical blue turtle industriously works its way across the goo […]
