The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.
It could be said we live in the age of TMI. Too much of it is being offered, in the form of blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages; and too much of it is being taken and gathered, as attested by the big building at the south end […]
Paul Davis likes his studio dark. He compares the former garage — now rendered useless by the roof-high pile of firewood in front of its doors — to “the bat cave.” Inside, where the windows are blacked-out, the only natural light comes from a small skylight that the […]
Una Pett’s artist statement says that she’s “a lifelong student of the human figure,” but you won’t find any evidence of it in her current show at the Salt Lake City Main Library. With the exception of “Entryway,” a view of Library Square in which you’ll catch just […]
Osral Allred would make you rethink watercolor. Spend any time with his work and you were quickly convinced that watercolor was not simply the realm of broad washes and cheery, bright colors; nor that it was only for painting pretty flowers. For over forty years his dappled surfaces, […]
Photographer Mark Hedengren has traveled the world on assignment, but he says his favorite place to shoot is here in Utah, his own backyard. So when he learned that two of Photography’s greats, Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, came here in the 1950s to shoot “Three Mormon Towns” […]
Chris Gauthier’s photography has always had a message. For years, it was the message of others, but at a certain point Gauthier had an epiphany and decided to devote the skills he had learned in the advertising industry to the things he wanted to say. It was after […]
As part of our 35×35 exhibition in the spring of 2013, 15 Bytes interviewed participating artist Matthew Allred, who was selected for the Artists of Utah Board of Directors award. 35×35 gave us a glimpse at the artist’s Heliography series, which is now on exhibit at Salt Lake […]
Will the human body ever become cliché ? For thousands of years it has served western—and most non-western art—very well. In fact, except when specifically proscribed, it has been the centerpiece of our visual world (even during the brief interlude of abstraction’s orthodoxy, when critics rather than clerics […]
Photography liberated painting says the traditional narrative of art history. Freed by the advent of photography from the burden of faithful reproduction, artists of the nineteenth century began experimenting with their mediums, stretching their descriptive possibilities while exploring new manners of seeing and understanding the world. Something similar […]
So you’re feeling a little adventurous. You want to add a little culture to your life. If you’re thinking visual art, it’s not too hard — or at least not too expensive: around here, galleries, and even most museums, are free (that being said, yes, if you’re new […]
In the 1990s, a theory gained popular traction — though never professional credence — that in the nineteenth-century quilts were used to help runaway slaves along the Underground Railroad. Hung outside a house or slave shack, the theory went, the quilts were either signals to passing slaves — […]
One culture’s culinary pleasure is another culture’s entrenched taboo. Which can come in handy if, say, you’re a young maritime Republic looking for divine protection and a little tourist industry: legend has it the Venetians swiped the relics of St. Mark, their patron saint, by layering them in […]
Retro Furniture Changes Colors — Chroma Gallery
In the late ’80s, Erdmann ran the Salt Lake Contemporary Gallery in downtown Salt Lake where he showed minimalist and color-field art at a time when “Mark Rothko wasn’t a household word.” Reception to the gallery was not overwhelming and it eventually closed down. Since that time, abstract art has failed to achieve a pervasive presence in Utah. The Salt Lake Art Center has had more and more exhibits highlighting contemporary art and Phillips Gallery has survived showing abstract work, but few other venues for abstract art have proven viable…
