Utah Exhibition Reviews published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine, including reviews of local Utah artists, regional artists, group exhibitions and traveling exhibits of national and international artists.
Aside from “Please don’t touch,” it’s rare to see a warning posted in an art gallery. Perhaps, though, there should be more. For example, the exhibition of Oonju Chun this month as Phillips might fare better if there were a sign advising the viewer not to read the […]
At the edge of a forest, amid lush foliage punctuated with small blue, yellow, and white flowers, a barefoot woman with red hair lies sleeping on the grass. She wears black leggings and a blue blouse adorned with curlicues, and a planter’s trowel lying nearby identifies her as […]
In the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary art, new mediums and materials constantly emerge, challenging conventional notions of what constitutes fine art. But sometimes we look to old materials and techniques and reimagine or recontextualize them. For centuries the result of practical necessity — and generally considered a folk […]
There’s something familiar about this landscape, but it’s not quite right. Yes, the verdant, green foreground and the rounded, purple mountains in the distance speak of an abundance of water because, unlike the hard-edged verticals of the red rock, mesa country of southern Utah deserts, northern Utah took […]
“So many people have lost the proper way of living, but here it is.” The comment, delivered by someone contemplating two of the approximately 125 mostly woven works in The Threads That Bind Us, the annual exhibition by the Mary Meigs Atwater Weaver’s Guild at the Utah Cultural […]
We may be done here. From time to time, a new effort in a human enterprise so fully exceeds what has gone before that it becomes impossible to speak of the new in the language that was adequate to discuss what came before. Imagine trying to explain to […]
There’s a device filmmakers use to show the passage of time. It starts with a closeup of a calendar—the type where each day is a single page that is torn off to mark the arrival of a new day. On film, the pages slip off as if being […]
If you like your skateboard decks artistic, but whole, rather than chopped up and stitched together (see here), the Urban Arts Gallery’s annual skateboard deck competition may be your thing. Every year in conjunction with the Utah Arts Alliance’s Urban Arts Festival, the gallery and streetwear shop located […]
In Roger and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, Maria says that “when God closes a door, he opens a window,” alluding to the hope of new opportunities presented in the face of current obstacles. When an artist chooses to work from within a specific culture and experience, possibly […]
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 […]
When visitors enter the UMFA’s newest exhibition, Tatau: Marks of Polynesia, what appears to be a survey of Samoan tattoos quickly reveals itself to be an exploration of Fa’asāmoa — the Samoan way of life. This is because the two are inextricably linked. As recently as a generation […]
Will it matter to you to know that these winding, twisted orgies of positive and negative space, these three-dimensional doodles spiraling and folding onto each other, these rigid stacks of competing planes frozen in time and space, were made from old skateboards? It would explain some things, like […]
The soaring ceilings and commodious galleries of Ogden Contemporary Arts make an ideal environment for large-scale installations. Two simultaneous exhibitions on view right now prove the point. The staff at OCA, along with independent curator Kelly Carper, have brought in two artists who are well established in their […]
