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.
The entire historical range of mimetic artistry — the copying of natural appearances — is essentially on display at Ogden Contemporary Arts in a single exhibition: Tamara Kostianovsky’s Mesmerizing Flesh. Best known from its Western version, beginning in the Renaissance, which began in several parts of Europe around […]
Lenka Konopasek, a Utah artist who emigrated to Utah from the Czech Republic, has documented disasters in her art involving humans and nature in many ways: tornados, mega storms, explosions, fires, even personal accidents; and yet when Modern West Gallery invited their artists to submit work concerned with […]
There can be few more mysterious and daunting creative tasks than designing new buildings. In recent centuries, the process inevitably began with the shape of a box, the result of natural construction materials, the need for stability, and for the final product to fit with existing usage. The […]
Finances aside, what is the most important task shared by roommates? According to Nataly, one of 28 artists participating in Radical Joy, in the east gallery of Finch Lane, it seems it’s to create a common space of sharing and support. The casual intimacy enjoyed by the ambiguous […]
Malachi Wilson’s gallery card initially challenges the viewer who seeks an explanation of his art’s purpose. With careful reading, however, eventually it does make sense. “These works use distinct mediums to approach the footprints and forms of different natural objects, including the human body,” it says. Meaning what? […]
Several decades ago the words “A stone, a leaf, an unfound door” opened Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel , suggesting that a rock and a leaf had as much importance as a door — or that a secret and invaluable door or truth could only be found, […]
When the news is unbearable, perhaps the best we can hope for is good art. As the centenary of the Dust Bowl devastation of Oklahoma approaches, and the once-great Salt Lake is on schedule to become our planet’s next dust bowl, images of pristine nature, now gone forever, […]
An eerie, green glow shrouds numerous faces and figures with painted or printed veils. Bright swirls of colored oils make paths for flying silhouettes of birds. Those same birds are bound to a dark border of black ink, stopping them mid-flight. In her show at Provo’s Writ and […]
As entry into open-ended transgressive thinking via diverse materials and studio habits of mind, art is a way to expand science. As entry into micro worlds, data and diverse possibilities, science informs art. Pretending art and science are like magnets forever turned to repel one another leaves a […]
It’s 11 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and the third bus parks at the Springville Museum of Art. A high school field trip to an art museum could be made up of expressionless bodies who boarded the bus because it means an excused absence in science or math […]
There’s something unusual about the paintings of Melinda and Joe Ostraff: something that even though never seen before, seems familiar. A work like “Tide Pool #1” isn’t just a bunch of colors arranged in a balanced, dynamic composition. The parts, a folded pink veil with a hole through […]
If you have ever been to an exhibit of (even slightly) heterogeneous works and found yourself wishing the artist had leaned more into one direction rather than another, you know the feeling. It’s a presumptuous one, the desire to tell an artist what direction she should follow, but […]
All our world involves transactional borrowing, or theft. Except our sun, our landlord — who gives us what we have for free (while flames are slowly consuming his own self) — everything’s an extractive bargain, an argument settled by sharing. Earth draws its moisture from the sky, and […]
The venue has the vibe of a Zen retreat, seasoned with a pinch of the speakeasy. It’s downstairs at the split level, mid-century modern building across H Street from the Glendinning Mansion. Once home to Alderwood Fine Art, it’s now the headquarters of real estate and interior design […]
The Tom Waits song comes to mind. “What’s he building in there … With that hook light in the stairs/ What’s he building in there?” But it’s not really right, the association. There’s none of the foreboding of the Waits’ song in Steve Dayton’s works, now at Phillips […]
It may be difficult today to understand how important the artist Gordon Matta-Clark was, prior to his premature death 45 years ago. His career coincides with Earth Art, which can be dated to the show of that name held at Cornell University in 1969, when the curator, Willoughby […]
Seen across David Ericson’s luminously sunlit gallery, Clay Wagstaff’s “Light on the Rock,” a landscape of two trees that join at their crowns so the space between them forms an arch, clearly reveals a vertical line that is not part of the image, but appears to divide the […]
An artist who complained that everyone he drew ended up looking like him was told, “That’s what makes it art.” Every true work of art is a self-portrait, someone said. It’s not the worst definition of what distinguishes art from other uses of the same materials and techniques. […]
