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.
It would be helpful if words could capture the sequence of impressions created by a first encounter with Confetti and Distress, Honey and Suspicion. We know what to expect with paintings and sculpture, and increasingly now with performance, installation, video—all the newer media that have become familiar […]
The Utah Division of Arts & Museum’s annual Design Arts Utah show proves once again the continued growth of talent and ingenuity in Utah. Collected among the juried designers we find students with an eye on the future and established creatives who continue to push boundaries and exercise […]
In a vintage wisecrack, Ad Reinhardt once defined a sculpture as “something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.” Gallery owner Thomas J. Howa knows the sentiment, but disagrees. Himself a painter, Howa doesn’t see how showcasing two artists in the same medium […]
Artists Tyler Willmore and Molly O’Mara, who are showing at UTah Artist Hands Gallery for the upcoming Salt Lake Gallery Stroll, both use nature to their advantage. Willmore expands the landscape, wrapping his paintings in written texts that provide metaphorical context for personal exploration, while O’Mara strips down […]
Amalia Ulman’s anti-war installation is an ambitious, multimedia work in which the artist clearly has invested much of herself. In a dark room, three independent elements—wire sculptures that can be felt and navigated around as well as seen; recorded music from an unseen source; and in an […]
In a 2012 show at Finch Lane Gallery, Layne Meacham displayed a series of large canvases that read as sizable bodies of cement, each with large, yellow, painted stripes, and black spots resembling old chewing gum to render the effect of a literary view of a city street […]
A passage can be something literal, a tangible progression from one place to another, or it can represent something metaphorical, a life journey of gained personal experience, and the personal development it manifests. Utah artist Fahimeh Amiri, who is one of the featured artists in the Springville Museum […]
The current controversy over art’s funding, precipitated by the apparently politically-motivated firing of Utah Division of Arts and Museums director Lynnette Hiskey, exposes two fundamentally different ideals of how art should operate in modern society. To be fair, it’s not that the Tea Party-types don’t like art; […]
Let’s be honest, Utah lacks a world-class art collection (whether that be due to historical circumstances or financial means is a subject for another time); which means that for the non jet-setting citizens of the state it is to traveling exhibitions that one must turn to experience […]
It feels somehow fitting that Price’s Gallery East should inaugurate its pristine new space on the campus of Utah State University Eastern (formerly the College of Eastern Utah) with an exhibition of works concentrating on the worn and the rusted. Opening this week in the newly built—and blandly […]
Constable is known for depicting the British sky more accurately than his rival Turner: He painted it gray. It is true that there is a great deal of ‘grey’ in British painting . . . some even downbeat,” writes Salt Lake City artist and gallery owner Karen Horne […]
In the 1870s, LDS Church leaders became increasingly worried about the commitment of the second and third generations of Mormons, those born too late to have remembered or witnessed the church’s formative days outside of Utah. In the decade after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, several factors […]
The right title can do a lot to empower an exhibition. The best name on a show in recent memory belongs to Lizze Määttälä’s exhibit in the Artists-Working-in-Utah gallery at UMOCA, which she calls Uphill / Both Ways. Of course the phrase isn’t original, having started life in […]
How one perceives the world, and how one is perceived by those in the world, constitutes much of one’s sense of being-in-the-world. One’s sense of reality can often be dependant on one’s inner states of being, determined by the physical, cognitive, emotional and spiritual self. At the same […]
In the century and a half since photography rose up to challenge painting as an image source, artists have invented countless strategies for incorporating photos into their working methods. Some use snapshots to replace the traditional sketch book. Others primarily paint things they could never see in person, […]
There’s a hint of cruelty in the Rio Gallery’s choice to devote August, a month most people spend wearing as little as modesty permits, to the subject of clothing. Among the nine artists here, there are enough heavy garments, long-sleeved shirts, and gloves to bring a suggestible viewer […]
In Yolande Harris’s current exhibit at the Woodbury Museum of Art the artist uses sound, light and installation to upend the senses.
