Exhibition Reviews

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.

Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts

You Are Here: Svavar Jonatansson and Jared Steffensen’s Takes on Place at the Kimball Art Center

We’ve all been guilty of it — visiting an exotic locale, taking a few shots of its iconic attractions, and feeling like we’ve captured the essence of the place. If we’re alert, we come home and realize that everyone else has a shot of Venice’s gondolas from St. Mark’s Square, or the winding streets of Montmartre (and that all the people in the shots are tourists) and wonder if there wasn’t something more to be discovered. Our backyard is such a locale for millions of tourists from across the country, many of whom visit the national parks as quickly as we might Rialto and St. Mark’s. Those of us who live here, though, know what the place looks like from within — the myriad attractions tucked away into cliffs and canyons far from the motorist’s gaze…

Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts

Eliding the Hypen: Nicholas Galanin’s video series at BYU examines cultural hybridity

Our country is increasingly becoming a place of hyphenated identities, in which we speak of ourselves in relation to the countries or continents our ancestors came from — African-American, Italian-American, Korean-American. This increased focus on cultural and ethnic identity is double-edged: the hyphen acts as both a bond, […]

Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts

Untamed Rebellion: The Custom Car Art of Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth

America has a way of normalizing rebellion. Beat poets in smoky coffee shops turned into hipster coders in Starbucks; the opt-outs of surf culture were transformed into commercial commodities packaged by Gidget and The Beach Boys; and the body art once reserved for sailors has become a rite of passage for 21st-century housewives. Mid-century hot-rod culture has gone through a similar domestication: vestiges of its fiery independence and outsider quality can be found in the low-rider tradition of Mexican Americans, but hot-rods are now a matter of nostalgic collecting for graying baby boomers, and the “weirdo” vibe of Kustom Kulture has become normalized to the point that the bulgy-eyed, adrenaline-fueled monsters that were once synonymous with the rebellious nature of the subculture have become part of the mainstream: you’ll see similar characters on almost any program of the Cartoon Network.

Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts

Both Sides of the Coin: ARTsySTEM’S exploration of art and science at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art

It’s not exactly nostalgia that makes antique scientific paraphernalia attractive. Not usually windows into our personal pasts, these carefully crafted tools and specimens take viewers on a journey into the collective history of exploring and deciphering the only planet we know. Two artists who have mined the aesthetic […]

Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts

Weaving the Unexpected: Navajo Pictorials from the Lucke Collection at BYU

Art maintains a remarkable ability to change and augment our perceptions of different cultures and traditions. As a title, “Weaving the Unexpected” anticipates the exhibition’s capacity for redefining what is typically known about this subject. The works contained in this show present remarkable craftsmanship and skill in their own right, made even more impressive when given the added layer of modernity…

Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts

‘. . . true / false / true . . .’ Claire Wilson and Nancy Vorm present mixed media collages and reliefs at the Dibble Gallery

Other than as categories, art terms like ‘representational’ and ‘realistic’ aren’t very helpful. The weightlessly floating, elongated figures of Byzantine mosaics ‘realistically represented’ the spiritual truth so important to those who lived in the dark age that followed the fall of Rome, that souls and eternity mattered more […]

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