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.
Size has always played a role in art. The scale of an artwork compared to its viewers matters, and its importance isn’t tacked on like some gradual development arrived at after all other sensations have been exhausted. In fact, while cave art, the earliest evidence for a fundamental […]
Place is not a thing, it is not even a space, it is an experience. An experience that, through the artist’s hand, can be shared. This is the concept that drives “Spirit of Place,” featuring works by Darryl Erdmann, Mark Knudsen and Paul Vincent Bernard, currently up at […]
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 […]
Down the Rabbit Hole Following Three Artists Into Their Burrows Part I Curiouser & Curiouser: The Artwork of James Christensen, Cassandra Barney, Emily McPhie, and Familyincludes sixty paintings by the three artists in the primary exhibition, with dozens more incidental works in the area set aside to […]
Forget Idealism. In the hands of an artist, hard truths can be made immortal. Goya’s “The Third of May, 1808” and Picasso’s “Guernica” continue to speak on behalf of murdered innocents long after convincing the world that it was the pretensions and excuses of their powerful, military butchers that were […]
Christmas is a time for traditions, mostly welcome, but we could do without a recent one: the culture clash that’s come to be known as the ‘Christmas Wars.’ The pattern will be familiar to anyone who has followed the national news, or for that matter ever been bullied, […]
“Money doesn’t talk; it swears” — Bob Dylan Money does a lot of things, and like swearing, they can be good or bad. Consider twenty-first century art, for example. Money attracts talent, and with unprecedented amounts of money flowing into the art market, there is so much wonderful […]
The nineteenth-century Utah artist Alfred Lambourne (1850-1926) loved Great Salt Lake. Nestled within a basin, the body of water he referred to as his “inland sea” was his source of adventure and joy, his faithful companion and as such, his preferred place for solitude. His relationship with […]
Waterscapes by Connie Borup opening January 17th at Salt Lake City’s Phillips Gallery once again demonstrates the power of resurrection. Not just the renewal of nature, but the regenerating endurance of Borup’s idiom. Working in oils on medium-sized canvases, Borup continues to explore nature, and how little we […]
What is the nature of a narrative? It has a beginning, it has a development that involves content, often conflict, ideally growth and progression, and it has an end. The best narratives are the ones that have an end that does not end, that through our experience of […]
Light has been many things to artists, from the scientific explorations of the Post-Impressionists, to the primary place it took in the Modernist agenda of formalism and even its place in contemporary atmospheres of total transience. What are we to think, then, when a contemporary artist calls something […]
A few years ago, a Snow College graduate was nearly dropped from the BFA program at Weber State for submitting drawings that resembled photographic double exposures. In one, a woman had two heads; in another, an ear of one face burst through another’s cheek. Ironically, they would […]
There’s an old rule-of-thumb in galleries, more applicable than ever these days: ‘The more text on the wall, the worse the art.’ Without an injection of extraneous text, much of today’s art would offer viewers little for their trouble. But the rule cuts both ways, and Fifteen, the […]
Think of Alice in Wonderland and the party with the Mad Hatter; or the Cheshire Cat, The White Rabbit, the roses and the flowers, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, and the smoking Caterpillar. These characters do strange things in strange ways to Alice, who never seems affected by […]
It’s often said that fans confuse the characters in movies with the personalities of the celebrities who play them. Something similar must happen with art and artists. Surely no one was surprised to learn that Picasso, bawdiest of artists, was a shameless womanizer, but how many of Thomas […]
“My art stems from my innate desire to make connection with my fellow human beings,” says ceramicist Suzanne Storer. Working out of her Ogden studio, the potter turned sculptor creates uniquely definitive and characteristic wall sculpture. The line drawings that had previously graced her platters and functional pottery have […]
At thirty-three feet long, Brad Slaugh’s Feast just barely fits into his studio. It may be the most monumental mural drawing created in Utah in recent years (1998). Pieced together from 48 pastel drawings, the work makes it difficult to achieve optimal viewing distance — even in the artist’s sizable […]
