The nature of perception, the artist’s vision and viewer responsiveness is a topic that concerns all of art, in every facet, from every place and time, from every artist, and from every viewer. From a visitor to a gallery or museum in Salt Lake City to a pedestrian […]
Driving back from Park City, where Brenda Mallory’s second exhibition at Julie Nester opened July 5th, the familiar but still disturbing sight of an elk lying dead on the median strip of I-80 brought into sharp focus the universal significance of the artworks just seen. Once broken, nothing […]
How many views does it take to depict the steady, human-formed creation of absence on the land? In the case of Utah Museum of Fine Art’s (UMFA) current exhibition Creation and Erasure: Art of the Bingham Canyon Mine, the answer is over one hundred. This well-researched, historical view of […]
Connectivity is an abstract term, a function that acts prolifically in multitudinous ways in all functioning of daily living. Through it, by connecting seemingly distant or unrelated terms or ideas, we create new meanings. Making art with meaning that is fundamentally based on connectivity requires a subject for […]
Emerging artist Denae Shanidiin, 21, wishes the emphasis wasn’t so much on “Navajo” for her show currently at Mestizo Gallery. “Because you call someone a Navajo artist and people expect traditional. I wish I were traditional, but I’m not,” she says with a smile. “I just don’t think […]
Every time art renews itself, there is the impression that something entirely new is taking place: something coming into being that has never been seen before. More likely, taking in the whole picture, the artists are actually narrowing the field, selecting a small part of what went before, […]
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things. —from Wild Geese by Mary Oliver The Alice Gallery offers one […]
This past weekend was a celebration of abstract art in Salt Lake City, with the top tier of the state’s abstractionists exhibiting at Salt Lake’s Rio Gallery. This dazzling exhibit of the brightest and best includes Dave Malone, who is also featured in a solo exhibit this month […]
Mil Mascaras prowls the large alcove at the corner of the gallery like a trapped, feral animal: circling, pacing, as though seeking a way out? Or a way in? His lithe, wrestler’s body is tense as he speaks earnestly, then suddenly strikes an aggressive pose, resumes pacing, then […]
There are two essential driving forces to the work of Woody Shepherd, but instead of an interrogation of which came first, we shall assume that in the context of his work they are married for an artistic synergy that results in the incredible and fantastical — two adjectives […]
A child with a predilection for solitude seeks a quiet corner for an uninterrupted afternoon’s reading or drawing, where the couch she settles on sneezes up an invisible spray of dust. Then, when a beam of sunshine enters a window and catches the motes still hanging in the […]
Art lovers and the general public alike have long been captivated by abstract art. The seemingly endless array of brushstrokes, scribbles, collages and color planes have beckoned labels ranging from grotesque to beautiful. Now, over a century after its explosion onto the cultural landscape, abstraction continues to assert […]
With a collection of abstracts, landscapes, and figurative paintings, Joseph Cipro makes a Salt Lake debut of sorts at 814 Gallery, April 18 through July. “This show marks my return to the gallery venue and I hope a greater presence in the art environment and in your collections,” […]
Hyunsung Cho did something artists have traditionally been expected to do: he saw something on the street—it happened to be a mailbox—thought of his parents, then went home and made a work of art about it. Because Cho works in glass, he was able to create a luminous […]
In a January 2014 article Catherine Craft reassessed a 1970 Whitney Museum exhibition by African American artist Melvin Edwards asserting, “A reconsideration of Edward’s exhibition reveals its seminal place in art of the period as both an incisive response to the most radical forms of sculpture and installation […]
Behind her charming bracelets, Haworth has something edgier to show. “She Was Not There” and “She Was Defined by Negative Spaces” comprise a symmetrical pair of mixed-media canvases that make their most telling point through their ambiguity: is this one woman, or two playing similar roles in familiar […]
Susan Kirby became an artist not by any decision but by a realization, an epiphany. She was 19, in Paris for a two-year study program, practicing a self-taught style she felt insecure about. A young artist-to-be needs validation and Kirby realized hers in a grand manner in Paris. Nothing […]