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.
Kent Miles, photograph by Jared Christensen. Art as a profession has always come across to me as an extremely individual pursuit. Artists have their time in school to work in a group situation, participating in critiques and honing their vision throughout the course of several classes, but once […]
We expect alchemy from poets and artists. To hear Lance Larsen and Jacqui Biggs Larsen tell it, some of their audience expects more from them. In the text introducing Animal Brilliance, their collaborative exhibit of her paintings captioned by his epigraphs, they report being made to feel they should […]
1985.005 001 The visual arts have regularly been considered with regard to their relations: in the heyday of oil painting literature was the next of kin. In contemporary art the closest cousins are philosophy, and her bastard child, theory. But for a few decades in the middle of […]
Painted representations of Jesus Christ have been a primary subject of Western art, morphing in style and content according to individual artistic style but also the role of commissioning patrons: Roman Catholic imagery can contrast heavily with the art of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, each having a distinctive […]
by Shawn Rossiter At the Artists of Utah Office Holiday Party this evening I was pleased to meet Austen Diamond, a writer and editor for City Weekly. He told me he mostly writes on music but that in this week’s edition he has contributed two visual arts articles. […]
Someone immediately disagreed with my opinion of the Salt Lake Art Center’s latest exhibit Honeymoon. A group of us were enjoying a post gallery stroll meal and comparing notes on what we’d viewed during the evening and I said that Honeymoon, Micol Hebron’s first show as Senior Curator, is a satisfyingly successful […]
by Tyler Spurgeon The Utah Museum of Fine Art puts its best face forward with a collection of prints, photographs and sculpture. Most of the work in the show falls under the umbrella of Pop, and overtly or otherwise deals with portraiture. The artists within Faces are well known, but the work […]
The line between art and craft may be no finer than when quilts are the topic of discussion. Quilts have resided happily in the craft category for centuries, but in the last 30 years or so, some quilts have made their way off of beds and on to […]
by Melissa Smolley I once heard a fascinating firsthand account of what it is like to experience a severe stroke — from a neuroscientist with a unique capacity to ingeniously articulate the event. In what she described as the most transcendent and terrifying experience of her life, she […]
On the wall opposite UMFA’s entrance, looming over passageways leading to various destinations, the monumental painting Flight Aspiration can be seen almost as Trevor Southey conceived it for the Salt Lake Airport. Four horizontal figures fly from right to left across its surface: a man facing towards us, […]
“In a sense I have become myself . . . .” Trevor Southey in person at U.M.F.A. by Geoff Wichert Trevor Southey, one-time Bad Boy of Utah art, has turned out to be indispensible for anyone wishing to understand why there is—and why there isn’t—a distinctly ‘Mormon’ art. […]
While Sperber doesn’t actually belong to any of the now-exhausted camps that have cluttered the landscape of art for the last half-century, she incorporates the raveled threads of their various narratives into a strand she makes by twisting them together, thereby restoring to art the feeling of a unified purpose such as artists and their audiences shared before it disintegrated under the assault of the permanent avant garde….
To any who believe culture is in the DNA, Kathleen Carricaburu’s experience may serve as an example. When, after years of exploring different mediums, she discovered metal she had an epiphany. “I felt like I had come home,” she says. Carricaburu’s heritage is half Irish and half Basque. […]
To describe Regina Stenberg’s current work, now on exhibit at Finch Lane Gallery, as “drawings of clouds” aptly captures the “what” of her work but not the “how.” To create her contemplative cloudscapes |0| the artist works vertically, with watercolor paper suspended against the wall with a flexible (linoleum) surface […]
by Connie Deianni An interesting and alluring aspect of the work on display at the Bountiful/Davis Art Center’s LeConte Stewart Festival: A Teacher’s Teacher is the absence of people in the paintings by Stewart. Perhaps the well-known regionalist wanted the viewer to place themselves within his world, rumbling down the rutted […]
Economic strife requires many things from people: reconsideration of consumption, conservation of resources, redefining necessity, solidarity amongst individuals, and, perhaps surprisingly, a flourishing of the arts. Inspired by the dance hall marathons of the depression era, Dark Horse/Fallen Shadows hearkens appropriately back to a time where financially desperate times […]
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when photography was in its infancy, the questions – What is photography? Documentation or art? – were hotly debated. Photographer Shalee Cooper revisits these questions in her latest series of photographs on display at Rose Wagner Art Center through October. […]
Some artists embrace their background. Others flee it. Chad Crane does something in between. Though he is a rural Utah boy who grew up watching Westerns and surrounded by the cowboy life, Crane hates cowboy paintings. Which is precisely why he started to paint them. These aren’t the […]
