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.
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 […]
Art galleries can turn up in unexpected places. If you happened to stop by the Neighborhood House on September 17th or 18th you saw the latest incarnation of Urban Gallery, a collaboration between the west side day care center and Salt Lake Art Center’s 337 Project, where […]
Earlier this year Ernesto Pujol’s Awaiting captured our community’s attention as dozens of participants joined the artist in a 12-hour site specific performance at Utah’s State Capitol (see our April edition). Tonight, Gary Vlasic’s 48-hour performance at the Salt Lake Art Center — entitled “Dark Horse: Fallen Shadow” […]
It is not unusual for an artist to layer paint in a way that allows parts of the underpainting to show through in the final work. Nathan Florence, whose work is currently on display at the Kimball Art Centerin Park City, has taken this process a step further: He uses […]
“Of Two Minds” by Emily McPhie The predicament of art that takes the human figure as subject matter today recalls Dickens on pre-revolutionary Europe: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” On the one hand, with reading on the decline and the graphic […]
“Those Pretty Arches,” a wall-mounted sculpture by Nadra Haffar on view as part of The Face of Utah Sculpture VI, is made of enamel pit-fired onto several long, battered, torn, and twisted strips of galvanized roofing. The use of ‘arches’ in the title tells us that it rises—rather than […]
Perhaps it’s my fascination with layering paint that attracted me to the printmaking work of Erik Waterkotte, a recent printmaker-in-residence at Saltgrass Printmakers. With a lecture at the Salt Lake Art Center, and a class at Saltgrass, as well as an opening reception for his exhibition there, I had […]
