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.
The Springville Museum of Art’s Spring Salon is the largest annual exhibition of work by Utah artists in the state. More than 1000 works are entered for consideration each year. From these, the museum manages to hang several hundred on their ground floor galleries. The Salon is too […]
“Regina is a compact, trapezoid-shaped tower, like a slender version of a ziggurat, the temple structure that spread across the Fertile Crescent three thousand years BC, which almost certainly inspired the story of the Tower of Babylon. Where ziggurats were made of sun-dried clay bricks, however, this tower […]
The Springville Museum of Art’s Spring Salon is the largest annual exhibition of work by Utah artists in the state. More than 1000 works are entered for consideration each year. From these, the museum manages to hang several hundred on their ground floor galleries. The Salon is too […]
For a couple of magic years during her adolescence, I drove my step-daughter to and from school five days a week. During those shared moments, one of her favorite things was to tell me her dreams. Eventually I realized her narratives went on far too long for her to be remembering them: that she had, in fact, returned to the dream state and was telling me the dream as she witnesses it continuing. The literary novelist, Robert Olin Butler, describes the process of artistic creation just so, as dreaming while awake, and I realized that I’d had the rare privilege of witnessing that process in play.
That description comes close to accounting for the art of Trent Alvey, in that her works are rooted in abstractions and resist ascribing them to subject matter.
New Mexico artist Eric Garcia is the latest recipient of a spot in Ogden Contemporary Art’s (OCA) artist-in-residence program. The program, as showcased with their inaugural artist-in-residence Ya La’Ford aims, to bring national and international artists to Ogden to investigate via their art issues that affect both Utah […]
The Springville Museum of Art’s Spring Salon is the largest annual exhibition of work by Utah artists in the state. More than 1000 works are entered for consideration each year. From these, the museum manages to hang several hundred on their ground floor galleries. The Salon is too […]
A piece of art is like a fingerprint. Even if two artists use the same tools, processes, inspiration, and subject matter, each finished piece, no matter how similar, will display subtle differences because each artists’ experience is their own and, whether they like it or not, their work is stamped with their unique signature of personal perspective developed throughout their life.
Rose Dall’s “I Was, I Am” utilizes relief typography in contrast to her two-dimensional self portrait. A hand, formed of strong brush strokes, pulls Dall through a cacophony of negative talk and stereotypes that threaten to drown her; her face breaks through the debilitating wave to be embraced by positive phrases of who she really is, her worth, and her essential presence, illuminating the powerful need of a helping hand that people so often struggle to reach for.
Jason Lanegan’s “Relic and Icon of a Rural Life” unites a found toolbox with an icon: a model barn made on the scale of the small churches often held by saints in their portraits, here fabricated from building materials and covered with plans and patterns. Inside the box lies a baling hook, a handheld extension of the worker’s arms and fingers, restored to the environment in which it spent its working life. Lanegan’s reliquaries express his faith that his life and its milestones are as valid, and more entertaining, than those of long gone figures whose names few recall.
Out There includes 17 artists, most of whom will be familiar to Modern West’s regulars. They all appear frequently, and most have some work in the collection, giving their audience a chance to witness their gradual, and occasionally sudden evolution. Two themes that made for new work were the ongoing environmental crisis, which has only grown worse while almost nothing is done by those who could and ought to help, and the pandemic, with its associated social isolation and continuing controversy, in spite of mortality remaining high.
Touring Broadway shows, rock bands, and blockbuster art shows schedule venues and acts years in advance. That’s great for events that take place over decades or even centuries, but contemporary art hasn’t that luxury. So when the Kimball Art Center’s curator, Nancy Stokes, undertook to survey the evolution […]
Employing greasy oil paints in bright pastel colors, Katrina Berg adds intricate texture to layers of meaning in the large scale pieces of her latest exhibition, The Signs & Symbols of Spring. Appearing thick and jelly-like, or what the artist refers to as “stained glass-like,” Berg’s brushstrokes work […]
They’re clearly plants, though unlike any we see here in Utah. The tallest one looks like a tree, but with something like a handful of twisted fingers at the top. Closer to the viewer, something pink looks like a Fourth of July firework: a single stem like the […]
There are a lot of whale bones in the AIR. (That’s the gallery at UMOCA where their Artists In Residence cap their experience with a one-person show.) There are also a number of red herrings, which can happen when an artist tries to do something unconventional. In Razorbacks, […]
“Domestic Remiss” is the title of a work by Kylie Millward that appeared in Space Maker, a 2021, pandemic-inspired exhibit at UMFA that, as 15 Bytes reported at the time, was drawn “from work by faculty within the University of Utah’s Department of Art and Art History to […]
Nathan Florence converses much the way he paints: in-depth with lots of color; layered with nuance but an abundance of honesty; moments of intensity with an overall cheerfulness. He is a fun interview. But try chatting with Florence about his work and you will immediately be turned down […]
The Statue of Liberty is to America what the Mona Lisa is to France: the nation’s best known work of art, one that people come from all over the world to see and appreciate. The history of Mona Lisa, however, is the story of a small painting that […]
Here’s a question each of us should ask ourselves: what is my legacy likely to be? Lately, each generation or era gets assigned an identity — the Greatest, the Boomers, the Millennials — each of which might signify something. But what is the relation between a generational impact […]
