Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
Sarah May is a storyteller. Those stories may appear as poems, images, sculptures or combination of the same. You may remember her 2016 exhibit at Mestizo Gallery, where she used the folk art form of the retablo to explore issues of identity and racial stereotyping. In Glances, a […]
“…My salad days, / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood/To say as I said then!” The speaker is Cleopatra, but the words come from Shakespeare, who invented more words and phrases than any other English speaker. He intends his Egyptian queen to mean in her […]
In a brilliantly luminous and subtly surreal oil painting, titled “Pink Lake (Where Will She Go?),” Holly Hind places a young lady, or perhaps a child, on the near shore of a sizable lake, under a livid red sky — perhaps the sunset to end all sunsets — […]
“Everything is Gray,” a photo-realist oil painting by Nicole Woodruff, doesn’t resemble an ordinary photograph; it looks like a camera error, a multiple exposure in which the same couple, the man sitting on a sofa and the woman reclining across both the couch and his lap, are seen […]
Chrysalis Jiri’s untitled watercolor depicts a rooster strutting on a grassy field, with a fence, a river, and a mountain range in the distance, all beneath a scrubbily-brushed, cloudy sky. Nowhere does the painting technique approach optical realism, but everything is clearly identifiable — not least the rooster, […]
Susan Klinker’s assemblage, variously titled “Scarab Piece” or “Desert Transformation,” recounts what she describes as her “transformative experience during a desert meditation” while she was “on a three-day prayer retreat at Christ in the Desert Monastery, Abiquiu, New Mexico.” The work initially seems to resemble a rugged, weathered […]
Hikmet Sidney Loe left in the summer of 2021. Left Utah, that is. Moved her residence 385 miles south to Nevada, where she now teaches in the art history department at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Left Salt Lake City, where she had lived for decades, working […]
Hospitals are bustling busy places where people move quickly with purpose, where missteps can divide life and death, and where hurting people spend countless hours waiting. The team of chaplains at the University of Utah hospital, along with architects, designers, and artists, have created a space of respite […]
Beginning 2023, sculptor Nathan Brimhall is very excited about a commissioned piece he’s working on for a private residence in the Colony in Park City. “It will be the largest work I’ve done at between 20-24 feet tall,” he says. The idea dates back to 2017. “It is […]
As 2023 begins, Susan Makov is anticipating the publication of poet Gary Stein’s Getting to Heaven (and Other Miracles). Makov’s work, based on images the poets sent as source material, graces the cover. The book cover was just part of a busy 2022 for the retired professor. She […]
Personal identity is one of the most influential issues of the day, one with its essence to be found in memory. Recalling not only what has happened, but what we felt like then is how we create a durable sense of who we are. In the 21st century […]
A friend suggested, in jest, that I spend a few years editing down the thousands of entries in the new Dictionary of Utah Fine Artists to a more manageable Dictionary of Utah Fine Artists Who Matter. They all matter, of course. Not being an artist himself, my friend […]
Two bowls are set on a small wooden end table. The bowl on the right reads, “Take one of these cards if you do NOT have OCD.” The bowl on the left reads, “Take one of these cards if you DO have OCD.” Each is filled with cards […]
Every genre of art comes, if not with rules exactly, then with expectations. Religious images are not permitted to be funny, while landscapes are expected to focus on land rather than the people living on it. Judging from endless corridors lined with countless monotonous examples, portraits must be […]
On a bookshelf a few feet from where I’m writing this sits a volume that claims to contain “the complete paintings of Vincent van Gogh”—(it should say “surviving,” his mother having burned half his work when she became discouraged). It’s a large and rather heavy book. Nearby, a […]
In “Reflections on Lake Powell,” printmaker Rob Chipman could be said to have reversed a common but popular natural sight. Beneath a classic desert sky of clouds too ephemeral to ever produce rain, a red rock landscape is doubled by its reflection on the reservoir’s surface. Normally, a […]
It’s a well-known fact that while comedy doesn’t always produce outright laughter, it does require a happy ending. So if the paintings of Lucky Tuck, now on view upstairs in the Utah State Capitol, are comedies — some of them are deliberately funny — can they be said […]
