The eyes of the “Spell Caster” gaze forth from a countenance at once as ancient as the gnarled forest that surrounds it and as conceptually modern as its nonbinary gender. Bewitching is one word for it, spellbinding another. Much of the portrait’s power comes from its elusive smile: […]
The Great Salt Lake has been a beacon for scientists and artists alike for years. Like any other place warranting so much attention, it becomes progressively more difficult to offer new perspectives on it. Artist Dan Tree has accomplished just that with his show Shoreline Meditations. A simple […]
Artists have long explored the infinite layers of humanity. With The Many Suits We Wear, Alix Twiggs Wright takes that exploration into her practice to create physical suits that represent our many real and metaphorical identities. In the far back gallery of Bountiful Davis Art Center, viewers can […]
Two of Colour Maisch’s favorite materials reveal particular insight into why she makes the kind of art she does, or for that matter, why she makes art at all. One, which refers back to the influence of critical history and art education, is porcelain: a celebrated, durable, even […]
“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 […]
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 […]
For instance, I hold life, pressing thunder, another breakdown and through A simple whisper darling I press the trigger on the limbs of another day. —Nicole LaRue, “For Instance” Poetry is an art form, but one that essentially stands in opposition to visual art. Calligraphy might be shown […]
“…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 […]
Throughout the Covid pandemic, public conversation made much of the experience of isolation. Recent art exhibits, several reviewed on this site, included interpretations of solitude and of its consequences. Still, for such a commonplace source of suffering, it didn’t seem all that well illustrated — perhaps because it […]
“Epigenetic Mechanism #1” sits humbly on the floor of the underground gallery at Bountiful Davis Art Center, part of the circle of objects Art Morrill calls “Material Support.” Nothing about it refers back to previous art works, though it makes copious references to what lies outside today’s art. […]
Surgeons and airline pilots probably shouldn’t pretend to know more than they do. But is it wrong when an art critic does? After all, what we do is hardly dangerous, or even, for that matter, important. But it may still matter, if for example an artist knows something […]
There are three levels at work in Bea Hurd’s It Was Their Third Cup of Coffee. At the bottom is physiology: the human body and the human brain, each in competition for the same resources. It’s well known that while the brain makes up only 2% of body […]
Walking into the small gallery at the Bountiful Davis Art Center where Paper Bandages is installed feels like departing on a road trip so early in the day that it’s still dark out. Silhouettes and familiar shapes can be made out at first, but as inky darkness gradually […]
On the one hand, the term “orb” might mean nothing more than a sphere, which is what McKenna Anderl, recently the Junior Artist in Residence at BDAC, chose to paint on a salvaged dictionary page. But then again, the word, primarily used in phrases like “the orb and […]
Faced with Kristina Lenzi’s 11 wicked caricatures at Bountiful Davis Art Center, “subtle” might not be the first word that comes to mind. Such large, distorted heads sitting atop long necks that grow out of bodies so tiny a viewer may overlook them — it all feels less […]
