Every museum or community art center needs a really big room. At the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the biggest gallery extends like an atrium up through the floor above, so when they wanted to showcase Salt Lake’s explosive mural art movement, which has decorated buildings of every […]
Located in the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art’s Codec Gallery, Shattering the Pictures in Our Heads uses multiple screens to deconstruct stereotypes of the “Mythic Indian.” Shattering the Pictures in Our Heads is the most sophisticated exhibit currently running at UMOCA, presented in a gallery that uses “codec” […]
In Black River, Charles Edward Williams tells a personal story of universal relevance through eloquent physical metaphors. He could have written it down in one of those dubious memoirs that became all the rage a few years ago: how the author fell into addiction or abuse, hurt loved […]
Sometimes it seems like the current desire to make art a tool of political activism and social change is threatening to displace its fundamental virtues. If a gallery show asks us to put on headphones and listen to anonymous speakers talking about their lives, does it augment a […]
It was recently calculated by the University of Cambridge that the amount of electricity required by Bitcoin in a year would power all the tea kettles of the United Kingdom for 27 years. This startling assertion brings to mind two facts, both of which are part of the […]
At first glance, there’s something distressingly familiar about Nick Pedersen’s Slow Apocalypse, which — installed in the Exit gallery at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art — represents a traditional gallery, including an upholstered viewing bench surrounded by 14 framed-and-hung works. Initially it recalls, among other things, a […]
A linen print tacked to the gallery wall beckons our gaze with its earth-colored, vertically-configured shapes. At proximity, the planes of color converge with bold, textured patterns and strategically placed outlines that reveal the underlying canvas. Immersed in the scene is a standing figure — a maid — […]
The semicircular handle of a wicker basket frames the angelic face of a young woman, which is doubled by reflection from the silvery surface of its contents. A pair of blue-gloved hands supports the basket’s bowl, while concentric pink ovals of satin and roses, a pink lace bow […]
News that one of the world’s most exciting landscape painters has moved to Utah, adding the Rockies and Wasatch mountains to an already stunning resumé, sounds a little like saying another ship full of coal has arrived in Newcastle. After all, no other paintable subject is more popular […]
In a few weeks it will be ten years since Jorge Rojas first showed his art in Salt Lake City, bringing him to 15 Bytes’ attention and eventual inclusion in Utah’s 15. Since then, as one of the foremost arts activists in Utah, he has alternated between showing […]
It did seem too bad about the video. I mean, here’s this uber-intriguing show at UMOCA — joyful, absorbing, edgy, impactful, magical, riotous both in color and often also in mood — a superb conveyance of works-to-date by the genius Beat-origin artist and wordsmith, a professor of humanities […]
The floor of a dark room sprouts fifteen narrow white pillars, three rows of five, laid out like an orchard. Each slightly more than waist-high pedestal supports a different object; some are large and protrude into the surrounding space, balanced in defiance of gravity, while others are compact, […]
In order to enter Material Issues, the pieces of which can be seen from above, spread invitingly across the ground level gallery of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, you must cross the familiar steel bridge and descend the switchbacks of the staircase, first walking away, into the […]
If you hit UMOCA on Saturday night, opportunity for fame awaits: the chance to digitally distort or enhance the work of a respected local or nationally or internationally famous artist and get your resulting image in a database and printed catalog. Not only that, but at 8:30 sharp […]
In the darkened gallery they float like apparitions, life-size outlines of figures captured in poses that shift between submission and aggression, carved masks sprouting from their flattened surface suggesting fear, defiance, bafflement, awe. Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez’s Casta Paintings, currently on exhibit at the Street Gallery of the Utah Museum […]
