“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” So Charles Dickens characterized the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities. So we may pray writers in the future will reflect on our plight today. In any event, it certainly can be […]
Myriad Dance Company recently presented its winter offering, Perspective, at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA). The company’s first publicized performance under the artistic leadership of Kendall Fischer, Perspective lived up to its name by subverting expectations for the venue and format in which dances are presented. If you’re not […]
Attending two performances addressing themes of gender, sexuality, race, and power in Salt Lake City over the same weekend in November was disorienting. UMOCA’s When Flesh Becomes Matter: Bodies Unbounded, by choreographer Yasin (Ya-Ya) Fairley, and the University of Utah School of Dance’s Gender/Power, by Maya Ciarrocchi and Kris Grey alongside U […]
Mike Lee, an Artist in Residence at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, describes himself as a product of two world cultures, having split his childhood between rural Japan and Utah. His work bridges these two separate geographical and cultural regions with reference to an elusive third: the […]
Andrew Rice’s new works, on exhibit at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art’s Projects Gallery, are filled with dark masses, scrubbed in black oil sticks, covering a rainbow of hues that struggle to emerge through the darkened planes. They define abstracted interior spaces, corners of large rooms, two-sometimes-three-stories […]
Longtime followers of UMOCA, going back to the days when it was called the Salt Lake Art Center, have known to check out the room all but hidden in the back, at the northeast corner of the large, downstairs gallery. Here gems often can be found: small collections […]
Tyrone Davies’ In Camera comprises more than a dozen television sets arranged in deliberate, symmetrical spatial compositions around an altar-like pair that much of the time places an image of religious meditation in close proximity to a giant sports arena. Symbolism noted. All the sets are playing, a […]
Amalia Ulman’s anti-war installation is an ambitious, multimedia work in which the artist clearly has invested much of herself. In a dark room, three independent elements—wire sculptures that can be felt and navigated around as well as seen; recorded music from an unseen source; and in an […]
The current controversy over art’s funding, precipitated by the apparently politically-motivated firing of Utah Division of Arts and Museums director Lynnette Hiskey, exposes two fundamentally different ideals of how art should operate in modern society. To be fair, it’s not that the Tea Party-types don’t like art; […]
The right title can do a lot to empower an exhibition. The best name on a show in recent memory belongs to Lizze Määttälä’s exhibit in the Artists-Working-in-Utah gallery at UMOCA, which she calls Uphill / Both Ways. Of course the phrase isn’t original, having started life in […]
Aesthetic theory has always been a subset of Philosophy, a body of human thought that modern science has essentially rendered obsolete. The problem is that philosophers, be they Plato or Kant, want to legislate reality: to say, not Is this beautiful? but rather, What is beauty? The process […]
Perhaps the most important question that should be asked of any new work of art is this: So What? A work can do all sorts of things, some of them even unprecedented, but unless doing so serves a purpose, the accomplishment may be no more than a stunt. […]
