We Are Changed: Zvi Gotheiner Brings Bears Ears to the RDT Stage
“We were changed.” It’s a phrase Zvi Gotheiner says repeatedly as we discuss his new work, “Dancing the Bears Ears,” being performed this week at Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT). It becomes almost a mantra. A rhythmic punctuation mark to pace his thoughts. It’s something he said repeatedly along […]
Ririe-Woodbury’s Parallax Provides Various Views of the Company’s Talents
Ririe-Woodbury in Daniel Charon’s Exilic Dances. Photo courtesy of Ririe-Woodbury. Sept. 28-30, Ririe-Woodbury’s six artists undertook the task of creating for their audience a sense of Parallax — the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions. What ‘object’ […]
Encycloing the Jetty: Hikmet Sidney Loe Meanders Through Robert Smithson’s Earthwork
Though people travel from around the globe to visit Robert Smithson’s monumental Spiral Jetty, located on the northeastern shore of Great Salt Lake, to this day some Utahns have no idea that one of the 20th century’s most iconic artworks exists in their own backyard. One who does is […]
Bewitched by Stuff: Joe Carter Looks Closely To Find the Humanity of Things
Joe Carter in his studio. Photo by Simon Blundell. Joe Carter might not look like a “Burning Man” regular, but this summer’s gathering is the first he has missed in years. “We went to Element 11, instead,” he says, referencing Utah’s new, cozier version of the enormous desert […]
To Embody Truth: A Profile of Street Photographer Ryan Trimble
Ryan Trimble “Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it,” said Yeats. This is the motto photographer Ryan Trimble lives by and the thesis of the personal introduction on his website. Trimble is a photographer, writer, and father of three daughters, but he is first and foremost […]
Alternative Process: Thomas Aguila, Etsuko Kato and Kelly O’Neill Get Physical with Photography
In Utah, photography historically has been behind the times. If it was happening 30 years ago in New York, then it’s probably starting to happen now in Salt Lake City. photo_dot_alt proves this wrong as three artists bring the national dialogue on alternative photography to Finch Lane Gallery. Thomas Aguila, […]
Michael Gills’ The House Across from the Deaf School wins Book Award for Fiction
15 Bytes is pleased to announce the winner of the 2017 15 Bytes Book Award for Fiction: Michael Gills’ The House Across from the Deaf School, a collection of inter-related stories set in the rural South. The judges’ citation for the book follows: Both a straight-talker and a poet at […]
Scott Abbott’s Immortal for Quite Some Time Wins Book Award for Creative Nonfiction
15 Bytes is pleased to announce the winner of the 2017 15 Bytes Book Award for Creative Nonfiction: Scott Abbott’s Immortal for Quite Some Time, not a memoir but “a fraternal meditation on the question, ‘Are we friends, my brother?’’” The book opens in 1991, as Abbott, his sisters, […]
Unnaturalized Generations: Robert Terashima Explores Japanese-American Identity in a New Chapbook
In 1966, Salt Lake City’s “Japan Town” was demolished to build the Salt Palace Convention Center, taking with it a deep cultural memory of institutionalized prejudice. Although many Japanese immigrants came to America between 1884 and 1907, Asian immigrants were prevented from becoming naturalized citizens until 1952. A […]
Art, Oil and the Possibility for Change: A Conversation with Ali Mitchell
At Salt Lake’s September Gallery Stroll, Mestizo Institute of Culture and Arts | MICA opened Ali Mitchell’s Oil Fields, a multimedia exhibition evoking industrial landscapes as cultural artifacts as a means to explore complex systems of social, political, and economic production. 15 Bytes tracked down the recent University of Utah […]
The Object of an Object: Jann Haworth’s Mannequin Marchers
“Mannequin Defectors I” Much has been written about Jann Haworth, but two things seem customary to mention. One is her formative involvement with Pop art, which began in England and with which she still identifies. This biographical fact might otherwise escape her American audience, since the substantive work […]
Amy Jorgensen Crashes the Patriarchal Party at Nox Contemporary
“Dinner Napkin No 1” Things were going swimmingly in the Garden of Eden before a sinister serpent offered Eve, Earth’s first woman, an apple. Though such a partaking was expressly off limits, Eve simply couldn’t resist the seduction of the deliciously bright and crisp fruit. Letting her selfish […]
The Secrets of Communication: Love, Loss and Birds in Sylvia Torti’s Cages
“Have you ever heard of mammal watching?” a professor once asked me. “Besides whale watching?” I admitted that I hadn’t. “Sure,” he continued, “we humans like to watch animals of all kinds, but have you ever heard of a self-described snaker? Met an insect-looker at a party? But no one […]
The Degradation of Justin Watson
Like microplastics, Justin Watson seems to be everywhere these days. There was “The Fountain of Youth,” his video installation at Bountiful/Davis Art Center, that came down recently, and currently you can see his piece |human| at Nox Contemporary and the exhibition . . . the future is the past is the future is […]
Plein Air Winners Celebrated in Brigham City
“The Wild Garden” by Susette Gertsch Some of Utah’s finest plein air painters converged on Brigham City for the Brigham City Museum’s Fourth Annual Plein Air Competition. Lydia Gravis, Gallery Director at the Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery at Weber State, juried the competition and selected Susette Gertsch’s […]
Saltgrass Reopens at the Salt Lake City Art Studios
A few boxes remain to be unpacked in the entryway to Saltgrass’s new home. In anticipation of a grand reopening party on Saturday, Sept. 16., members, friends and volunteers are putting the finishing touches to Saltgrass Printmakers’ new space this week. Gentrification pushed the nonprofit out of its […]
Kramer vs. Controversy: A Profile of Writ & Vision Gallerist Brad Kramer
In 2016, gallerist Brad Kramer decided to display a painting by J. Kirk Richards depicting the biblical Eve as African. The ensuing controversy came from an unexpected source. Not from the prudish, objecting to the depiction of her naked breasts (Kramer’s gallery is in Provo and his audience […]
When Geologic Time Becomes Human: EyeKnee Coordination’s DRYPP
Photo of DRYPP, courtesy of EyeKnee Coordination. En route to DRYPP, I passed people taking photos of the sun diffused by haze caused by smoke blown into the Salt Lake Valley from fires as far away as Los Angeles and the Pacific Northwest. I thought about my family and […]



















































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