Horses have inspired artists for millennia. From the mesmerizing silhouettes in the Panel of the Horses at the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave in southern France, to the dynamic Mycenaean frescoes of ancient Greece, to Deborah Butterfield’s widely recognized sculptural interpretations, the horse has remained a persistent muse across cultures […]
Shalee Cooper had already begun to pack. A few paintings were boxed, ready to be shipped back to the Mandelman/Ribak Foundation, which the gallery had been working with since 2018. After six years at the Bogue Foundry, Modern West’s lease would be up in December. In a changed […]
Out There includes 17 artists, most of whom will be familiar to Modern West’s regulars. They all appear frequently, and most have some work in the collection, giving their audience a chance to witness their gradual, and occasionally sudden evolution. Two themes that made for new work were the ongoing environmental crisis, which has only grown worse while almost nothing is done by those who could and ought to help, and the pandemic, with its associated social isolation and continuing controversy, in spite of mortality remaining high.
An influential art gallery doesn’t just record the history of art; they help make it. An excellent example is the current, primarily painting exhibition at Modern West, shared between gallery director and painter Shalee Cooper and Navajo sculptor and painter Sheldon Harvey. When the gallery’s founder and guiding […]
The Salt Lake Engineering Works, built in 1904 as a machine shop, warehouse and foundry on Salt Lake’s near West Side, has a new tenant that’s adding some extra class to the increasingly artsy neighborhood. Modern West Fine Art has left Second South and Second East and settled […]
[dropcap]Almost[/dropcap] from the beginning, Diane Stewart’s Modern West Fine Art has been evolving away from the cowboys, American Indians and Western landscapes — however jazzed up or modernized — that threatened to define it at its inception. Gradual at first, the process has picked up steam in recent […]
In the December 2013 edition of 15 Bytes we introduced you to Instantly Framed, the new app that helps social media users and photographers preserve and display their online photos designed by our former image editor Shalee Cooper. This Friday night, for the Salt Lake Gallery Stroll, Alpine Art […]
Early last fall Shalee Cooper, who was then working as our Image Editor, told us she had found a full-time business opportunity and would have to step down from her responsibilities at 15 Bytes. She had spent two years transforming the look of our magazine, so we were […]
When an entire roll of film taken at the Keukenhof Gardens in the Netherlands came out blurry, Shalee Cooper decided it was time to study photography. After returning from her study abroad, she enrolled in the foundation program at the University of Utah, and has made Salt Lake […]
Within the matte and frame lies an almost blank, gray rectangle. Recognizing the one contrasting spot—a foot, toes downward, entering at the top-left corner—causes this undifferentiated area to pop into focus: a reach of asphalt or concrete stretching away from the camera, into which open space a woman […]
In a society where everything seems disposable, photographer Shalee Cooper looks for alternative perspectives. Over the past seven years Cooper has collected twenty-five pairs of used cowboy boots. By buying used Cooper keeps her environmental impact low, but that doesn’t explain the “obsession” that began with a single […]
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when photography was in its infancy, the questions – What is photography? Documentation or art? – were hotly debated. Photographer Shalee Cooper revisits these questions in her latest series of photographs on display at Rose Wagner Art Center through October. […]
