At the turn of the 20th century, the American West came vividly into focus in the public imagination, shaped by a flourishing body of romantic representation circulated through poetry, illustration, travel writing, and popular media. Among the voices helping to define this picturesque vision was Henry Herbert Knibbs, […]
On walking into the Street Gallery at UMOCA and seeing the paintings of Elizabeth Malaska for the first time, they just might appear—and there may be no more accurate word—grotesque. Consider “Oracle,” which is the closest to the entrance. Three women sit close, their backs to a table […]
Visual artists are not like musicians. A musician will practice making sounds every day. She may tell you that if she misses even one day, she can hear the difference; that after two days, her colleagues can hear it; and after three days, the audience will know it. […]
Housed in the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art’s Street Gallery, Mariposa unfolds in a corridor of curated light. Carlos Rosales-Silva’s paintings range from small, intimate works to expansive site-specific wall pieces, each alive with high-key color, bold geometry and textured surfaces. Encountered together, they feel both deeply familiar […]
Utah artists and their audiences are no strangers to the salvage of discarded objects possessing the power to suggest rich associations between these things and new ideas. Nor do we lack experience with assemblage, the bringing together of unrelated bits and pieces to stimulate the cerebral and aesthetic […]
Josh Winegar’s Future Monuments, currently in the Projects Gallery at UMOCA (behind the gift shop, which the gallery doesn’t employ as an exit) includes 12 untitled, heavily manipulated, black-and-white composite photographs assembled from, among other things, photos of carved stone sculptures (presumably originating from monuments). Winegar has gone […]
New Sol LeWitt murals keep going up almost 20 years after his death. They’re new and yet old, some of the initial conceptions dating back to 1968. That’s when LeWitt first conceived of what are known as “wall drawings,” though they often take the form of massive wall […]
One of the rarest and yet most compelling phases in an artist’s career is the time when she emerges like the universe from the chaos of limitless possibilities and begins to find her best direction forward: the work that will fulfill her potential. Antra Sinha has been working […]
Leonardo da Vinci taught that a portrait should begin with the skeleton, to which muscles, flesh, and if appropriate, clothing would be added. The point was to be aware of the presence within the subject of those parts that gave form to the person: the form that became […]
Entering the gallery, I am greeted by five wooden pedestals of varying heights, each supporting dried lavender. The subtle fragrance permeates the air, though not as strongly as I might have expected, relying more on the memory of its scent. It immediately pulls me inward, evoking a sense […]
“I think that if a song isn’t about something, it ought to be an instrumental.” With that advice, spoken often in concert, the great American jazz poet and performer Gil Scott-Heron, author of “Winter in America,” “Johannesburg,” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” never failed to bring […]
The five sculptures and one video that constitute Parable Bodies, the exhibition by Moses Williams now in the AIR Space at UMOCA, simulate living things using materials that are not alive, such as earth and light. That could be said of most art, of course: but it’s not […]
The film is set in the quintessential American space: the interior of an automobile. Marlene Kos is seen sitting on the passenger side of the front seat (the “suicide” seat), while the camera views her from behind. This brings to mind “Jo in Wyoming,” a painting by Edward […]
The view is straight down, so that the desert hillocks and washes look like an abstract painting, all contours and curves on a completely flat canvas. Then the view rotates, the viewer seeming to circle down, around the focal point, moving from above the spot to looking at […]
The relationship of success and freedom is anything but simple. Successful artists, to take one example, often complain that their work sells only so long as they repeat a winning formula, and they may openly pine for their days of obscurity, when they could follow their imaginations freely. […]
Egyptians, Romans, and Europeans all painted landscapes in order to simulate perfect nature in their homes throughout the year, or even for eternity. During the reign of Britain’s Queen Victoria, the invention of the greenhouse made it possible to introduce the public to galleries filled with exotic, actually […]
Above the steel stairway that connects the upper and lower galleries at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, for the duration of the current exhibition, a large monitor displays, in a continuous loop, recent satellite images of Great Salt Lake by UMOCA preparator Jeff Griffin. Watching the lake’s […]
For centuries, Western artists labored to understand and reproduce the appearance of the natural world. Art created in the 19th-century academies of Europe testifies to their eventual success, so that by 1905, Picasso could move on, reminding writer and collector Gertrude Stein that, according to previous standards, the […]
It’s fairly obvious to the discerning that our environment is changing in challenging ways. It’s also apparent that so far, the process remains deniable. Each new degree of temperature, each addition to the severity of storms, soon becomes the “new normal,” so that the continuing slide into inhospitality remains concealed. What Jensen seeks to do in her art is to elevate that almost subliminal transition until it becomes ominous, but to do so without losing track of the appeal of the places she represents. …
