On July 16, in the Harris Fine Arts Building, a traditional showcase for BYU student projects, senior Katie Marie Liechty installed what might have been intended to be three separate ensembles, although the complete installation also works well as one compound work. Given the subject matter of this […]
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 […]
The gallery titles this show Round Trip, a reference to life’s having taken Haworth from western America to Britain and back. Aside from the two bracelets and “Jewels and Ring,” a freestanding set of fabric jewels, Haworth, if she chose to follow Cindy Sherman’s example, might well call most of the works “film stills.”
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. […]
The art world is full of strange processes, from the rituals artists use to give themselves ideas, to the crafts they employ in bringing these inspirations into being, and so on to the necessary habits and innovations employed by audiences in sorting out the results. One of the […]
Contemplating Karin Hodgin-Jones’ two remarkable machines, both titled “Tug,” what may well come to mind are the unquenchably popular inventions of Leonardo da Vinci: the ornithopter and the aerial screw that couldn’t fly, the parachute and the diving suit that would almost certainly have killed their users. […]
Back at the turn of the millennium, Shon Taylor and Ray Childs were looking to make something out of the technologies then evolving all around them. They could see how the advent of the computer was creating a new approach to graphic arts, but so could a whole […]
It’s not exactly nostalgia that makes antique scientific paraphernalia attractive. Not usually windows into our personal pasts, these carefully crafted tools and specimens take viewers on a journey into the collective history of exploring and deciphering the only planet we know. Two artists who have mined the aesthetic […]
Other than as categories, art terms like ‘representational’ and ‘realistic’ aren’t very helpful. The weightlessly floating, elongated figures of Byzantine mosaics ‘realistically represented’ the spiritual truth so important to those who lived in the dark age that followed the fall of Rome, that souls and eternity mattered more […]
Ansel Adams, the first photographer to insist that photographs are artworks, blurred another boundary when he compared the making of a photograph to the composition of music. The negative, he said, was like a score, and the print was like a performance. Marcel Duchamp, the pioneering gender-bender who […]
It hasn’t been long since Laura Hope Mason graduated from the U of U. This becomes apparent during her opening lecture for her latest show, now up at the Salt Lake City Library, when questions asked by her audience turn into shared recollections of classes taken, particular professors, […]
One of the more perennially popular genres of art, often done in watercolors that are engraved and printed—sometimes bound in albums or books, at other times framed in sets hung together on a wall—is the ‘botanical,’ a characteristics-displaying portrait of a plant species shown through an exceptionally complete […]
OK. You may be convinced there is one authentic way of painting. One subject matter, perhaps, and one legitimate presentation. Like Clement Greenberg, you may think pure painting must be flat, call attention to itself as two-dimensional manipulation of color and form on a wall. You may associate […]
Playwright Brian Richard Mori set himself a challenge when he set out to dramatize one of the 20th century’s most illuminating literary feuds. While more than half of all Americans must be old enough to remember this and other events from the early 1980s, few things can have […]
When Jena Schmidt saw ‘Black North’ written inside the lid of her grandfather’s brass compass, the words resonated with her painterly project as though she’d found a fellow explorer. While compass directions have rich associations for us, they don’t really have colors: north is no more black than […]
Roundly praised, intermittently censored, and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. —Margalit Fox, New York Times obituary The news that a touring exhibit of works by Maurice Sendak, the […]
One of the key questions art plays with at the present moment can be implied to the five-word phrase it is and it isn’t. Most traditional works of art unambiguously intend viewers to see just what they pretend to be: a visage, a human figure, a moment from life. Kandace Steadman pulled three artists from Finch Lane’s slush pile, the stack of proposals every gallery (like every publisher, whence the term is borrowed) draws from, and juxtaposed them to call attention to three relatively new forms of this ambiguity.
In Don’t Read This, eight artists attempt to explore incorporating the verbal content of a message into the way it’s presented without allowing text to hijack the image.
