Where are you going, Still Life: Charles Becker at the St. George Art Museum and Phillips Gallery’s Brad Overton
Geoff Wichert examines the genre in the hands of Charles Becker, Vincent van Gogh and Brad Overton.
Geoff Wichert
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Memoir: recollection without tranquility?
Literary tastes lead to literary debates. Readers disagree about subjects and treatments, and one reader’s favorite book is the object of another’s scorn. It is ever thus, and should be; lively opinions make for better, more attentive reading. But what about entire genres? Even those who don’t love […]
Beyond the Horizon: Stephen Foss at Julie Nester Gallery
In the February 2011 edition of 15 Bytes Geoff Wichert reviews Stephen Foss’ exhibit of enamel paintings at Julie Nester Gallery.
The Arc and the Sediment
“You have to be careful. This one will write it all down.” The question we asked ourselves was simple. What kind of writing wins Utah’s literary awards? In this month’s edition, we took a look at 2009 Utah Book Award for Poetry winner Lance Larsen, whose […]
Geoff Dyer and Utah
Magnificent Days: Geoff Dyer makes Utah a habit On January 14, British author Geoff Dyer went public with the story of his obsession for vacationing in Utah. He did so in the Financial Times, a London newspaper read by people who live in the world’s most expensive city, […]
Ken Sanders’ Bureaucratic Nightmare
Last year many Salt Lake residents, who are known for searching the news for local names and familiar faces, were delighted to see downtown bookstore stalwart Ken Sanders recognized as perhaps the nation’s leading enemy of antiquarian book thieves. In The Man Who Loved Books Too Much Allison […]
Is Dance Dead?
The art of ballet is at the point of death. Or it’s moribund, awaiting transformation. Such are the points of discussion between two of its foremost critics, Jennifer Homans and Robert Gottlieb. Homans is the dance critic for The New Republic and the author of the recently published Apollo’s Angels: A History […]
Animal Brilliance
We expect alchemy from poets and artists. To hear Lance Larsen and Jacqui Biggs Larsen tell it, some of their audience expects more from them. In the text introducing Animal Brilliance, their collaborative exhibit of her paintings captioned by his epigraphs, they report being made to feel they should […]
Last Minute Gift Ideas
If you’re still looking for gift ideas you might check out Radio West’s Best Music of 2010 and Holiday Book Show programs. And if you haven’t read the entire December 2010 edition of 15 Bytes we’ll remind you that there are some art-related book suggestions on pages 5 […]
Steve Martin’s An Object of Beauty
At the end of Shopgirl, a first novel published to cautious praise in 2000 and made into a well-received movie in 2005, Mirabelle Butterfield, a struggling artist supporting herself in a dead-end retail job, makes a vocational leap upwards to selling art in a gallery. A decade later, […]
Trevor Southey: Reconciliation
On the wall opposite UMFA’s entrance, looming over passageways leading to various destinations, the monumental painting Flight Aspiration can be seen almost as Trevor Southey conceived it for the Salt Lake Airport. Four horizontal figures fly from right to left across its surface: a man facing towards us, […]
Trevor Southey Thursday Night at UMFA
“In a sense I have become myself . . . .” Trevor Southey in person at U.M.F.A. by Geoff Wichert Trevor Southey, one-time Bad Boy of Utah art, has turned out to be indispensible for anyone wishing to understand why there is—and why there isn’t—a distinctly ‘Mormon’ art. […]
Jan Andrews’ JOSEPH BRODSKY
Joseph Brodsky: In the Prison of Latitudes a film by Jan Andrews In 1963, Joseph Brodsky was arrested by the KGB. While most Americans were probably too distracted that year by the arrest in Alabama of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, the ominous news of 80 American […]
Positively Pixillated: Devorah Sperber at the Kimball Art Center
While Sperber doesn’t actually belong to any of the now-exhausted camps that have cluttered the landscape of art for the last half-century, she incorporates the raveled threads of their various narratives into a strand she makes by twisting them together, thereby restoring to art the feeling of a unified purpose such as artists and their audiences shared before it disintegrated under the assault of the permanent avant garde….
Mirror Mirror
“Of Two Minds” by Emily McPhie The predicament of art that takes the human figure as subject matter today recalls Dickens on pre-revolutionary Europe: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” On the one hand, with reading on the decline and the graphic […]
Face of Utah Sculpture
“Those Pretty Arches,” a wall-mounted sculpture by Nadra Haffar on view as part of The Face of Utah Sculpture VI, is made of enamel pit-fired onto several long, battered, torn, and twisted strips of galvanized roofing. The use of ‘arches’ in the title tells us that it rises—rather than […]
Stefanie Dykes: From Quarrel to Querl
A successful printmaker and key figure among local artists, Stefanie Dykes insists she doesn’t like to question appearances. Instead of digging in search of concealed causes, she prefers the commonsense approach: assume things are largely as they seem and try to see them clearly. That’s probably why her prints have […]
Adriana Lara
Take the best line from each of the ten best poems and print them on this page. They may produce ten splendid images in our minds as we read them, but they will not become a poem, and if they do, it will not have anything like the […]
