The big local art news last week (while we were on vacation) was the announcement that the Central Utah Art Center is being evicted from its Ephraim home in August. As reported in the Salt Lake Tribune and the City Weekly, for the past six years the CUAC […]
Geoff Wichert examines two new shows at the CUAC that explore works that tap into various cultural narratives, from the super heroes of comic books to the mystic shamans of primitive cultures.
Matthew Choberka, a well-liked and influential painting professor at Weber State, can briefly be seen in overlapping exhibits in two of the most progressive galleries in Utah. His work could be called postmodernist, or painterly– environmentalist, but it seems to me that he partakes of a mainstream movement […]
While carrying out his pivotal role in the early days of Modernism, Cezanne found time to set a precedent for one of its characteristic exercises: in sixty-some paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire and uncounted tabletop arrangements of apples, pears, bowls, and bottles, he showed that an artist can paint […]
Sometimes an installation gets an unexpected boost from nature: so it was in the outdoor sculpture garden at the Central Utah Art Center this week. One of the rare sumptuously beautiful works of art with critical credibility, Roscoe Wilson’s Waste Not, Want Not (see our December issue) saw […]
Back in the twentieth century, the meticulous, pedestrian questions of art criticism were swept aside by a racy substitute that captured the public’s fancy in a way academic discourse never could. In a foretaste of what was about to happen to art itself, the response “But is it […]
In his “Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, with Saints Jerome, Paul, and Peter,” Botticelli makes one of the Renaissance’s more subtle claims for the status of art and the artist. After all, of the three men he shows present at the crucifixion, one was not yet born, one had yet […]
Public vs. Private: Who Owns the Light? Sean Slemon and Herman Dutoit at CUAC by Geoff Wichert From ten feet away it appears that in Tied Up/Tied Down, Sean Slemon has filled a shadow box with bits of leafy foliage and then overlaid lengths of orange ribbon in […]
The camera looks out through a small, square window set high in a wall overlooking some trees and what might be a garden run wild. Through it we see an odd figure shamble into view, walking away from us. His shapeless clothing and bucket-like hat hide any sense […]
Printmaker Stefanie Dykes, whose mostly black-and-white relief prints dating from 2002 till 2005 are on exhibit at the Central Utah Art Center until October 3, apparently finds the present (pun intended) easier to swallow when it’s dressed up to look deceptively like the past. One of the more […]
At first sight, Sean Morello’s two-dimensional works seem too slight to support a title that properly belongs to an encyclopedia. But to view What Art Is as a summary is to look through the wrong end of the telescope. Morello, like Art Danto in “The Transfiguration of […]
I. If it has become a cliché that art usurps the place in modern life once held by religion, it’s an ironic cliché, for of all the subjects and sources of our art, religion is surely one of the least respected. In fact, in its purest sense […]
