The desert is a vacant cochlea, a geographical chamber of bone, in which waves propagate from the base freely distant sound brought close to my hearing. The vehicle was now perched in an alcove of short, pinyon pine, amidst a vast solitude and harsh stillness. Soaking in the yellow grassy plain, I paced around laying … Read more
NOTE: This is Part II of reviews of shows from the 2018 Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival. For Part I, see here. Austin Archer’s Marty Has Cancer – Prufrock Productions Every performance of this play sold out or had standing room only, which likely makes it one of the most successful productions ever presented at … Read more
NOTE: This is the first of two parts about this year’s Great Salt Lake Fringe, which includes reviews of three shows. Part II will highlight reviews of four other shows. For its fourth year, the Great Salt Lake Fringe festival (Aug. 2- Aug. 12) is testing its new venue space at the Gateway shopping center … Read more
In The Poetics of Space, the 1957 book by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, the interactive effects of our minds with our most intimate, familiar surroundings were the focus of his phenomenological approach. Bachelard saw the childhood home, for example, as a theatrical space that inspired expressions of our dreamlike imaginations. With Bachelard, it was French … Read more
Queer cinema has matured significantly within the last decade and, this year’s Utah Film Center’s Damn These Heels International Film Festival is a panoply of emancipating artistic expressions that break many taboos and boundaries. The 23 feature-length films, including 14 fictional narratives and nine documentaries from a dozen countries, introduce audiences to stories where different … Read more
The Utah Film Center’s Damn These Heels LGBTQ Film Festival offers 23 films and three programs of short films for its 15th anniversary. Utah filmgoers have a rare opportunity to see some of the best examples of LGBTQ cinema today, as 21 films are receiving their Utah premieres and two others are being their first … Read more
Every documentary filmmaker inevitably struggles with the question: Do we have a story here? Five years ago, when Holly Tuckett and Kendall Wilcox assembled a creative team that included other Utah filmmakers to document Utah’s same-sex marriage case, there were many uncertainties. The prospect of three couples, the small firm of Magleby and Greenwood and … Read more
Long after their brief time in the public eye has ended, some avant-garde movements exist in remnants that have been absorbed unconsciously into the philosophical and aesthetic bloodstream and reappear with respected significance decades later. In Europe, for barely more than a decade beginning in the late 1950s, the Situationist International movement attracted a great … Read more
Fifteen awards were announced today in the 16th annual Fear No Film portion of the Utah Arts Festival, including a Grand Jury Prize, Utah Short Film of The Year, Fear No Filmmaker Award, three honorable mentions and the best short film in each of the seven ‘band aids’ categories around which the film festival was … Read more
The 42nd Utah Arts Festival has announced various awards for visual arts and literary arts. Nine awards were presented for the Artist Marketplace. All of the visual artist award winners are eligible for invitation to the Utah Arts Festival in 2019. Best of Show and People’s Choice Award winners also will have their booth fees … Read more