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Archive for January, 2008
It’s Here!
In Western, photography on January 23, 2008 at 6:26 pmEasy lookin’, Durango Herald, Jan. 18, 2008
In Durango, Mixed media, painting, photography on January 21, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Local juror selects mellow landscapes
Top: “Animas Sunset” by Judy Morgan won both the Chamber of Commerce and DATO awards selected by juror Mary Ellen Long at the Four Corner’s Commission exhibition at Durango Arts Center.
Middle: “The 29th Hour,” by Tirzah Camacho, won Best of Show. Hanging next to her painting is “Downward Spiral” by Jeff Madeen, a sculpture made of Juniper bark and ski-edge adhesive.
Bottom: “Canopy” by Patrice Brown was awarded an Honorable Mention.
January 18, 2008
| Special to the Herald
The juror for this year’s popular Four Corner’s Commission show at Durango Arts Center is Mary Ellen Long. Long has been a member of the Durango arts community for some time and is an established book artist. The arts center just named her their 2008 Sweetheart of the Arts honoree.
This is the 12th year that the arts center has launched this regional juried exhibit designed to celebrate the uniqueness of life, the land and the diverse heritage of the Four Corners. And since the arts center is unwilling to pay for hiring an outside juror, Long is a logical choice: established, experienced, dedicated.
This is Durango, I thought as I entered the Barbara Conrad gallery.
The show features lovely landscape paintings, western-style photography, wildlife sculpture and a handmade wooden rocking chair, combined with contemporary painting and found object creations.
It’s an attractive exhibit featuring artists from around the region. Most of the work is well executed and easy to live with. It’s the kind of art that makes one feel good.
Best of Show went to Tirzah Camacho for her acrylic on canvas called “The 29th Hour.” The beautiful painting features warm browns, reds and yellows layered and dripping; a chemistry symbol sits in the lower right, its random numbers and letters blown up into a dripping white splotch. Atop the abstract background is a large, green grasshopper, symbol of motherhood, fertility and abundance. The painting deserves the $500 cash award.
But I’m not in agreement with Long about her Juror’s Choice selection. Linda MacCannell’s “Defensible Space” is a photograph of a house mounted within a photograph of trees, surround by a gilded gold frame. It is an interesting concept, but a puzzling choice as other work in the show spoke to me in a way this work didn’t.
Thaddine Swift Eagle won the Merit Award for “Voices,” one of her vibrant, surrealistic paintings with long text passages that tell a personal story. Both Camacho and Swift Eagle mine their own lives and spill their truths onto canvas in a way that is at once truthful and discomforting. It is exactly what art should do.
The Chamber of Commerce “Reflections of Durango” award, another $500 prize, went to Judy de Vincentis Morgan for her oil painting “The Animas Sunset.” The idyllic painting of the river under an early autumn sunset will be distributed in print form to all Chamber of Commerce members.
The Durango Area Tourism Office selected Rebecca Koeppen’s soft pastel “Blowing Snow,” Ken MacAdams’ digital photograph “Red Mountain Splendor” and Morgan’s “The Animas Sunset” for their twelve-month online promotion award.
An Honorable Mention went to Patrice Brown for “Canopy,” though I think “August Chamisa” was by far the best painting by this artist.
Accomplished work that wasn’t recognized by the awards and promotion system of the exhibit include: Miki Harder’s “Scary, Scary Raven or Liam’s Guardian Angel,” Jan Mercer’s “Hesperus Hay Barn,” Jeff Madeen’s “Downward Spiral,” (which is the first art I’ve seen created with ski-edge adhesive), Jenny Treanor’s “Pagoda” and Al Olson’s “Twilight,” an elegant chromogenic print of lilies that looks delicately hand painted.
With nearly 100 entries, Long had her work cut out for her selecting the 45 works of art on display. It may not be the most unique work we have in the region, but it does reflect life in the Four Corners – beautiful, pleasant, and a bit colorful and challenging.
If you go:
Four Corners Commission, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tues.-Sat., through Feb. 2, Durango Arts Center, 802 East Second Ave., 259-2606.
artsjournalist@centurytel.netLeanne Goebel is a member of the International Association of Art Critics.
Pagosa’s Confluence exhibit reprises artists, Durango Herald, Jan. 11, 2008
In Pagosa Springs, contemporary art on January 21, 2008 at 9:12 pm
“Red Lilly,” on the left, is an intaglio print by Ron Fundingsland from Bayfield. The print is made by carving the image into a copper plate and hand pressing hand-colored images. “Competition,” on the right, is a lithograph by Michael D. Barnes, head of the printmaking department at Northern Illinois University.
Shy Rabbit consistently shows high quality, contemporary art created by lifelong artists. “Confluence: Meeting at One Place” is a recapitulation of what Michael and Denise Coffee have created at their gallery/exhibit/studio/workshop space over the last four years.
The show features works by Michael D. Barnes, Illinois; D. Michael Coffee, the gallery’s owner; Patrick Shia Crabb, California; Ron Fundingsland, Bayfield; Jean Gumpper, Colorado Springs; Kelsey Hauck, Saguache; Karl Isberg, Pagosa Springs; Blair Meerfeld, Sag-uache; Marty Mitchell, Sag-uache; Jill Sykes, California and Nina Tichava, New Mexico.
Many of these artists have been exhibited before at Shy Rabbit. Meerfeld and Mitchell from Saguache are recent additions to the gallery’s posse of artists.
And it is an experience not to be missed. Even the repetitive showing of these same artists from around the country still provides the highest quality contemporary art shown between Southwest Colorado and Santa Fe.
“These are all the kind of people we want to continue to work with over time,” Michael Coffee said. “Most are mature artists with 20 to 30 years experience. Tichava and Barnes are young, but have developed way beyond their years.”
Barnes’ lithographs and drawings are phenomenal. His large charcoal drawings were in a previous show, and smaller pieces are available from the gallery’s flat files. Only three lithographs are on display in this exhibition: “The Strategy,” “The Subject” and “The Competition.” Barnes’ imagery presents cynical stories that prompt psychological dilemma. His titles are satirical. “Competition” is likely my favorite because of the highly realistic marbles outside the read of a scrawny, two-legged creature standing on two boxes, its leash tied to one box.
In “The Subject,” the viewer must decide which creature is the subject. The one in the pen or the one bound outside of the pen? The power of Barnes’ work seems to be the surreal and imagined quality rendered in profoundly accurate detail.
Isberg’s large canvases are equally mysterious and perhaps alchemical. They achieve a paradoxical result by combining incompatible elements. At first glance, the paintings from what Isberg terms his Hermetic Book series are religious and iconographic. But, Isberg’s God is theosophic and known only through the artist’s intuition and spiritual ecstacy.
The images are colorful, geometric and seemingly symmetrical, but upon further investigation, the symmetry does not exist, the colors and shapes form human figures and sexual images. Each of his three paintings “Emblema XXIII,” “Emblema XXIV” and “Emblema XXV” are large acrylic works on canvas painted within the last few months and accompanied by obscure texts. The depth and meaning of each painting is accessible to those willing to understand the meaning, to dig deeper into the symbolism. For example, emblems typically represent the character or history of a family or nation. The work is likely highly personal and perhaps political.
Isberg’s text for “Emblema XXIII” could easily summarize the mission of Shy Rabbit and the purpose of a show like “Confluence.”
“Seek that which the philosopher will not name, whose name is concealed to this day; for if its name were known, many would operate, and the art would be common. Common work is short, and without charge, a small and mean work.”
There is little small and mean work on display in “Confluence.” Don’t miss Fundingsland’s “Red Lily” and Gumpper’s “Secrets” and “Abuzz,” or Hauck’s “Man in Guinea 7.” All are definitely
NOT common.
If you go
“Confluence: Meeting at One Place,” Thursday-Sunday, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. (or by appointment), through Feb. 23, Shy Rabbit Contemporary Arts, 333 Bastille Drive, Pagosa Springs, 731-2766.
artsjournalist@centurytel.net Leanne Goebel is a freelance arts journalist from Pagosa Springs.
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Color as field, Durango Herald, Dec. 28, 2007
In Art Museum, Denver, Durango, painting on January 21, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Top: Frankenthaler’s “Flood, 1967″ is synthetic polymer on canvas (124 by 140 inches).
Middle: Mark Rothko’s oil “Number 18, 1951,” is 81 by 69 inches.
Bottom: Helen Frankenthaler’s 1973 acrylic on canvas”Off White Square” (79 by 235 inches) is in the Denver Art Museum show “Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975.” All photographs are courtesy of the American Federation for the Arts and Geoffrey Clements
The role of art is not to report the visible, but to reveal the unknown. This becomes evident in a recently opened exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. “Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975,” curated by Karen Wilkin.
The radiant, uninflected hues and vast canvases stained with color in this exhibition are vigorous, yet ambiguous. They are large, luminous and purely visual.
Unlike the 1964 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, curated by the infamous critic Clement Greenberg, where he coined the phrase “Post Painterly Abstraction,” this exhibition attempts to broaden Color Field painting.
Greenberg included in his show the artists Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Walter Darby Bannard, Jack Bush, Gene Davis, Friedel Dzubas, Sam Francis, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons and Frank Stella, all of whom were using broad areas of unmodulated color.
He did not include Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Hans Hoffman, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman as Wilkin does in this exhibition organized by the American Federation of the Arts.
The exhibition features more than 40 expansive canvases. And Wilkin seems to have grabbed on to Frankenthaler, who claimed to be influenced by DeKooning and Pollock.
“DeKooning made enclosed linear shapes and applied the brush. Pollock used shoulder and ropes and ignored the edges and corners. I felt I could stretch more in the Pollock framework . . . You could become a DeKooning disciple or satellite or mirror, but you could depart from Pollock,” Frankenthaler said to Gerald Nordland in 1965.
The exhibition’s focal painting is Rothko’s “Number 18, 1951.”
For me, seeing a real Rothko in Colorado is worth a trip to Denver in a snowstorm. That and the vast Frankenthaler canvases, particularly “Off White Square, 1973″ nearly 20-feet wide, and “Seven Types of Ambiquity, 1957,” an elegant early oil painting. Larry Poons’ “Han-San Cadence, 1963,” a richly stained ochre canvas with splotches of turquoise and pale blue, like stars in an earthy sky, is also striking.
Greenberg is the link between many of the artists in this show. He defined their style and created an -ism in art history. Many critics have dismissed “Post Painterly Abstraction” as reactionary, patriarchal and phallocentric. Some have suggested that the work is merely decorative. Perhaps this is true. But Wilkin has curated a pleasing exhibition filled with radiant hues.
Frankenthaler’s work is far from patriarchal and phallocentric. She is the rare woman making art with serious male artists of the time. A student of Hoffman, married to Motherwell and the inspiration for Louis and Noland, she even shared a studio with Dzubas.
Her stain paintings deserve the recognition they have received. Frankenthaler managed to depart from Pollock and create her own sensual style.
Wilkin writes in her essay in the exhibition catalog:
“Unfortunately, the minds of many spectators, who include makers of art, as well as art historians, critics and curators, have been carried so far into regions so purely literary that they seem to have forgotten that the visual is as much a cerebral function as the verbal.”
And as valuable, even if all the work in this show is not as ravishing as Frankenthaler’s, Poons’ and that Rothko.
If you go
“Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975″: Tuesday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-10 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday, noon-5 p.m.; Monday, closed, through Feb. 3, Denver Art Museum, North Building with a few paintings in the Contemporary Art Gallery on the third floor of the Hamilton Building.
leannegoebel.blogspot.comLeanne Goebel is an arts journalist living in Pagosa Springs.
MCA a glowing home for contemporary art, Durango Herald, Dec. 21, 2007
In Art Museum, Denver, contemporary art on January 21, 2008 at 8:37 pm
The exterior of the new Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, which opened in October, is made of glass. The museum is on Delgany Street, northwest of the central cultural district.
In 2005, architect David Adjaye described his design for the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver as a “city in a jewel box.” His concept was to design a jewel box that would not only hold art, but welcome a wide range of people.
On October 28, MCA Denver hosted a free public opening. Executive Director Cydney Payton and the museum board collaborated with Adjaye and challenged him to build an economical ($16.3 million) and environmentally responsible building “that would be a sponge for the museums’ mission to present innovative and challenging art of our time,” Payton said in a radio interview in 2005.
Adjaye was the right choice, and the building is expected to achieve gold-level LEEDS certification for energy and environmental design, a distinction that will make it the first “green” art museum in the country.
The new home for the 10-year-old museum is three structures wrapped in a translucent skin. Each structure is a rectangle, some based upon the golden proportion, a ratio of 1:p (pi).
Entering the new museum at 15th Street and Delgany Street in the Platte Valley, northwest of the city center and cultural district, it is evident that this museum will be like no other contemporary art space.
One enters via a ramp that rises from the sidewalk. A corridor narrows, funneling visitors from the outside to the inside, where one gradually leaves the city behind to enter another space – a space that is all about art and not about architecture. There is no door. On a warm day, the building will be open, but during my visit on a cold, snowy night, a sliding black panel opened automatically for our entrance.
Welcome to the magical world of contemporary art.
Stained concrete floors, dark wood paneling, stark white walls are present, but not overpowering. One young woman greeted visitors. Behind her, a large space with book-filled shelves, the museum bookstore; beside that, a paneled library with sleek Apple computers and contemporary art books, and a glimpse into one of the exhibition spaces.
The museum eases you into the experience of challenging art with five rectangular spaces: one designed for works on paper, another for large works, a third for new media, a fourth for photography and the fifth a project gallery. The 25,000-square-foot space also features a café and a roof garden.
The gray, glass-clad building features an interior skin made from natural polypropylene insulated panels. The panels filter 50 percent of the light and act as a fabulous insulation for the building. From the outside at night, the museum appears to glow from within like a translucent sculpture.
This museum is not a huge industrial space or a flexible warehouse that is commonly the home for non-collecting contemporary art museums. Instead, Adjaye has created a museum where the space is discreet and one can feel the hand of the artist and commune intimately with the work.
Because it is not a typical space, the new MCA Denver will require a unique curatorial approach to creating exhibits specifically for its space, not work lifted from another installation and shoehorned in. Expect more shows like the inaugural exhibition curated by Cydney Payton, “Star Power: Museum as Body Electric.”
“Star Power” features work from David Altmejd of Canada; Carlos Amorales of Mexico; Candice Breitz of South Africa; Rangi Kipa of New Zealand; Wangechi Mutu of Kenya; Chris Ofili of United Kingdom; and the Collier Schorr of the United States.
Ofili’s watercolor paintings of nude, brown women were a hit with my husband. Mutu’s dripping milk bottles seem trite and overdone already. Schorr’s photographs are visual novellas, and Altmejd creates an endless mirrored room with mirrored figures and missing limbs, almost like giant glass transformers, minus the werewolf heads often associated with his work.
Payton chose artists featured in numerous biennials and the PBS series “Art:21.” Each created a specific work to explore the body and its relationship to art and space.
The experience was electric.
If you go
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver hours are closed Monday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. It is located at 1485 Delgany Street and can be called at (303) 298-7554.
Artsjournalist@centurytel.net Leanne Goebel is a freelance writer specializing in the visual arts.
