MCA Denver, Exploring the CounterCulture (West Coast Style) from adobeairstream.com
The counterculture movement was in essence a western phenomenon. That’s the premise of West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977, a book and exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. Yes, significant moments played out at Woodstock and in Greenwich Village, but the American West allowed … Read more
Pagosa Springs Exhibit Shows Off its Art from The Durango Herald
There’s no place like home for the holidays. But when home is Pagosa Springs, Colorado where people are more interested in the latest ski report, and you’re an art writer, well, home is more a place you retreat to than a place you spend a Saturday viewing art. That’s not the case thanks to Michael … Read more
Ricky Allman at David B. Smith Gallery Exhibition Essay
Ricky Allman Surface flaws render light reflections unreliable Ricky Allmanʼs paintings on view in this exhibition at David B. Smith gallery are neither dystopian or utopian—they fall somewhere in the middle—dark, yet hopeful. The series seems cavernous, as if Allman has gone underground to secret bunkers, perhaps the abandoned silver mine beneath Area 51 or … Read more
Exhibition Essay for Kim Keever at David B. Smith Gallery
Kim Keever creates landscapes that are mesmerizing. The viewer stops, ponders, frozen in her tracks. Where is it? What is it? Have I been there? Will I go there? Itʼs familiar, yet strange. Real, yet an apparition. A Kim Keever photograph is prehistory and post history, the epoch and the apocalypse.
Exhibition Essay for Gregory Euclide at David B Smith Gallery
Gregory Euclide is an outsider. An observer. Whether walking in the woods, or driving across country, he pays attention to the minutiae. Important details become part of his art. Since his last solo exhibition at David B. Smith Gallery, his work has branched out into objects that are similar yet diverse. Heʼs created large installations for New Yorkʼs Museum of Arts and Design and Denverʼs Biennial of the Americas. He also produced an album cover for Bon Iver, has been featured at the PULSE Art Fair, and continues to broaden his studio practice creating 3-dimensional works on paper, sculpture, captures, and video. Euclide is pushing the boundaries of the way he thinks about the land, and how itʼs used.
Peter Plagens at Rule Gallery from adobeairstream.com
Explosions of color are presented in the solo-exhibition of collage paintings by Peter Plagens at Rule Gallery. Vivid color seeps into the paper, full chroma jars the eyes in staggering layers, there is depth, contradiction and spontaneity in the color, packed in relatively small frames. The largest paintings are 24 x 18 inches the smallest … Read more
Fred Sandback at MCA Denver from adobeairstream.com
One building and 16 ounces of string, that’s what one finds at MCA/Denver. Of course it’s much more than that. The conceptual, minimalist sculptures of Fred Sandback create transparent planes that change the perspective of the otherwise bare galleries at the museum, providing new insight for the viewer. Sandback was born in 1943 and died … Read more
The Chair at Shy Rabbit Contemporary Arts in Pagosa Springs from adobeairstream.com
Chairs have been the subject of paintings throughout history. Van Gogh painted one, so did John Singer Sargent, Henri Matisse and David Hockney. Edward Hopper chose a train car filled with mostly empty dark green chairs, focusing on a blonde female figure for his painting “Chair Car.” An exhibit currently open at Shy Rabbit Contemporary Art in Pagosa Springs, called “The Chair” hearkens back to these traditions. But the subject of the work is not just the brown leather chair from the artist’s home that sits in the middle of the gallery.
Making Treasure from Trash: Reclamation at Center for Visual Art from adobeairstream.com
Reclamation speaks to the human need to overcome consumption, to subvert capitalistic messages and to focus on the still, quiet voice at the creative core.
Regan Rosburg: The Understory exhibition essay for David B. Smith Gallery
Regan Rosburg is inspired by the humble network of life that proliferates on the forest floor, in the shade, beneath the canopy of trees that sore above, blocking out the precious sunlight. The artist collects objects and insects from the deciduous forest of Northeastern Tennessee where she lives on a small farm with her fiancé. Regan left her native Colorado for Tennessee a little more than a year ago. Sheʼs inspired by her surroundings and the sound of her rooster talking to his hens. These recent works created for “Understory” reflect how those changes in her life are influencing her creative work.
