Two more recent features on adobeairstream.com. Click on the photo to be taken to the complete article.
Edward Ranney brings his New World Landscapes to the Denver Art Museum. The exhibit is part of the recently ended Denver Biennial of the Americas and is on display through September 26 in the 4th Floor Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art Galleries.
I also interviewed Canadian artist and Sobey award finalist Brendan Tang at the opening of “You are Here” at Plus Gallery. The ambient gallery sound is challenging, but Tang is a fun and informative interview. “You are Here” ends August 20 and is a show not be missed. The only exhibit as part of the Biennial of the Americas that looked North to our Canadian neighbors.
I wrote about Energy Effects and Objectophillia, two official exhibits of the Denver Biennial of the Americas, for adobeairstream.com.
My initial reaction was that Energy Effects was a boy’s show, filled with boy’s toys like rockets, engines, and mechanical works, cars, gas pumps, and particle accelerators. Yet, I immediately paused and thought of Viviane Le Courtois’ “Chaussures” featuring 125 pairs of used hand made sandals that the artist wears until they literally fall apart. Something shifted. Read the article on adobeairstream.com.
Objectophilia was supposed to respond and react to Energy Effects, and I didn’t see much to link the two exhibits other than the parking lot that seprated them. But both stand on their own.
At Walker Fine Art, Marie M. Vlasic was featured in an exhibition entitled “Altered.” The artist paints highly realistic portraits of people who have altered their body with tattoo’s. The results are technically masterful. Read more about it on adobeairstream.com.
Two recent interviews from adobeairstream.com. Click on the image to take you to the articles–an interview with Paola Santoscoy, the curator of The Nature of Things at the Biennial of the Americas and a video interview with Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper who talks about the biennial, the Hamilton Building and all things creative economy.
The painter as conservationist, Stephen Hannock, installed a new work at Denver Art Museum. The painting entitled “Mt. Blanca with Ute Creek at Dawn” was installed on May 13, 2010 in the Hamilton building in the Contemporary Western Art Galleries outside the 2nd floor bridge. The 80” x 120” painting is on a two year loan courtesy of collector and patron Louis Bacon, owner of the Trinchera Ranch in Costilla County near the base of Mt. Blanca.
“How can I fuck this up?” That’s the question Jenny Morgan asks herself as she begins a portrait. Starting with 50 to 100 snapshots of friends, often women, but not always, Morgan selects one that reflects no smile or emotion: the person is relaxed, with their guard down and a deadpan stare. A breakthrough came when she painted her first self-portrait, exposing herself nude to the camera and then on canvas. It was brave act on her part, inspired by the fearlessness she sees in the work of Jenny Saville. Morgan then attempted to paint porn stars and prostitutes, but she didn’t feel connected to those women. “The work was insincere,” she says. Since focusing on people she knows, as Francis Bacon did, her painting has become more genuine. But the emotional states she portrays are not necessarily those of the sitter. “I’m seeing the person as a structure to put my own emotions on,” she observes.
Morgan’s art career began in Denver, as a student at the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design; after getting her BFA, she moved to New York in 2006 to earn her MFA at the School of Visual Arts. Her portraits are as much about painting as about a person. “I love to see the paint build and get luminous,” she says. Morgan prefers oils, mixing colors with a knife. Her palette is primarily white with ochers and reds. She’s now sanding away the luster to reveal the red undercoat on her #10 grit canvas, giving her portraits a sunburned quality. Often the distortions look like bruises and the sitter can appear beaten, but in essence they are coming to life through the layering of pigment on canvas, the sanding, the mark-making. Just as a body is made of layers of muscle, epidermis and skin, we see that a portrait is made that same way. The blood flowing through the veins, the red layers beneath the skin contrasts with the hyper-realism of a lopsided breast, the non-expression of a face, a finger gently tugging a lip, a drooping eye.
In From The Valley To The Stars, Morgan has painted one hand and forearm black, creating a negative space. The other hand is glazed yellow, yet features all the fine detail of her style. In We Are All Setting Suns, one hand is red and outlined in white, incorporating printmaking and drawing techniques. The other hand is missing its skin, and has been sanded away to appear blotchy red, while the face appears as if under water, or refracted by a lens: blurry eyes with long, dark, vertical shadows. The hair in a Morgan portrait is disheveled, somewhat fly-away. She reveals the loose ends that are never seen in a magazine ad, the awkward curl standing out from the head. It could be interpreted as bedroom hair. But there is a disengaged element to her nude portraits. One does not sense sex or narrative when looking at a Morgan painting. And though she chooses a photograph in which the sitter “is extremely uncomfortable” the paintings are not difficult. Other emotions rise to the surface. No matter how stripped away or bruised a Morgan portrait is, the luminescence remains: that, and the eyes, powerful, real, gazing out from the canvas. It is through the eyes that we see Morgan’s emotion and her powerful fight to prove that painting is not dead and that portraiture can indeed be challenging, cool, and now.
Jenny Morgan’s work was featured in two solo exhibitions in 2009, “This Too Shall Pass” at Plus Gallery in Denver, and “Abrasions” at Like the Spice Gallery in Brooklyn. Her work can currently be seen in the group show, “Mirror, Mirror” at Postmasters Gallery in New York, through May 8, 2010.
Fourteen years of John Bonath’s photo-digital work is on display in “Blurring the Edges,” a show that features everything from large pigment giclée prints on paper and canvas to smaller hand-dyed and bleached archival silver gelatin prints. The work is not arranged chronologically. No dates are provided on the work or in gallery materials. That seems to be intentional. Bonath doesn’t find time relevant to magic (however it might be relevant to the realism part.) There is something kitschy about looking at a photograph of magic realism that features a bird nest or butterfly, ancient symbolism packed with meaning, and looking over and finding that bird’s nest with it’s tiny beige eggs sitting atop a bookshelf, or the vivid blue butterfly encased under glass. This is the case with the “Angels” series, strong portraits of aged, saggy and creping skin, a butterfly perched on an ear or knee. Magic realism is supposed to be less coincidental than surrealism, and the coincidence diminished the magic. I am not a fan of digital images printed on canvas, unless the artist can keep the materiality from overtaking the concept. The canvas is not evident in the Vortex Triptych “River of Chocolate.” The texture of the leaves and the smooth glaze of the babies’ skin works well. However, the hand worked elements on Bonath’s current flower series manages to peel away the veneer of magic and realism leaving me with nothing more than a mediocre photograph trying to be something it is not.
The AWP hosted writer and critic Dave Hickey during their conference in Denver. His reading was on Thursday, April 8 at 1:30 p.m. in the Centennial Ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Convention Center Hotel. The venue held hundreds–of empty chairs. I was shocked. Hickey is snarky and controversial voice, a quick wit with insight into creative culture. He’s a MacArthur Genius grant recipient and last year, his monthly column in ARTnews was the most entertaining and thought provoking read in the art media. Appallingly, the AWP is closed to members only and the thick catalog of readings and workshops is like reading a college course catalog. It’s too bad more people in Denver didn’t know Hickey was speaking and that AWP doesn’t open these lectures to those who might want to pay at the door.
“I’ve never spoken to a larger auditorium with a smaller audience,” Hickey said. “I’m going to remember this when they ask me back to Denver…. Don’t fuck with me.”
A few highlights from Hickey’s reading and comments.
Hicky was supposed to read from his forthcoming book A Connoisseurship of Ways, but instead, he chose to read an essay called Firecrackers about Terry Castle and her new book called The Professor. He called Castle one of his heroes and he said it was time to try and write a fairly sophisticated review of her work. The lighting in the room was bad and Hickey slumped over the podium, his head and hair often hitting the protruding microphone as he read. But if one could ignore that and just listen to the words, linked like luscious lego’s on the page, it was eloquent, funny and inspiring with phrases like “literary tapioca” and “the vanity of intellectual culture.” And luscious sentences like: “one of those envious charismatic, brain gobbling professors who entangle gifted children in duals to the death in the guise of grown up love.”
Then the real fun began when a woman in the audience asked Dave Hickey a question about his experience in the visual art world and how it intersects with his experience in the creative writing world. Hickey basically said that it was not possible to teach creative writing. “All I can do is teach you how to write like I write.” He said the same about artists, they can only learn how to paint or sculpt like their teacher.
“The idea,” he said “is to kill us [the teachers] to take our place. This is a revolutionary practice. You’re supposed to freakin’ win.”
He talked about how he couldn’t really grade his students because when he failed a student it equaled loss of income for the department. According to Hickey (and generally agreed upon by those who teach writing given the level of laughter in the room) most creative writers want to write about what happened to them at camp–or that moment when their adolescent world collided with the adult world and someone snatched their innocence.
Hickey said he longer reads what his student writer’s write. “When I can’t take anymore of this shit I draw a line and stop.” Later, he admitted that it was the same process he used when editing his own writing.
“A great many people are in creative writing and art just to get the crit,” he said. “To bolster their ego and reinforce their own ambitions.”
“Do something good and I’ll give you a good crit,” he added.
It’s no secret that Hickey is not a supporter of MFA programs in spite of working in them. “What do you write the day after you leave?” Hickey asked, then said the attrition rate for artists is 85% and for writers 95%. Meaning that after all the money and all the time and all the work only 5% of graduates become professionals who get published.
Hickey confessed that he hates people who think they are better than they are, and in fact, every creative person has had a conversation with a friend about why the other person is succeeding or seems to be getting ahead when we feel their work doesn’t merit the attention. The fact is, only a few are truly good, or truly willing to dedicate themselves to doing the work of becoming a better writer or artist.
The good ones, Hickey says, he feels deeply obligated to let them alone. “You cannot encourage them to hesitate or miss the exit.”
The mediocre students he teaches to be good PR guys or business writers.
“I like art and writing better than I do people and especially children,” Hickey said.
What can he teach an artist or writer?
How to dress. He recommended jeans, a t-shirt and an $800 leather jacket.
Stay away from orgies because your obligated to write than you notes and that’s a lot of work.
There is more sheer suicide in Under the Volcano. It’s gorgeous. The greatest testimony to death that you will ever find.
Then he closed by telling us that he was quitting teaching writing.
“Egret on Small Globe,” 2009, oil on canvas, 28 x 32″, at Robischon Gallery.
Continuing through April 17, 2010
Robischon Gallery
Denver, Colorado
David Kroll paints with the touch of an Old Master. Refined layers of oil on canvas, linen and paper are applied to capture not only the exquisite light of a sunset in a background, but the highly detailed and intricate reflection of a ceramic bowl or vase, a bird perched on the rim, a drop of water, a pearl necklace placed in the foreground. The staging is sparse and often features woven nests, tiny bird eggs of multiple colors, a fragile spider’s web, which taken together offer an ironic and contemporary perspective to the work. It is clear that Kroll revere’s pre-modern nature painters, like those from the Hudson River School, and that he wants to provide viewers with a place of peace and solace to experience what is left of nature today. The objects in the foreground are often easily broken or destroyed, like the pearl necklace that has come unknotted and unstrung. This provides a moment of pause, inclining the viewer to consider the fragility of humanity and nature.
- Leanne Haase Goebel VAS Weekly Newsletter, March 26, 2010
Bruce Lowney, “Stumble,” oil on canvas, 24 x 16″, at Redline.
Continuing March 28, 2010
Redline
Denver, Colorado
“Love Lines,” curated by Robischon Gallery, is the first exhibition at this year-old facility to fulfill its mission of providing a strong connection to the critical vanguards of contemporary art. It was a treat to see British artist Tracy Emin’s confessional “Those Who Suffer Love,” seen recently at New York’s Lehmann Maupin Gallery. But equally as intriguing and powerful are works by Colorado artists. Margaret Neumann’s painting “Romulus and Remus,” features the groundless image of two women on all fours, breasts hanging, in shades of black and dark blue against a multi-layered, dirty white background similar to those of Susan Rothenberg. Laura Merage’s chromogenic print “Anguish” is a 60″x 40″ close-up image of a female torso clutching her breasts in torment. Jonathan Saiz’s piano installation was too cliché for me in its use of roses and hearts. But his placement of the male images in the multi-media work “Us,” top right and lower left, pulling on a rope, provides the right tension. This show could have easily been saccharin sweet, but instead encompasses love in equally diverse forms: passionate, erotic, forbidden, unrequited, and transcendent as an art form.
- Leanne Goebel VAS Weekly Newsletter March 12, 2010
Bill Amundson,
‘Self-Portrait with Pricey Mountain Homes,’ 2009, pencil on paper, 40 x 44′.
“Face to Face” brings together 36 portrait drawings from various private collections in Colorado. Curated by Julie Augur, serving as an adjunct curator for the Museum, the exhibition primarily features 20th Century works. However, Augur has included two older drawings: “Portrait of a Woman Wearing a Hennin,” ink and chalk on paper from 1500 by Bernardo Buotalenti and “The Grotto of Pan,” watercolor and ink on paper from 1856 by Richard Dadd. These two works are hung on a wall salon style with 15 other drawings in all media, styles and from diverse time periods. These are not drawings with the sort of coded symbolism about the subject’s status, virtue or worthy attributes that we associate with the Old Masters. They are more current than historic, and their inclusion tweaks our expectations of portraiture by raising critical questions about how we establish identity and construct history from sanctioned representations. Furthermore, the salon hanging emphasizes a non-linear art historical perspective.
Near Buotalenti’s drawing is “M.F. in Her Striped and Beaded Sleeping Jacket” (1996-7, pastel over monoprint) by Lisa Yuskavage. It is an intricate image of a woman with distended breasts done in Yuskavage’s distinct style. As a viewer’s eyes jump from one time period to another, from one portrait to another, as they look face to face at each subject, the idea that “earlier works reflect an eye for correctness of physical appearance and later examples show a looser, more relaxed approach with an interest in portraying the psychological as well as the physical,” as museum text and press materials suggest, falls away.
One begins to focus on the emotional response to the work, not the mark making or the medium, nor the year it was made. Augustus John’s “Portrait of Dorelia” (1908 watercolor and chalk on paper) is nearly as melancholic as Lucian Freud’s “Self-Portrait,” a darkly shadowed watercolor and graphite on paper from 1961. Marlene Dumas’ “Bad Mouth” (1996, mixed media on paper) is a plum colored face with thick black eyes and textured crusty lips. Her “Erika” (1998, ink and acrylic on paper) features a full frontal nude with eyes that draw the viewer back again and again. Thomas Schütte’s “Big Head (Grosser Kopf)” (1992, ink on paper) defines a yellow head with fine lines. This group fills the back wall of the gallery, and perpendicular to them are works by Francesco Clemente, “Self-Portrait with Lemon Heart,” an oddly tinted watercolor on paper from 2005. Each work is disturbing, dark, sad, and soulful.
On a pedestal in front of Dumas’ drawings is Robert Crumb’s “Portrait of Jackie and Ari,” an ink on paper drawn tabloid cover from 1970. Across the room, Philip Guston’s “Untitled” (1970, ink on sheetrock) is a charged image of cone-headed figures pointing at each other with large hands, one holding a cigar. Bill Amundson’s “Self-Portrait with Pricey Mountain Homes” (2008, graphite on paper) displays his head capped with windmills and Aspen McMansions in a rich mix of humor, irony and neurosis, just as Charles Sarka’s early 1900’s graphite portrait “Mice” is whimsical and satirical. Chuck Close’s “Phil” (1973, ink on paper) lays his signature grid over a realistic drawing. George Condo’s “Constructed Female Portrait” (graphite on paper) brings together differing graphic elements and vaguely architectural structures to create a face, while hinting at a broken and reassembled identity.
Two works that weaken the overall experience are tucked on a slanting wall between the rest of the show and the Oceanic galleries. It wasn’t just the odd angle of the wall but the subject matter. “Study for Landscape” (1994, collage) by Mark Tansey and “The Instant Decorator/Sun Room with Richard and Harley” (2001-07, mixed media on card) by Laurie Simmons seemed out of place in this show. Not because they weren’t drawings, nor because they were hung too close together, with the larger image mounted directly above the smaller one. Rather, they seemed to lack the same evocative elements of the other portraits.
A recent DAM Newsletter tells viewers that the exhibit is simply about the many ways to draw a face. This oversimplifies a small but powerful exhibition that presents portraits for a more complete and open ended read – emotionally, socially, and politically. This is not merely a show about the many ways to draw a face. It’s an exhibit that challenges given notions of identity and its representation.
The Pagosa Springs Town Council voted unanimously Nov. 3 to demolish this log cabin that was home to the Pagosa Springs Arts Council, leaving the organization without a home.
Kris Lewis and Will.i.am collaborate with Denver art dealer David B. Smith to co-curate a Grammy visual arts exhibition of 15 artists reflecting on Who Killed the Music? The artists get their chance to call out who, and in turn connect to the new “I Am” scholarship fund.
Colorado Council on the Arts replaces a former grant program with a new “Colorado Creates” initiative, as Governor Ritter, before announcing he will not run for re-election, announces three-pronged legislation to support the arts.
Leanne culls out as things to watch in 2010: How DAM director Christoph Heinrich will keep working to transform the controversial Hamilton wing through art, and how Colorado will keep nurturing its creative economy while the indie types still get the shortest stick.
Christoph Heinrich, curator and director of the Denver Art Museum, invited 17 contemporary artists to “embrace” the Daniel Libeskind-designed Hamilton Wing.
A greater percentage of adults attend arts events in the Mountain Region than the US average artgoer, but arts attendance has declined 10 percent in the region between 2002 and 2008. The bright side? Increased participation via technology.
City Center in Las Vegas is touting itself as the largest green and sustainable development in the world. With six LEED-gold certified buildings and an onsite power plant, the development is definitely greener than anything else on the Strip, but sustainable? Not.
Robert L.B. Tobin left a collection of books, etchings, drawings and maquettes spanning four centuries of European and American theater to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio. A newly expanded museum houses the riches. Right: Eugene Berman was a Russian Jewish painter and set designer, included in the Tobin Collection.
Continuing through January 2, 2010
Walker Fine Art
Denver, Colorado
For Sabin Aell, everything that exists is based on a formula, an undefined code she used to create her mother and father series of images for “Moonwalk.” Based on a pair of echoing forms, these ethereal works are not twins, but opposites. All are 43″ x 33″ and placed in recycled wood frames. Each began with a photograph of plant life. The father series is a negative – a whitish image on a black background. The image is sealed and the artist then paints by hand thousands of short dashes across the image. She interprets the pattern from the background image as a code. That code reappears in the mother series, which begins as a photograph of a finished father piece. The artist then digitally removes the black and enhances the image, resulting in a lighter, grainier opposite. The title of the show seems disconnected, except for the artist’s statement hung on the wall: “Is the moon moving towards or away from us? Is beauty approaching us or are we stepping closer?” Aell says the mother series reflects our aspiration to find beauty and the father series the movement of beauty towards us. Perhaps this idea would seem clearer had the works been hung in pairs. Nevertheless beauty is evident. (Image: Sabin Aell, “Moonwalk 1| father series 1.1,” 2009, 48 1/2″ x 38 1/2,” mixed media photography, at Walker Fine Art.)
Jessica Stockholder, “Swiss Cheese Field 17,” 2009, monoprint, at Robischon Gallery. Jessica Stockholder’s work is often described as “paintings in space.” Her dimensional “Swiss Cheese Field” series of monoprints might then be described as compressed sculpture. Not compressed into a flat 2-dimensional form, because the works remain multi-dimensional, but they are designed to respond to a wall in the way a painting does. All of Stockholder’s formalism, use of color and her historic foundation are present in these works, which combine mark making, printmaking, painting, drawing, wood engraving, photography with found ready-made objects such as Styrofoam, fake fur and plastic. The large black swatches of fluid color in “15 and 17″ echo back to abstract expressionism and Clyfford Still in particular. Color remains as important to the artist in these works as it is in her sculptures, two of which are also on display, “Untitled” and “Two Frames.” Stockholder is interested in the illusion of weight and space. Using a hydraulic press to create these monoprints left the essence of weight and pressure in the work, much the way that her use of light bulbs creates a disruption of stillness. Electricity appears static, but is actually moving. In this way she is able to disrupt viewers’ expectations (at Robischon Gallery, Denver, Colorado). (Image: Jessica Stockholder, “Swiss Cheese Field 17,” 2009, monoprint, at Robischon Gallery.)
Continuing through December, 2009
Van Straaten Gallery
Denver, Colorado
There is something playful about the work of Homare Ikeda. His effusive and colorful paintings are filled with layers of organic shapes and symbols. Ikeda’s current exhibition features a selection of large acrylic, wax and oil paintings that are vivid and of the same intense tonality. They often feature clunky, pseudo organic shapes and layouts that are intentionally off-balance and uneven in a Wabi Sabi aesthetic. The work is lyrical and dark. The exhibition also features watercolor, ink drawings and monotypes through which the artist continues to transform nature into art. Exploring contrasts of yin and yang, thick and thin, open and closed, the artist creates atmospheric and primordial vertical “landscapes.” Some appear to be underwater, others ethereal and still others almost microscopic. Ikeda creates art that fuses Neo-expressionism with Pat Steir-like drips, along with Japanese influences through line, form, and composition. The result is a compelling and layered visual exploration.(Image: Homare Ikeda, “Ima (now),” 2009, acrylic on canvas, at Van Straaten Gallery.)
Continuing through November 12, 2009
Colorado College, I.D.E.A. Space
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Fifty-six diverse works of printmaking created by women artists since the 1970s come together in “Women’s Work: Contemporary Women Printmakers.” Happily, they explore more than gender issues. The diversity of processes and techniques utilized by artists from Helen Frankenthaler and Agnes Martin, through Louise Bourgeois and Barbara Kruger, and on to Wangechi Mutu and Kara Walker reflect and convey cultural and social themes explored by contemporary art over the past forty years through conceptual strategies. Color, geometry, drawing, painting are all combined and recombined. This exhibition is, in part, a romp through art history from Abstract Expressionism to recent works of a more narrative and fictive nature, to pop art’s consumer and advertising culture, to questioning the position and role of women in society. The venue also explores a breadth and variety of printmaking approaches. The gallery provides an informative handout defining printmaking terms from aquatint to watermark, which is presented in a helpful but unobtrusive manner that is not distracting. Younger contemporary artists as seen here are pushing these traditional techniques forward by combining styles and methods to create forms of expression that relate to the issues of our time. (Image: Hung Liu, ‘Official Portraits: Citizen,’ 2006, lithograph with collage, edition 12/30.)
The Susan Rothenberg piece also appeared on Saatchi’s Online Magazine. And the editor kindly moved it to the center column under: Essays by the World’s Leading Writers, Critics and Curators on Art and Artists.
Monroe Hodder screams, Debra Salopek whispers at William Havu
Monroe Hodder is the star attraction at William Havu Gallery. Her thick, impasto, expressive, abstract paintings fill the front gallery with vivid, shocking color in a show appropriately title “Painting Metabolism!” If I had a metabolism like that I’d be as thin as a Ralph Lauren model. Perhaps all the frenetic energy and screaming color of Hodder makes the small new works by Debra Salopek tucked in a corner near the desk and the back alcove space of the gallery even more inviting. Salopek has ten works on display all relatively small oil on paper abstracted landscapes that are soft, lush and invite silence to envelope the viewer. Four small conte crayon on paper drawings are like tiny little etchings, each mark exquisite and intentional. Her paintings and drawings focus primarily on the skies and the clouds and her technique with oil is ethereal like watercolor but with more intense hues and pigments. Salopek’s touch is delicate, proving that a whisper is often more effective than a bullhorn.
Stephen Batura “Borrowing Time” at Robischon Gallery
“Borrowing Time” is an exhibition of 54 paintings by Denver artist Stephen Batura on display at Robischon Gallery through October 31. Batura based each of these paintings on the historic photographs of Charles Lillybridge from the online database of the Colorado Historical Society. Lillybridge photographed everything, from people to buildings to wagons to trains. His photographs are often flat and blurry and this is a quality that allows Batura freedom to explore his atmospheric painting approach to translate and transform Lillybridge’s imagery into something more than a documentary. The images displayed salon style play off one another to tell a story of not only the past, but the present and the future as well. Batura utilizes a subtle monochromatic palette that is jarring and otherwordly. He adds gold and silver leaf to some paintings—gold for the historic Colorado gold rush and silver used in processing film. In a painting like “Reflection” the effect is a hyper realistic reflection on water that is equally spectral and off-kilter.
Andrea Modica at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
Can urban ideals exist in the rural lifestyle? Can rural values exist in an urban society? These seem to be the questions Andrea Modica raises in her photographic series “Fountain, Colorado” on display through January 17 at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Modica does more than document the lives of the Baker Family who run a slaughterhouse in Fountain, a town of 15,000 located between Fort Carson military base and Colorado Springs. She captures an almost otherworldly tenderness among this family. Her silvery platinum/palladium images made with an 8×10 camera are remarkably detailed. Their subject matter is alternately tender and grotesque: A lamb fetus held in a human hand; a child falling asleep on a table; a sister holding her hands over her brother’s eyes. Modica’s imagery is reminiscent of Manual Alvarez Bravo, but with the eye of Sally Mann. These are more than images documenting a lifestyle and more than portraits of a family. There is something primal in these photographs that is equal parts confrontational and disturbing. They are raw. They are intimate. And in the end, they are beautifully made.
Visual Art Source is the partnership between ArtScene a California website and Art Ltd. magazine, which is expanding from it’s Los Angeles base and reaching eastward to capture both Santa Fe and Denver and beyond.
I’m writing previews and recommendations for VAS of Denver and Colorado exhibitions. Here are two early entries that were featured in their weekly email newsletter:
UdoNöger and Katrin Möller at Rule Gallery Denver, Colorado
Katrin Möller, “there is no time – but there is day and night,” 2009
The luminescent “white on white” paintings by Udo Nöger seem to emanate light from within. In fact, they do. The artist uses light as a material, literally capturing it between layers of translucent canvas, oil and acrylic. These painterly mixed media works are sensuous, liquid, and evoke a mysterious depth. There is a dialogue between surface and space, an interplay between energy and tension in this survey of the artist’s work created between 2000-2009. Also on display is the work of Katrin Möller, Nöger’s studio assistant from 1995-2007. In 2008 Möller began painting daily her own series, titled “Gemaltes” (Painted). Whereas Nöger is exploring light, Möller paints essence, particles and atoms-the complex elements of life itself. Both artists share a fascination with liquid, fluid, water. Moller’s forms are amoebic, cellular and spontaneous; she uses earthly colors like damp pine green and Caribbean Sea blue to ground her explorations in the familiar, yet they are ethereally elemental. The exhibition is an archipelago of simple, beautiful, yet dynamic painting.
-Leanne Goebel
Matthew Buckingham at MCA/Denver
Matthew Buckingham. Peace and Anarchy, 2004-2009, black and white fiber prints, c-prints, at MCA Denver. Courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York.
A major survey of Matthew Buckingham’s smart and sophisticated conceptual art, curated by former MCA Denver Deputy Director John Grant, this survey features photography, film, slide and other objects, all of which in some way examine our cultural relationships with time and the way the past appears and is interpreted in the present. Buckingham’s works are literary, historical, scientific and contemplative. Whether we are observing the date “1720″ projected in Caslon type while listening to Johann Sebastian Bach, or viewing “Peace and Anarchy,” a series of images paired with written reflections on the origins of five popular graphic symbols, through the use of language and images Buckingham transforms our perception into narratives, which are interpreted by others. But even in the interpreting we are reframing and restaging history. Each of the works examines in some way the past and how it impacts or appears in the present. In the end we realize that the more we know, the less we understand (at MCA Denver, Denver, Colorado).
-Leanne Goebel
Sustainable living and art collide in Boulder where a cooperative group of art students under the guidance of visiting Dutch and Slovenian artists designed the “Chicken Shack Village.”
Are the chicken coops art?
One student added: “It doesn’t matter if its art, it’s the dialogue that’s important. The art will follow.”
Heinrich was named assistant director in January and his Embrace! exhibition opens Nov. 14, featuring 17 artists from around the world who were invited to create site specific works that react to or embrace the Libeskind designed Hamilton building. Heinrich may be asking artist’s to embrace the angular building, but can we expect more dynamic programming in the future?
“We’re not competing,” he said. “We [DAM] don’t have to be cutting edge. We can be broader in our appeal.”
Heinrich also said DAM is committed to being an encyclopedic museum, and mentioned the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA Denver), as if to suggest the cutting-edge programming belongs at the smaller museum of Denver whose simpler building, by architect David Adjaye, has proven a galvanizing space for public gatherings.
Heinrich’s apparent challenge is to determine what DAM has to offer that can be found nowhere else in the world. His Embrace! seems to be a step in that direction.
Critic Neal Brown writing in Frieze in 1999 crafted this phrase that applies to two art shows that recently crossed my desk and attention: “fetishistic attention to detail with grotesque error.” He was talking about J.D. Ingres, the French neoclassical painter, and how the level of meticulousness found, say, in Ingres’ Grand Odalisque, joined his work “spiritually” to current art practice. So have a look at these two: Tom Palmore at Sorrel Sky Gallery and Julie Speed at Galleri Urbane.
“Society is basically not interested in art,” Donald Judd said. “Art has a purpose of its own.”
That purpose can be discovered in Marfa, Texas, where this weekend marks the annual celebration of Judd and lectures about Judd’s re-opened works in concrete that will be live-streamed from the Chinati website. Marfa, a remote town, with a rundown ex-Army base and old Army barracks, specifically, is where Judd installed 100 sculptures in aluminum and 15 works in concrete. He transformed Fort Marfa into a seminal location to display his own art and building-sized installations by his friends and admired peers including Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Carl Andre, Ingolfur Arnarsson, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, David Rabinowitch and John Wesley.
Viewing the concrete works from a distance is not the same as wandering along a path near them, meandering in between them, looking through them at the way the sky is framed. Feeling the dry heat of the desert plain, the dust kicking up around your feet, listening to the cacophony of grasshoppers and reaching out to touch the stiff golden grass that reaches nearly thigh high, ears attuned for the sound of rattle snakes coiled up and hiding in the cool shadows cast by the objects as one experiences time and space from a new perspective.
An investigative article I wrote on Denver’s First Perplexing Biennial was published at adobeairstream.com on October 5. It was then picked up by Arts Journal on October 9, Artinfo on October 12, Artcyclopedia on October 9 and Cross Cut on October 13. Additionally it was included in the email newsletter weisslink on October 12.
This reprint is my favorite so far: ArtTattler has illustrated the article with fantastic images from other biennials. It was published on October 18.
“The board set me up in a really great way,” Adam Lerner told me by telephone from Denver the first week of June.
He was referring to the MCA‘s decision, when they invited Lerner to be director, to effect a merger between the downtown contemporary museum, and Lerner’s last squeeze, the LAB at Belmar.
(The LAB, no longer a physical locale, had been a contemporary art center in a new-urbanist development in Denver’s western exurbs. The developer fit the LAB into the mix alongside bowling alley. movie theater, and upscale shopping, hoping it would make Belmar a destination. But that didn’t happen.)
One of the immediate effects of MCA’s hiring Lerner and incorporating the Lab’s programs under their shingle was that the popular Mixed Taste lecture series, of which Lerner was instigant and emcee, now take place at MCA. In early June, Lerner was getting his feet under him at a museum that bills itself as “a museum without a front door-a place for public engagement.” His impression was that things were going great.
Still, to backtrack a few paces, many in the community have found MCA sterile and inaccessible. Over at Belmar, Lerner’s Mixed Taste was famous for yucking it up during evenings in which unlikely duos gathered to talk meat sausage and T.S. Eliot, tattoo art and Ibsen, followed by shuffleboard, darts and dinner for the 20- and 30-somethings in the crowd. It might be that constituency who believe Lerner is just the impresario needed to lead Denver’s contemporary art museum, which shows work both by international and regional contemporary artists, into a populist future. But he has his detractors.
Westword art critic Michael Paglia has written he’s afraid Lerner’s going to dumb down programming. (Below: Andrew Novick show at Belmar.)
Still, in the period since Lerner’s been the brains of the museum, the first Mixed Taste series at MCA sold out, with more than 330 people attending. The chief animator explained he is looking to capitalize on that success by exploring options to expand program capacity.
Back when the LAB was operational, the idea was that the developed community of Belmar itself would feed in audiences. But actually the audiences were driving out from the city: Some 60 percent came from Denver, with the rest coming from nearby. Lerner allowed that the LAB, “in a more conventional setting” (than downtown Denver), was experimental, and laid the foundation for now.
“I learned a lot, but I’m not going to continue what I did there, whole quaff.” Lerner allowed, “The LAB provided me a venue to try and fail.”
“The Astounding Problem of Andrew Novick” was one example Lerner gave of his being his own biggest critic. The exhibit showed the collections of a Denver object- obsessive whose mania for multiples in everything from Barbie dolls to gumball prize made up the show. While that exhibition at the LAB received the most media attention of any Lerner-generated exhibit, Lerner says it taught him a lot about how an institution represents non-art objects. Because Mr. T. figures and flea-market paintings of cat faces weren’t fine art, Lerner sidelined the exhibit into a gallery outside the main space, something he said he wouldn’t likely do again.
“I’d like to invest more and make a truly artful and elevated presentation of these ideas. It pulled my punch a little.”
Echoing the “museum without door” PR of MCA, Lerner said, “Often, institutions divide the front door experience — and call it marketing– and the gallery experience — and call it curating. It’s all woven together. The MCA building is really a theatrical experiment that doesn’t distinguish what’s inside from what’s outside. It incorporates it all into the whole aesthetic experience.”
Lerner wants to incorporate the museum’s passageways, halls and the library to create a more holistic creative experience of contemporary art-going. Still, he reiterates that the core backbone of the institution are shows of work by important contemporary artists–but he won’t be directly organizing these.
So, while his role is to breathe new life into the institution, he doesn’t want to play dual roles of curator and director that his MCA predecessor Cydney Payton filled. Lerner is looking to hire a curator, “I’m putting together a creative team. I’m the artistic director. My role is not to make sure the art goes on the wall, my role is to create a vibrant experience for the visitor.”
In the meantime he is working with independent curators like Paul Andersen, design critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design who will produce a show on the history of pattern and design.
He also confessed that MCA will play a key role in the upcoming Denver Biennial by hosting a large-scale exhibition as well as coordinating several satellite projects. Lerner wouldn’t confirm that Tim Noble, Sue Webster and David Adjaye will be involved, but their recent presence in Denver for the Logan lecture series, with Suzanne Geiss of Deitch Projects, suggest that is possible.
Lerner has stepped up into national lanes already. He participated at a May 15 panel discussion in New York at MOMA. And he is taking Mixed Taste to Deitch Projects in July, while Mark Allen, director of Machine Project, is coming to Denver to study the integration of creative programming into MCA.
Judith H. Dobrzynski takes the Denver Art Museum to task on her blog Real Clear Arts. She questions why the museum did not agree to host their former curator R. Craig Miller’s show “European Design Since 1985: Shaping the New Century.” An expansive exhibit she reviewed in the Wall Street Journal calling it “exactly the kind of show serious museums should be doing. It’s ambitious, it’s rooted in scholarship, it’s aesthetically interesting, and it’s displayed well.”
Read her full post by clicking on the hyperlink below:
The exhibit is currently on display at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and will travel the High Museum in Atlanta and perhaps a venue in Europe. The Denver Art Museum claims to be a partner in presenting this show, but according to Miller: “The Denver museum did not view his show as a big draw.”
So what does the museum consider a big draw? Well, Instead of a 250 item design exhibit that looks forward to where design is going, Denver Art Museum’s new design curator Darrin Alfred has put together a show currently on display that looks backward:”The Psychedelic Experience, Rock Posters from the San Francisco Bay Area, 1965-71.”
Other temporary exhibits at DAM this year? Charles M. Russell through September 2009 and a show called “New and Noteworthy: The Hopkins Family Quilt in Context,” through December 31, 2009. Wow! How exciting! I’m sure both of those will be “a big draw!”
An exhibition of master prints made at a legendary Lyons, Colorado shop, frolics at MCA Denver through June 28.
Printmaking is a very fine art. Whether lithography, monoprints, woodcuts, or chine collé, the act of making a print is often painstaking, detailed and precise. To get the results an artist is looking for often requires intense collaboration with a master printmaker.
Artists from around the world venture to a small printmaking studio in Lyons, Colorado to work with just such a master-Bud Shark-a printer unafraid to challenge the assumptions and limitations of printmaking. And because Shark is not only the master printer but the director of the studio, he is able to collaborate with artists and make on-the-spot decisions, from how the plate can be made to the appropriate paper.
“Shark’s Ink: The Legend of Bud Shark” was designed by former director and curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art /Denver, Cydney Payton for the Paper Works Gallery. Payton selected 82 prints by 10 artists John Buck (MT/HI), Enrique Chagoya (CA), Bernard Cohen (UK), Red Grooms (NY), Don Ed Hardy (CA/HI), Jane Hammond (NY), Robert Kushner (NY), Hung Liu (CA/China), Hollis Sigler (deceased, formerly IL), and Betty Woodman (NY/Italy). The collection on view represents a survey of works produced by these renowned artists who have worked with Shark for many years, some since the studio inception in 1976.
In the hallways outside the gallery are technically and visually innovative works by Red Grooms, the painter, sculptor, printmaker, filmmaker, and showman par excellence, including several four-color, 3D lithographs engineered and constructed at Shark’s Ink. These masterful constructions are pure brilliance. Grooms’s witty work captures elements of New York and the dominance of the hero myth in 20th-century modernism, as in lithographs showing Jackson Pollock (“Jackson in Action”, Pablo Picasso and Bill De Kooning (“De Kooning Breaks Through”) making their legendary art. Art history and its gestures and feints never looked so good. (The complex works are all put together by Shark’s longtime studio assistant Roseanne Colachis.)
“Bud is not only a masterful printer but a very knowledgeable and dedicated DJ. He has a vast collection of Rock and Roll Oldies to the newest thing. It makes time in his studio fly by in the best way,” Grooms said in the press materials for the show.
The earliest prints in the exhibition are from 1976–the year the studio opened–and were created by British painter Bernard Cohen and Shark. The two men met at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque where Cohen was a visiting artist during the 1969/70 academic year; the same year Shark earned his MFA.
Cohen’s abstract paintings use pictorial and schematic images of jet planes, animal tracks, dinner place settings and billboards to create an exhilarating dance of form and texture across the picture plane. Cohen’s work evokes the chaos, playfulness and expansiveness of our times.
Enrique Chagoya makes paintings and prints about the changing nature of culture.
“My artwork is a conceptual fusion of opposite cultural realities that I have experienced in my lifetime. I integrate diverse elements: from pre-Columbian mythology, western religious iconography and American popular culture.” Chagoya credits Shark with helping bring to light the creation prints and lithographs.
“When Bud first approached me about making a Codex I thought it would not be possible due to the difficult kind of handmade paper I use-Amate-which is very uneven in thickness and unstable. I was amazed by the ways in which he was able to do it,” Chagoya is quoted in press materials. He goes on: “Many of my paintings and drawings are born first as a print with Bud.
Chagoya’s newest prints, “Historie Naturelle des Espécies”, and “La Portentosa Vida de la Muerte II” continue his examination of cultural realities with satire and humor. With a historical lexicon of ideas, beliefs, and myths, Chagoya’s imagery combines disparate and incongruent elements. Cartoon balloons filled with bewildering and wry “artspeak” hover above character’s heads, uniting his actors in conversation. The quotes in this context become a surreal and satirical self-criticism.
In her final print project at Shark’s Ink, Hollis Sigler created a suite of four lithographs with woodcut and chine colle borders titled “Suite for the Gods.” Sigler used metaphoric images from nature and the spiritual life to confront her own mortality. The artist died of breast cancer in 2001. Using a faux naïve style, Sigler created narrative works that are intensely personal and emotionally complex featuring unpeopled rooms and landscapes filled with scattered object left behind by an unseen heroine.
And like the entire exhibit, the works created by Bud Shark and his artist friends remain with the viewer long after leaving them behind.
Top Image: Hollis Sigler, On the Edge of Hope
Bottom Images: Enrique Chagoya, The Misadventure of the Romantic Cannibals. Both courtesy of MCA Denver.
“Confluence” at William Havu Gallery in Denver is the first of two group shows the gallery will host featuring regional and national artists involved with abstraction and landscape on differing levels, all deeply rooted in modernism. The first artist group, through July 11, includes: Tracy Felix, Monroe Hodder, Joanne Kerrihard, Amy Metier, Sam Scott, and Richard Thompson (below). The gallery mezzanine features small works by Susan Cooper, “Downsize/upscale.”
The works in the show, mostly painting, owe to schools and influences as diverse as post-Impressionism, and cartoon clouds, so prevalent in the West and Southwest. Tracy Felix’s stylized modern mountain landscapes are jovial and playful. Some of his paintings remind me of Thomas Hart Benton, the Depression era regionalist who elongated landscapes in which equally tall fellers frequented courthouses of rural America (and whose painting style briefly intimidated Jackson Pollock).
Tracy Felix was put with this crew of more abstract artists and not in the upcoming part two of “Confluence,” subtitled, “Realism,” although one might ask why, given Felix’s representational bent. This second group exhibition will focus on realism and hyper-realism featuring the work of Jeff Aeling, Michael Burrows, Rick Dula, Robert Ecker, Jeanette Pasin Sloan and Laurel Swab.
That landscape realism can’t do without Industrial Age modernism remains true in the work of Rick Dula, whose style echoes that of Charles Sheeler. Sheeler painted industrial plants and machines in a flat and precisionist style. Dula says that Sheeler’s paintings “were like proud birth announcements for modern industry. My work is more … the obituary… I paint what seems to be vanishing from the modern urban landscape.”
He also paints what is rising — an entire series of paintings of the Denver Art Museum Hamilton building follows the angular construction in Denver’s Golden Triangle. The building was completed 2006. Right: Dula’s Cathedral, DAM in progress.
Where William Havu Gallery goes to confluence, Robin Rule Gallery takes a minimal approach to convergence. Two exhibitions opening tomorrow deal with photography and landscape. The first is “Utopic” digital prints by Jason DeMarte. The second is “Landscapes-Studies in Light & Shadow” by art student Ronnie B. Johnson.
DeMarte combines large-scale color photographs of nature fabricated with commercially produced products and graphic elements to illustrate the connection between a consumer experience and a “natural” one. The work is playful and striking. Johnson on the other hand is hybridizing film and digital photography. He captures the images on both film and digitally then scans the film negatives and produces a digital negative. The work like the tracks below (“Omen”) is then produced using the lush platinum printing process favored by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Edward Weston (we sure hope he’s got backers).
One can pass the time quietly at the Aspen Art Museum, if you don’t factor the clickclick of heels. Through July 19, “No Sound” is an exhibition that includes silent moving-image work by three generations of artists, working in both Europe and the US. Featuring an eclectic mix of avant-garde film, rarely exhibited early video works, and recent film and video by artists: Doug Aitken, Bas Jan Ader, Marcel Broodthaers, Guy Ben-Ner, Nancy Graves, Henrik Hakansson, David Noonan, Paul Pfeiffer, and Diana Thater, the exhibit creates a space unmoored. The removal of sound pushes the viewer towards an almost hypnotic focus on the work. Exploring the ideas of time and experience is an emerging artist from Colorado, an emerging artist living partly in Boston.
Colorado artist Monica Goldsmith has said she sometimes feels she might have to leave the West to find an audience for her painting. Goldsmith has been painting for eight years and she is halfway through her MFA at the Art Institute of Boston, where she’s been nominated for a Dedalus MFA fellowship. A prominent Denver dealer reportedly commented her work was too intellectual or difficult for regional art buyers. It is definitely technically rigorous.
This month she is featured in the Boston Young Contemporaries exhibit at 808 Gallery. Seventy emerging artists from 11 Master of Fine Arts and Post-Baccalaureate programs throughout New England are in the show. Goldsmith is also in Abridged/Abstraction a national juried exhibition of small works selected by Sarah Walker for Good Question Gallery in Milford, PA. Juror Walker said she felt the work represented “a random yet compelling snapshot of people thinking and working abstractly in the early years of this new century.”
Bringing forth strands from Hard edge painting, Goldsmith explores the transitory nature of seen and unseen states, rooted in physics and time. She uses the abacus to explore variables while capturing a flickering moment and suspending it in stasis. Below, detail of Precursor.
Originally conceived of as a survey of contemporary art “from the tip of Tierra del Fuego to the Northern Hudson Bay,” Denver’s Biennial of the Americas continues to morph into something entirely different and unexpected. When Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper announced plans for Denver to premiere the Biennial of the Americas in the summer of 2010, an “ideas pavilion” that would explore such themes as science, education and urban planning was to be a secondary component.
A year later, the “ideas pavilion” has become the primary focus and Vancouver design guru Bruce Mau has been chosen to direct the Biennial, named and themed “In Good We Trust.”At a town hall meeting on February 3, Mau said that the intent of the Biennial was to promote Denver and its assets, which include business innovation, research, environment, education and healthcare. He described Denver as a place with a “can-do spirit.”
“What is a biennial in the 21st century?” Mau said. “There are 200 biennials around the world and we didn’t want to be just another one, biennial 201.”
Well, that’s good, because the initial idea was fully poised to be just that biennial 201. Now, it’s unclear what’s on the agenda. Requests for interviews were declined until an official launch announcement coming sometime later this summer.
Mau promises that the Biennial of the Americas will break down old categories and boundaries and explore what is going on in the world relevant to Denver and the cultural and geopolitical climate. What can Denver offer the world? But there was little mention of the reverse question, what can the world offer Denver? For Mau it’s no longer this for that. It is something more.
“To inspire people we need points of entry. We have to get rid of the audience as a separate thing and build a platform off of which we will launch action and create a new kind of dialogue and engagement,” Mau said.
The Biennial will be organized around seven themes: health, energy, environment, habitat, economy, education and technology. The design team will create one international research lab and seven immersion experiences activated by seven weeks of events that launch seven possibilities for the future. Lucky number? Go ask SITE Santa Fe.
But there’s a method to this sensibility of seven. In 2010, seven Latin American countries will celebrate the bicentennials of their independence from Spain: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Mexico and Venezuela. All these countries will be invited to participate in In Good We Trust.
Yet, it is unclear what role the visual arts will play. Erin Trapp, director of the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs said at a press conference: “This isn’t a biennial of contemporary art in the traditional sense. Our goal is to reinvent the notion of a biennial and take it a step further.”
Some of her opening comments: “…While the Denver biennial will be infused with art our goal is to connect artistic expression with the most salient issues of our tim, creating an event that is truly of the Americas and one that will resonate throughout the world. . . .This really is about action.”
The Biennial of the Americas took a sharp turn to its new picture during the Democratic National Convention when Mau was invited to participate in Dialog:City. He mediated The Green Constitutional Congress and presented a talk called In Good We Trust that posed the question, “Can we create a sustainable America?”
The panel featured Charlie Cannon, Jonathan Greenblatt, Majora Carter, David Orr, Bill Becker and Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky). Mau referenced this event as inspiring him and opening his eyes to what Denver has to offer. He also referred to his Massive Change project in Vancouver and Guate Amala! as the most informative projects to prepare viewers for what the Biennial of the Americas will look like.
“This is a cross disciplinary practice,” Mau said. “How do we foster an open dialogue and collaboration? It’s not what would normally be considered an art biennial, but it does embrace a holistic creative cultural practice.”
Then perhaps we shouldn’t call it a biennial? Maybe what is being proposed is so different that a completely new title is necessary? The language here is different. There isn’t talk of testing the limits of what art can be or how spreading art out into a city puts it in a unique context to create perhaps even a new world.
Mau and the City of Denver are asking questions about where we are going and what is happening, but the answers may not come from visual artists. The answers may come from the thinkers and the doers, those who will take action and create something other than art.
The best new gallery space in Denver is Plus Gallery at 2501 Larimer Street in the ballpark neighborhood. Owned by Ivar Zeile, the gallery has been operating since 2001, but moved into their new space (pictured below) in March.
On April 24, the gallery opened a solo exhibition of urban ambler Jean Arnold’s movement paintings.
“Onrush” is a series of oil paintings taken from Arnold’s sketchbook. When she travels, whether by bus or train, drawing allows her to gather visual information that is in a state of flux, contextualizing urban clutter. Arnold re-interprets her journeys on canvas, distilling specific portions of her sketchbooks into segments with cultural and compositional value. Her gestural techniques promote a broad, dynamic color range, converting her notes into forms that balance between the recognizable and the purely abstract. Several of the works on display were taken from sketches done during a previous visit to Denver. The work addresses issues of urban sprawl that are prevalent in cities like Denver and, as Arnold says, “essentially define our lives at this time.”
The geometric and colorful abstract paintings convey a dense layering of geography and complexity. Through her work Arnold breaks down barriers of time and space.
Arnold is currently in residence at RedLine an urban contemporary art laboratory in Denver. A talk with Jean in her studio at RedLine is tentaviely set for Thursday, May 7. She’ll present an artist talk in conjunction with her Residency at Redline next Friday, May 8th starting at 5:30pm, followed by a stroll over to Plus Gallery to hear her thoughts relating to the work on view here.
UPDATE: Jean Arnold will be in attendance Friday, May 1 at Plus Gallery. Plus Gallery will be open late till 8pm for First Friday.
Welcome to LeanneGoebel.com. I started blogging in July 2005 and for several years, this blog was merely a place to post published articles. But of course, as time went by, there were articles and story ideas that didn’t find a home in print and in the last few years as we’ve watched print diminish and newspapers and magazines go away there have been more articles posted to the blog. In 2008, my blog was awarded a 2nd place for best blog in the Top of the Rockies, Society of Professional Journalists awards. Being acknowledged for journalistic excellence as a blogger means that it is time to upgrade my blog, so I’m moving to WordPress and will continue to post published work as well as new and original articles.
My preferred subject matter will continue to be contemporary art and culture based in or connected to the Rocky Mountain West and Southwest.
For the past few months I have been working with Ellen Berkovitch on an exciting new media project. Adobe Airstream will be a state-of-the-art new media website providing unique content about art, culture and design in the West and Southwest.
Independently, Ellen and I came up with very similar ideas and decided to collaborate. She’s done more of the technical work on making this possible and should earn kudos for becoming a high tech guru! Most importantly, Ellen and I both believe that there is a plethora of content that is overlooked and underprinted about art and culture in the Rocky Mountain West and Southwest. We want to focus on the stories that deserve to be told and provide video, podcasts and slideshows of all that is great about the West.
As Ellen said: “Culture is where we have the great conversations. The west is where we live and work. And new media is just so cool. Please join us, all you citizens of culture, for our new new media look at culture in the west. And don’t forget to comment early and often. We will have RSS feeds and email sign up soon. The blog is our interim under-construction site, hence the hardhat. The first phase of the website will launch June 1. But we want you to have a taste of the kind of content we hope to provide and we want to hear from you about the funky little places and cool artists making work in this–the spine of what is commonly called the flyover.
I’ve always liked the ides of March and so here we are, right on track with daggers and cycles of history. One thing about emerging from stagnation: always keep looking up for light and air. Human nature is heliotropic. To that end we hope the content we’re producing will prove interesting, inventive and timely. This hardhat blog is our face, until the full adobeairstream site goes live around June 1st. We’ve been at this in earnest (but not too earnest) since last summer.It all started with canvassing for the president and realizing, as we traveled New Mexico and Colorado, how diverse and fascinating culture really is. Not to mention the west. Culture is where we have the great conversations. The west is where we live and work. And new media is just so cool. Please join us, all you citizens of culture, for our new new media look at culture in the west. And don’t forget to comment early and often.
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Carson van Straaten Gallery sent me two recent reviews by Kyle MacMillan and Michael Paglia of their current exhibit of work by Julia Fernandez-Pol.
I find it interesting that the van Straatens are using the Carson gallery as a retail outlet for artists discovered during residencies at Riverhouse Editions in Steamboat Springs. The holiday exhibit opening tonight at Carson van Straaten features master prints from the Van Straaten gallery in Chicago and new publications from Riverhouse Editions. The opening tonight features a talk by master printer Susan Hover Oehme. At least when we are talking prints with Riverhouse Editions they are done with the traditional printmaking methods–lithography, etchings, and monoprints–and not giclees.
Emerging artist’s solo exhibition a bold display of color and texture
By Kyle MacMillan Denver Post
November 6, 2008
With concept often trumping craft and the entire medium regularly receiving death notices, revelry in the physical act of painting has hardly been a prized commodity in the contemporary art world for many years.
But if a striking exhibition on view through Nov. 14 at the Carson van Straaten Gallery is any indication, it just might be primed for a comeback.
Vibrant textures and energizing colors dance through this group of 21 paintings and original prints by Julia Fernandez-Pol, 24. The St. Louis native of Argentine descent earned her master of fine arts degree earlier this year from Boston University.
It is unusual for a gallery of this caliber to devote a solo exhibition to such a young and unproven artist, but this ambitious, fully formed body of work more than justifies such a leap of faith.
While most of the paintings — all abstract to varying degrees — suggest aquatic scenes, the real subject matter of these works is painting itself, as it was with abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the late 1940s and ’50s.
One of the show’s standouts, “Green Chaos” (2007), a 96-by-80-inch oil on canvas, takes up where famed second-generation abstractionist Joan Mitchell left off. Like the variegated topography of her works, multiple methods of paint application abound in this spirited composition.
Subtle washes and graceful drips commingle with thicker, more assertive sections, including an unruly heap of paint that juts as much as an inch from the canvas. It is chaotic, as the title suggests, but it is controlled, pleasing chaos.
The largest portion of paintings consist of more manicured, evenly textured canvases, whose lush, creamy surfaces look like frosting on a cake. Indeed, Fernandez-Pol’s use of a large syringe to apply thick, squiggly lines of paint is similar to techniques used by cake decorators.
A stunning example is “Lily” (2008), a 60-by-78-inch oil on canvas that loosely depicts a water lily. The central flower, rendered in an explosion of intermingled, non-objective colors, rests on a background of hundreds of petal-shaped ovals of paint in pastel green, blue and lavender, all meticulously applied using a palette knife.
A similar but slightly more complex companion piece is “Cerebro (Brain)” (2008), a 72-by-64-inch oil on canvas with a more involved composition and an even richer mix of textures. In several sections of the canvas, Fernandez-Pol has swished a palette knife through previously applied swaths of paint — a frequent De Kooning technique — flattening and melding the colors in its path.
While watery-colored greens and blues predominate in this show, they do not hold a monopoly. “Mariposa (Butterfly)” (2008), 24 by 18 inches, looks like it was caught in a flash of light. Hues of yellow dominate, with a rainbow of other colors making appearances as well.
If the exhibition has any weaknesses, it would be two decidedly darker, more somber works, including “Introvert” (2007). A desire to offer an emotional counterbalance to the prevailing brightness is understandable, but the less textured style of these pieces proves underwhelming.
Also on view are eight examples from Fernandez-Pol’s “Reef” series of bas relief, hand-painted monotypes. These similarly aquatic-tinged abstractions were printed through Riverhouse Editions, a Steamboat Springs-based fine art publisher whose owners also run the Carson van Straaten Gallery.
She shows herself to be as adept at printmaking as she is at painting, creating colorful, dynamic images that extend many of the techniques she employs in her canvases.
Bursting with talent and potential, this young artist is a find. Fernandez-Pol’s ebullient celebrations of painting make viewers want to celebrate right along with her.
Julia Fernandez-Pol at Carson van Straaten Gallery
By Michael Paglia Westword
November 6, 2008
When Sandy Carson, a fixture in Denver’s contemporary art world, announced earlier this year that she had sold her namesake gallery, even insiders were shocked. Carson has been on the scene since the beginning of time, which in Denver means the 1970s.
The buyers were Bill and Jan van Straaten, who changed the name to the Carson van Straaten Gallery, and many have wondered about the future direction of the gallery. Julia Fernandez-Pol, which highlights recent paintings by this emerging Boston artist, is our first indication, as it’s the initial effort of the new era. It turns out that Fernandez-Pol’s compelling abstract paintings are very compatible with the established aesthetic program that’s been the gallery’s signature for decades; her work looks like a cross between that of Homare Ikeda and Lorey Hobbs, both of whom are part of the gallery’s roster.
Fernandez-Pol first came to the attention of the van Straatens when she earned a residency at Riverhouse Editions, their fine-print outfit in Steamboat Springs, and this show includes a series of embossed monotypes she did at Riverhouse a few months ago, among them “Reef Series, 26″ (pictured), which is gorgeous.
Just as spectacular — or maybe even more so, owing to their remarkable tactile qualities — are her incredible oil-on-canvas paintings, many of which are large. The artist’s compositions are crowded with formal elements based on vaguely organic shapes that are held together in the pictures by an awkward sense of balance. She works the paint in a number of ways, most notably by making gigantic brush marks that look like cake decorations, both because they resemble the familiar candy flowers made of frosting and because of the colors, which also suggest the shades that cake frosting comes in.
I loved Fernandez-Pol’s pieces at Carson van Straaten and highly recommend that you check out this show before it closes on November 14.
An ice sculpture entitled “Main Street Meltdown,” the work of artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese, made it’s debut on the 79th anniversary of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression.
As the day wore on, the sculpture melted. Watch a time-lapsed video here.
The monument measures 15 feet long, 5 feet tall, and weighs almost 1,500 pounds. It is the fourth in a series of ice sculptures by the artists that deal with important political issues. Earlier this year, Ligorano/Reese staged ice sculptures of the word “Democracy” during the Democratic and Republican Conventions in Denver and St. Paul.
This one is in Denver outside the Museum of Contemporary Art during the Democratic National Convention.
Press Release received from the ever delightful Daniele Robson, communications manager for MCA/Denver.
Denver, October 27, 2008 – Marking a hugely successful first year in the new building, MCA DENVER welcomed its 50,000th visitor on Friday October 24. The Museum set this unprecedented goal of first year attendance seeking to welcome 50,000 visitors from Denver and around the world by October 28, 2009, the one-year anniversary of the opening of the new facility at 1485 Delgany.
To celebrate these successes and the first anniversary, MCA DENVER welcomes everyone with a KeyBank Family Free Day on Saturday November 1, 2008, from 10AM-6PM, sponsored by KeyBank.
Currently on View Omer Fast July 22, 2008 – January 4, 2009 New Media Gallery
Adam Helms August 12, 2008 – January 18, 2009 Paperworks Gallery
Jane Hammond August 19, 2008 – February 8, 2009 Photography Gallery
Terry Maker September 16, 2008 – January 18, 2009 Project Gallery
Jonas Burgert October 7, 2008 – March 1, 2009 Promenade Space
Damien Hirst October 7, 2008 – August 30, 2009 Large Works Gallery
“I should note that Street Works were originally in part a response to Earth Works, which some of us considered elitist. It would take and still does take a considerable amount of cash to visit Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Smithson was a friend and verbal sparring partner, so I couldn’t help answering his own sarcasm with some of my own. I certainly didn’t have the money to visit Utah.”
He also points out his own perspective and definition of what makes an artist:
“At a time when commerce rules the arts, we need to be reminded that one can make art without a MFA and with little or no cash-outlay — hors de commerce, as it were. One creates ones own venue; the arts do not have to be controlled by money interests. In Artopia, the definition of an artist is not ‘an art-school graduate who makes his (yes, still usually his) living by selling art products.’ An artist is someone who makes us see.”
What Perreault calls elitism, I define as another level or form of art making. Yes, anyone can make art and use their creativity to make us see. When an artist or writer is in the studio and working alone with only their inspiration and their thoughts, that is pure and ephemeral and all about just creating because we have to. On the other hand, we have to live and it takes money in our society to do that. And most people want to earn a living by doing what they love.
Perreault says artist’s should look to poets for an example.
“Was William Carlos Williams (Robert Smithson’s baby doctor!) any less of a poet because he made his living by practicing medicine? Or T. S. Eliot less a poet because he was a banker? Was Hart Crane less a poet because he once worked in a bookstore? Am I any less an artist because I am a poet who has made his living as an art critic? Are there not clerical and factory-worker artists? Was Marcel Duchamp less an artist because he was in some ways Brancusi’s New York art dealer? “
Sure, and how many actors have waited tables and how many artists teach?
Can one earn a living doing what they love without selling out the marketplace? And how exactly are the arts not controlled by a money interest? Perhaps if we return to an aboriginal society model where art was a part of everyday life–from the water jugs, to the baskets to the cooking pots, all decorated and designed for aesthetic pleasure as well as function. It seems the options are to create a factory and have others help you make your art (Warhol, Hirst, Koons, Thomas Kinkade, Dale Chihuly, most well known Navajo jewelery artists); get a job and make art on the side, the two always battling for your attention (teachers like , radio announcers like Ron Fundingsland, doctors, poets who become art critics); or do the hard work of going into the studio, or sitting at your writing desk, day after day after day and working working working, creating, drawing, painting, making art and then working equally hard to enter juried exhibits, create websites, contact galleries, find dealers and release your work into the world where it may or may not be displayed as you like.
My favorite story is from the Donald Judd symposium I attended in May. Judd was hypercritical about his art and the way he wanted it displayed. He believed that displaying the art was just as important as the creation of the art and therefore he started the Chinati foundation where he installed his work and the work of his peers in the way he felt it deserved to be displayed. At the symposium, a participant told the story of visiting a collectors home and finding a Judd aluminum box and on top of the sculpture (or specific object as Judd defined his work) was a Deborah Butterfield horse. Sacrilegious.
So, either you have enough money already to just do whatever the hell you want or you are left to create a lifetime of work and hope someone discovers it upon your death (Van Gogh).
Market is a reality that we cannot ignore. The challenge is to create work that is true to the artists aesthetic and purpose and not just pandering to a market.
MCA DENVER presents Damien Hirst’s signature works, including Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain, 2007 from his Natural History series presenting animals preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in large glass vitrines. His butterfly paintings offer a sense of beauty, vulnerability and tragedy. A medicine cabinet sculpture connects animals and humans to science as pharmaceuticals are created using a combination of synthetic and organic materials. Hirst’s work addresses various themes, largely in response to his personal experience and background. Religion and mortality are reflected through his Pop sensibility which is direct, yet tongue-in-cheek. Often evoking outrage, intrigue and awe, Hirst challenges established societal attitudes through new explorations of classical themes in art to offer new perspectives on questions of life and death. He is regarded among the most successful living artists working today and is recognized as the preeminent YBA (Young British Artist.)
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, United Kingdom in 1965. He lives and works in London and Devon, UK. He received a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London, UK. In 1995, he was the recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize. The list of exhibitions and collections featuring works by Damien Hirst is illustrious. Landmark exhibitions include Young British Artists (1992) at Saatchi Gallery, London; Sensation (1995) at the Royal Academy, London and a solo exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, New York in 2000. In an unprecedented step, Hirst recently offered his work directly atau ction, bypassing the gallery and museum circuit.
Sponsored by Scott Miller & Tim Gill, Alan Becker, Ellen Bruss & Mark Falcone, Mary Caulkins & Karl Kister, Nöel & Tom Congdon, Philae & Peter Dominick, Joanne & Ronnie Katz, Carol Keller, Pat Reynolds & Peter Kirsch and Emily Sinclair & Jay Kenney.
I saw Suzanne Opton’s “Soldier’s Face” billboard in Denver during the DNC. It was a powerful statement. The photographer has captured these soldier’s with their guard down. We all get to peer into their eyes and their souls.
“I wanted to look into the face of someone who had seen something unforgettable.” Suzanne Opton said.
The color headshots of soldiers who have served in active duty, beg the question “What happens to people who have seen terrible things that change them forever? Can you see it in their faces?”
The subject’s unconventional supine pose references Man Ray’s Noir et Blanche and Brancusi’s The Sleeping Muse, and are balanced by portraits of Iraqi refugees now living in Jordan, whose worlds have been turned upside down. These images are uncomfortably intimate distillations of the essential humanity of the sitter.
Unfortunatley, CBS Outdoor abruptly refused to post the billboards in Minneapolis — as well as in Miami, Fla., and Houston, Texas — citing concerns that pedestrians and motorists would mistake them for images of war dead.
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.
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.
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Christoph Heinrich named Denver Art Museum Director
Chinati: Judd’s Concrete’s Re open
The works in the show, mostly painting, owe to schools and influences as diverse as post-Impressionism, and cartoon clouds, so prevalent in the West and Southwest. Tracy Felix’s stylized modern mountain landscapes are jovial and playful. Some of his paintings remind me of Thomas Hart Benton, the Depression era regionalist who elongated landscapes in which equally tall fellers frequented courthouses of rural America (and whose painting style briefly intimidated Jackson Pollock).
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Ed Ranney New World Landscapes at DAM and Brendan Tang at Plus Gallery
In ART, Art Criticism, Art Museum, Ceramics, Culture, Denver, Mixed media, contemporary art on August 10, 2010 at 5:05 pmTwo more recent features on adobeairstream.com. Click on the photo to be taken to the complete article.
Edward Ranney brings his New World Landscapes to the Denver Art Museum. The exhibit is part of the recently ended Denver Biennial of the Americas and is on display through September 26 in the 4th Floor Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art Galleries.
I also interviewed Canadian artist and Sobey award finalist Brendan Tang at the opening of “You are Here” at Plus Gallery. The ambient gallery sound is challenging, but Tang is a fun and informative interview. “You are Here” ends August 20 and is a show not be missed. The only exhibit as part of the Biennial of the Americas that looked North to our Canadian neighbors.