An abandoned mining area above the town of Ward, Colorado, inspired John McEnroe’s most recent body of work, Half Life, currently on view at Robischon Gallery in Denver, in a solo show thematically connected with four other artist’s solo shows, under the curatorial title: “Object | Nature.” McEnroe, one of Colorado’s best known abstract sculptors, has for some time been exploring organic forms, in contrast to the inorganic plastic material that he gravitates toward. His exhibition features branches, roots and books cast in or covered in resin. Many of the titles identify the organic source material: Pinon, Ponderosa, Lodgepole. Others are given more human personifications: Bride, Fragment (Thumb), Torso. Still others refer to the material, and its meaning. A large, white wishbone-shaped double branch is itself called Half Life.

“It has lots of references,” McEnroe says. “The half-life of plastic, the half-life of this organic material that I’m mining. I’m way more than doubling the half-life by casting them… Now they are a burden to society, these large plastic trees.” The work also references the reality and mythology of the West. Describing the mining area as a bunch of holes in the ground with big piles of rock and rusted metal objects, he says, “It’s sad, desperate, scary, romantic, but as you linger that soon peels away and you begin to see the endless disappointment that this process must have offered.” The materials used to craft these objects will outlive the myths created.

The commercial-grade plastic McEnroe uses has a semi-translucent radiance to it, and its whiteness gives the works a reverence and purity that is unexpected. Using plastic allows McEnroe to do things other materials cannot, but he doesn’t love to work with the material. “It’s just another tool in the toolkit,” he says. McEnroe’s toolkit includes a BFA in Ceramics from Kansas University and an MFA from Ohio State. In 1994 he moved to Denver, and began working as an apprentice to sculptor John De Andrea, in which role he sanded and rasped many of De Andrea’s hyperrealist polyvinyl figurative works, as his studio assistant. In 2002, he began doing exhibition production at the Denver Art Museum. Currently, McEnroe teaches at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and works for a commercial plastics manufacturer, in addition to making art. He has completed five major public art commissions in Denver and was included in the popular “Embrace!” exhibition at the Denver Art Museum in 2009. McEnroe’s sculptural oeuvre is filled with art-historical reference points. “I’m a product of many years of art school, and if I don’t push back against that then I didn’t get my money’s worth,” he explains.

Installation view of Object I Nature Photo: Wes Magyar, courtesy Robischon Gallery

That push back often gives McEnroe’s work a sardonic edge. A wood and resin piece titled Arneson Out West references sculptor Robert Arneson, who used everyday objects to make confrontational statements, a practice McEnroe also employs. An exhibition at Robischon in 2009 featured sculptures created from melted plastic playground toys. His well-known work of public art installed at the Highland Pedestrian Bridge in a popular Denver neighborhood, titled National Velvet, was created with industrial-grade nylon filled with sand and hardened with resin to create a rigid translucent shell. By day, it is a tower of bright red organic forms that create an obelisk. By night, the work glows from within.

Although it was the realist De Andrea who introduced McEnroe to plastic, McEnroe’s own practice has a strong affinity with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jessica Stockholder in its effusive embrace of common materials put together in quasi-unadulterated ways.

This July, McEnroe will be the focus of a solo show at MCA Denver. Intriguingly, he hints that his show at MCA Denver may not include as much of his chosen plastic material. “The tree objects pushed me into a more naturally organic interest. It may be that organic forms in nature are doing more than I give them credit for and maybe I need to explore that.”

“Object | Nature” was on view at Robischon Gallery in Denver, CO. January 17 – March 2, 2013. http://www.robischongallery.com

John McEnroe at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver opens in July. http://www.denverartmuseum.org

Here are ten artist’s I think should be more well-known. They are all currently working in Colorado. They just happen to be women.

Last September, I was invited as guest art critic to give an update on the status of art criticism in the digital age to the Art Student’s League of Denver. (Fellow panelists were Denver dealer Ivar Zeile and artist/blogger Theresa Anderson.) In the past seven years more than half of all arts journalism jobs have been eliminated in American newsrooms and according to Pew Research Center, all newsroom jobs have declined by 30% since 2000. I wanted to, in digital-media style, ask the audience an important question:  Did they read (need?) criticism? Was it important to them?

Is criticism an adjunct marketing tool to promote the business of art? Or worse, are art editors and critics simply a courtier class as Dave Hickey suggested to The Guardian? Or is criticism and arts journalism merely dictated by the financial news as Sarah Thornton laments.

On the fringes of the contemporary art world in places like Denver, the questions and concerns about art criticism are different. “What are we going to do in Denver?”  ”How do we get coverage?”

Denver  lost the Rocky Mountain News (the West’s oldest paper folded in 2009) and then The Denver Post (through buyouts and newsroom cuts, lost critics Kyle Macmillan and John Moore, arts editor Ray Rinaldi does it all now).

Does Criticism Matter?

Is criticism about coverage, cash, being a courtier, or discourse?

Most newspaper critics, when asked, claim their job is to educate readers about art. (New York Times chief art critic Roberta Smith told a Santa Fe audience attending an NCECA conference, in 2010, that only 26 jobs like hers existed in the US.)

Perhaps this education approach is one of the reasons the basic agreement of digital life is that readers get to co-curate their news. They don’t want one-way lectures, which immediately seem to be elitist, boring, a turn off. They want a more democratic and pluralistic approach–a dialogue.

However, what we have ended up with, in the absence of independent critics, is a bubble, where online we often choose to curate and read only those who agree with our positions. We associate with those who are on the same path as we are. Curators and museums network around the business of art reputations and auction sales, wanting to control their message –they rarely invite critics to the table.

“The market seems to have declared that arts criticism as a profession, as a calling, isn’t supportable, isn’t sustainable, isn’t legitimate,” Douglas McLennan wrote in 2011 on his blog Diacritical when John Terauds, classical music critic of the Toronto Star was reassigned to the paper’s business section. “We could go on about what was lacking or what didn’t work in the way we covered the arts. But the cold hard truth is that there just isn’t an audience for what we were doing.”

McLennan is the founder and editor of ArtsJournal (a daily online arts news aggregator that he established in 1999) and he teaches at the NEA Arts Journalism Institutes and the USC Annenberg School For Communication and Journalism that ran the online arts newrooms projects, Engine 28 and Engine 29. During the Engine 29 experiment in 2012 the fellows determined that “the trickle-down theory didn’t work in economics and it doesn’t work in arts journalism. People who aren’t already encountering your work generally won’t, which means if you want to reach new communities, you have to build the pipelines.”

They went on to add that the problem lay in construing writing for a broader audience, by mastering new media and realizing that criticism happens everyday on social media; as well as “thinking beyond” the arts section, being entrepreneurial and being more broadly representative of artists.

New Models, New Money

To that end, the Knight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts have funded several new models for arts journalism providing $80,000 each to the Charlotte Arts Journalism Alliance, Art Attack in Philadelphia and CriticCar in Detroit. CriticCar is a mobile recording system proposed by two New York journalists, Jennifer Conlin and Dan Shaw, offering event-goers the opportunity to record video reviews as they exit a performance or exhibition. Akron, Macon, Miami, San Jose and St. Paul also received $20,000 each to create action plans for their proposed models for arts journalism. All in an effort to find a reciprocal model that can be shared from city to city to resurrect art criticism from its grave. But the question remains: Is any of this really  criticism and will a one-size-fits-all model help find an audience for criticism?

Another problem is that nothing is yet sustainable as a business model. Digital ad revenue remains a mere 10% of ad and circulation revenue for publications like The Denver Post. Technorati counts some 300,000 art blogs online with the best of them focused on art centers—New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Santa Fe and nary a mention or glimpse at Denver except for this online magazine, AdobeAirstream.com (entering year five on March 15), highlighted by McLennan during the 2009 National Summit on Arts Journalism. At that “contest,” Glasstire, FLYP Media (now defunct),  and San Francisco Classical Voice all were awarded prizes from $4,500 to $9,500. FLYP Media shut down in early 2010 when the investor pulled out.

In Denver it appears a form of xenophobia applies. Many readers don’t read my work in AdobeAirstream, believing that since this site is regional and not solely Colorado-centric, it can’t pertain. Or because it’s not New York-based, it’s irrelevant. In the meantime, as new media pipelines appear to offer some hope for arts journalism, they tend to come from invested power brokers in the Chambers of Commerce arena: municipal, financial powers that really know nothing about creating media, much less criticism, except as an adjunct to tourism messages. For criticism to work, boosterism motivations have to take a back seat to independent dialogue.

New Art Media in Colorado

In the past year we’ve seen the launch of multiple art and culture related websites based in Denver, all of which are seemingly unaware of the larger dialogue and experimentation happening in the arts journalism sphere:

Confluence-Denver (funded by big dollar backers to attract the “creative class” to Denver, a subject on which AdobeAirstream has written extensively)

Culturewest (an effort by John Moore to turn his ranking as one of the best theater critics in the country into a viable endeavor);

Colorado Art Seen (a website and print publication attempting to cover all of the arts across Colorado with content created by artists for artists);

The Scen3 (the website of the Tier Three Scientific and Cultural Facilities Districts that wants to publish reviews to attract audience to their venues):

The Invisible Museum (the digital version of the defunct print publication Eye Level, featuring some better writing and contributions by volunteer bloggers and critics) and;

ColoradoCreates.com (Disclosure: I edit and “curate” this website for Colorado Creative Industries, a division of the Office of Economic Development and International Trade, to promote seven categories of Colorado “creative” industry: Culinary, Design, Film & Media, Heritage, Performing, Publishing and Visual).

More recently comes the news that Bonfils-Stanton Foundation has given nearly $1 million to Colorado Public Radio to hire an arts editor and two arts journalists to create an arts bureau which they describe as an “online hub intended to become a one-stop, multimedia destination for arts news, information and performances in Colorado.”

Freelance reviewers are also expected to contribute.

Public Radio and the Arts

Studio 360 is probably the most successful of public radio’s experiments in arts journalism. The Peabody Award-winning Studio 360 with host Kurt Anderson is produced by PRI and WNYC and is a guide to pop culture and the arts. In Minneapolis, Art Hounds features three people from the Minnesota arts community talking about a performance, opening or event—insiders sharing their insider information on the art scene. And in other local markets, there are other small efforts to cover arts on public radio.

What remains to be seen is if Colorado Public Radio is structuring its model on either Studio 360 or Art Hounds, or if it is inventing a new model.

Returning to Art Criticism

Is the premise upon which art criticism is based–that art needs criticism to help it connect to the larger world–a fallacy?

David Levi Strauss who is chair of the Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program at the School of Visual Arts says: “If you want to engage, if you want discourse, you need criticism.”

Then how do we innovate criticism in this century and beyond? According to Michael Raynor, author of The Innovator’s Manifesto innovation is especially powerful when it is disruptive. It is time to disrupt the status quo where art criticism is concerned.

Raynor presents in his book that true disruptors define a new frontier and have an enabling technology, which drives the disruption or strategic innovation.

Is criticism sustaining? No.

Is it autonomous or incumbent? It is currently incumbent to the art market, to artists, to current media distribution channels.

Could it be autonomous? We see this in the plethora of blogs and new media publications out there attempting to be self-governed. But producing a website that looks like a print magazine with art criticism that is similar to what one might write in a newspaper is not a new productivity frontier. Hence, the failure of criticism to be innovative. (I acknowledge my own guilt.)

What if critics (and others in the art world) made an effort to engage outside of our bubble? Art is happening in multiple places, not just the so-called cultural centers, and is influenced by multiple histories woven together.What if we focused less on art theory, art history and art centers? What if our language was understandable and less esoteric? What would it look like? And would anyone want to read it?

Schutz paints hypotheticals—things unreal yet plausible. When viewing her paintings the viewer must give herself over to the possibility of the impossible. Subject matter for some of the paintings in her oeuvre: A cannibal devouring his own face; the autopsied corpse of Michael Jackson (created years before the singer’s death); a woman stripping a wood floor with her teeth; another woman giving birth while gazing at a landscape painting, a face under water puffing a cigarette tears in her eyes.

The DAM exhibition originated at the Neuberger Museum where Schutz was awarded the Roy R. Neuberger Exhibition Prize, a biennial prize given every two years to an artist for an early career survey and monographic catalogue. It is an exhibition that features a dichotomy of subject matter involving more dissection and dismemberment than Junior High Biology class, rendered in a vibrant and sunny color palette. The show was grouped chronologically and opened with Sneeze (2001) a small painting in which a thick, lump of colorful mucus spews from a woman’s nose, head down, long, blonde hair falling forward. Thick rows of paint squeezed directly from the tube appear to force the eyes to shut tightly. This is a painting about how it feels to sneeze, not what it looks like when one sneezes. Our eyes are closed; we cannot know what it looks like, yet here the artist creates the experience visually.

A few years later, Schutz began drawing the “Self Eaters” Series, often as a non-conscious exercise while on the phone or doing something else–not focused on making a finished drawing. The series depicts people in the midst of devouring their own faces and bodies. At first the artist didn’t think she could paint this subject because it felt, in her words, “too angtsy.” Today she suggests: “If you could eat yourself, you could digest yourself. … Then you could remake yourself.”

“Schutz began by imagining how someone would begin such an act. For example, if one were going to eat her own face, would she use her upper teeth to bite her lower jaw, or her bottom teeth to eat her nose? The artist must also consider how decisions about composition, color, and paint application determine the look of these impossible scenes. As she began the painting Face Eater (2004), Schutz wondered where the eyes should appear on the canvas. For the artist, eyes serve as a focal point of a face, and help viewers to identify with the subject, even if that subject is doing something inconceivable. In Face Eater, the eyes fill the center of the painting with a hypnotic reminder that the creature doing this bizarre act is supposed to be human,” according to Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Renee B. Miller of the Denver Art Museum.

Schutz explores physical sensations, actions and translates them to canvas in work that is created entirely from her imagination. There is no observation, no photographic source, no model and she presents the viewer with things no one has ever seen before. Take for example The Autopsy of Michael Jackson (2005) that began with the artist thinking about a picture that would be taken, but hadn’t been yet. A sock, a glove, an elephant man skull and a femur bone surround the pop star’s body.

 

However, painting an autopsy was not as unbearable for the artist as painting How We Would Give Birth (2007) because it is such an intense subject. The built in problem Schutz created for herself was how to represent something that was very uncomfortable for her to represent. She designed an escape route by have a landscape painting as focal object the woman giving birth and for anyone looking at the painting. Then she created this special separation between the upper body and the lower body, between what is going on in the landscape painting and what is happening in the bed. Two very separate spaces that are supposed to be natural but that she conveys as equally artificial.

More metaphorical than artificial is the “Verb” series in which Schutz explores how to depict simultaneous actions imagined by combining three seemingly incompatible actions together such as in Swimming, Smoking, Crying (2009). The artist admits to screaming Nirvana lyrics under water between breaths while on her high school swim team. When she later learned of water’s noise conductivity qualities, she determined that was why she “didn’t have many friends on the swim team.” The three actions together seem to be about one important act—breathing.

She also painted “the worst thing she could imagine: scraping wood with your teeth.” Carpenter (2010) is a painting she hopes is contagious, that it makes the viewer think about their teeth and gums, something most people do not often think about.

Schutz doesn’t think of her paintings as gory, “and I also don’t think of them as too far out either. And I don’t expect other people to feel the way I do, but that’s just how I feel.”

Drawing from a long tradition of Abstract Expressionism, Schutz creates an imaginative and mythic universe full of grotesque creatures and fantastical characters. Her paintings feature wildly colorful brushstrokes and her color monotypes showcase the sensory overload and luscious texture found in those paintings, while her black-and-white drawings are haunting and gestural, blurring together figurative and abstract elements. Whether cruelty or hatred, Schutz pushes the envelope by painting in a whimsical manner those things seemingly not possible or plausible to paint and she does it with painterly aplomb.

Organized by the Museum for African Art in New York (MfAA), it was the first retrospective of the African artist El Anatsui’s work.

“El Anatsui has been writing to us about Africa for a very long time,” said exhibition curator Lisa Binder of the MfAA. “For over four decades he has created drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures and installations that convey histories both personal and universal. Each work has its own story to tell, though, when seen together, they relate to each other like words in a sentence.”

Born in Ghana in 1944, Anatsui earned a bachelor’s and post-graduate degree from the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. He taught at the University of Nigeria from 1975 to 2011. In 2007, Anatsui created a stir at the Venice Biennial by suspending a large metal sculpture made from liquor bottle tops and metal foil bottle neck collars on the outside of a building. The work subverted the idea of metal as a stiff and rigid medium and instead turned it into a pliable and almost sensuous form. While the bottle caps used to create these works are recycled from a West African distillery, the initial use of this material came when he found a bag of these caps outside of his studio. Anatsui weaves them together with copper wire and he intentionally wants the viewer to read the labels and names of the liquor.

“I don’t see what I do as recycling: I transform the caps into something else,” Anatsui says.

The bottle caps and labels are transformed into works that have been associated with kente cloth. In 1993 he did a series of wooden sculptures called Old Cloth where the blackened areas signified the wear and age of an important old piece of cloth. Those blackened areas also appear in the black labels and metal caps.

The retrospective features ceramic works from the 1970s, when Anatsui began to manipulate broken ceramic fragments alluding to ancient Nok terracotts sculptures and West African myths. He also made sculptures that merged signs and symbols from various cultures and languages created by chopping, carving, burning and etching wood.

A series of found driftwood sculptures and wooden sculptures carved with a power saw leaving jagged surfaces are highlighted by Adinsibuli Stood Tall, a wooden tree woman, regal yet scarred, just like Africa.

The exhibit also featured, drawings, and aquatint and dry point etchings on paper and two large installations, Peak Project created from the tin lids of Peak brank condensed milk wired together and formed into peaks (at the DAM exhibition they seemed almost hoodoo like) and Open(ing) Market, hundred of small wooden boxes commissioned by African workers with traditional product labels glued inside.

From ideograms to failed communication, the works of El Anatsui tell a story of Africa from migration and colonialism to consumption and mythology. As the artist himself has said: “Rather than recounting history, my art is telling about what history has provoked.”

Living in a small, rural community myself, I found inspiration in an organization called M12.

Based in Denver and Last Chance on the rural eastern plains of Colorado, M12 utilizes contemporary art explorations in community building and in many ways is redefining contemporary art in a rural setting through interdisciplinary site-based art works, research projects, education and outreach programs. M12 is The Black Hornet a race car that races at the I-76 speedway in Fort Morgan; its Open Space, a wooden geodesic dome situated in a wheat field inviting contemplation of the landscape and the cycle of farming; its Action on the Plains supporting experimental art-making where Jetsonorama recently wheat pasted community history on the side of barns and buildings; it’s the Experimental Site for Rural Creativity, a site-specific, rural cultural center that will provide an interface for art and ideas that are directly inspired by the landscape of the high plains; it’s the Big Feed, part county fair, part community barbeque, part symposium; its Campito, sheep wagon as sustainable living, cultural heritage, art and science. It’s also bicycles, rovers, bird sanctuary and more. M12 has captured more than my attention, they were invited to participate in The 13^th Annual Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2011 Australian Biennial (SPACED), The Biennial of the Americas and their programs have appeared nationally and internationally. M12 was also recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and awarded an Our Town grant. This is a collective of artists, curators and creative professionals passionate about local and global problem solving providing evolutionary thinking and innovation in art, community and communication.

Another Colorado project that is receiving national recognition is AIR—Arts Incubator of the Rockies–with a mission to develop, support and advance artists and the power of creativity throughout communities in the ten state Rocky Mountain region, using web-based, Internet and distance learning technologies to provide networking, workshops, training and coaching. AIR also received funding from the NEA Our Town Grant Program and is the only Colorado based nonprofit to receive support from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation. While there is a lot of buzz around this project, it remains to be seen how many artists and creative individuals  will become paid members, whether the online format will provide the connection and networking desired by artists, or whether their educational curriculum will prove to be superior to a plethora of other offerings out there.

Shifting gears, from large creative projects to significant legislation, Colorado passed a new film incentive bill and has created a unique incentive based on the experience of director, producer and filmmaker Donald Zuckerman. Colorado now offers a 20% rebate on qualified expenses plus a loan guarantee program for films, television commercials and game production. Recently, Universal Sports Network announced they are moving their production and broadcast operations from California to the Denver area. More indicators that the new incentive is working according to Colorado Film & Video Association: The state has incentivized three times what it did in the entire previous year; more commercials are being produced in Colorado; several independent feature film projects are considering producing their films in Colorado; and major studios are calling the state to talk about production. But the biggest news in film making was the Lone Ranger filming some scenes near Creede–all without the incentive because Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp can pretty much do whatever they want and are guaranteed to rake in billions on their movie. Who cares how much it costs to make it!

 

Also bringing in the visitors and attracting more people to the state was the Denver Art Museum with their blockbuster exhibitions. Becoming Van Gogh–a DAM only exhibition and Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective, which had its only U.S. appearance in Denver, shocking the fashion world. YSL and cowboy boots? What? Additional programming at the museum has included these standouts: El Anatsui, Theodore Waddell, Ed Ruscha and Dana Schutz. While the Logan Lectures have featured: Martha Daniels, Tucker Nichols, Richard Tuttle, Lawrence Argent, Nick Cave, El Anatasui, Lucas Reiner, Larry Bell, Dana Schutz and Bill Amundson, all sharing their creative insights. But it wasn’t only the DAM bringing international artists and curators to town. David Anfam and the Clyfford Still Museum shed new light and made new discoveries about Still’s connection to Van Gogh in an inspiring lecture and intriguing exhibition. Meanwhile, the Dikeou Collection brought Nils Folke Anderson to their pop up space and Lordy Rodriquez talked about his work as part of the Art Swap Dikeou did with Art Pace in San Antonio. At the Denver Botanic Gardens, East met West through Kizuna’s amazing bamboo installations by Tetsunori Kawana and Stephen Talasnik while at DIA Vochol gave travelers something at which to marvel during a layover.

2012 was also the year that brought well-deserved attention to some key Colorado artists, both elevating and honoring their contributions. Stan Brakhage and his key works were the focal point around which Visual Rhythm was designed. De Wain Valentine, after receiving much attention in Pacific Standard Time was presented in a survey exhibition at the CSU Art Museum in Fort Collins called Colorado’s Valentine. Robert Mangold was retrospected at the Arvada Center in Time, Space and Motion. Clark Richert created Expanded Cinema II: The Ultimate Painting for the cultural documentary exhibition West of Center at the MCA/Denver. Technically, the work is a re-creation of a collaborative circular painting done by Richert, Gene Bernofsky and Richard Kallweit at Drop City outside of Trinidad. Additionally, MCA and the Aspen Art Museum selected seven Colorado artists to feature in Continental Drift: Christina Battle, Scott Johnson, Jeanne Liotta, Sarah McKenzie, Adam Milner, Yumi Roth and Edie Winograde. Dave Yust was also given a retrospective at the Loveland Art Museum and DU professor and artist Laleh Mehran turned the Fuse Box gallery at the Denver Art Museum into a technological, sociological, religious and cultural mecca with her work Men of God, Men of Nature.

Denver galleries seemed to up the ante as well, as if they are stating its time to go big or go home. At Robischon we were treated to international star Judy Pfaff and local newcomer Brandon Bultman while David B. Smith Gallery gave us Hong Seon Jang and Gregory Euclide and Plus Gallery showed William Betts and Jenny Morgan. Even smaller galleries and regional art venues have national and international reach. Places like Shy Rabbit Contemporary Arts in Pagosa Springs consistently show high caliber work by Colorado artists such as Ron Fundingsland and Karl Isberg and nationally recognized newcomers and established artists. While in Colorado Springs, a high school student named Karissa Gonzalez-Othon blew away the competition with her sculpture of an African warrior, which has been seen all around town including at the Fine Arts Center.

We saw a lot by artists Austin Parkhill who was seen in Art Takes Times Square, at the Arvada Center and in a solo exhibition at Plus Gallery; Adam Milner whose work was in Face, Places & Spaces at the Arvada Center and also in MCA’s Continental Drift currently on view at the Aspen Art Museum had solo exhibits at Colorado Photographic Arts Center and Vertigo Art Space and was in group exhibits at Ice Cube Gallery and The Garage in San Francisco; ditto Scott Johnson who was in Continental Drift and partnered with James Turrell in a standout exhibition at the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs.

Just a few of the things that stand out in this little art galaxy of Colorado.

It was not propaganda.

“Grief” is an image that captures the scope of human loss in the Soviet Union during WWII. Baltermants arrived at a trench on the outskirts of Kerch; days after the Soviet Army recaptured the city on December 30, 1941. (It would be re-occupied by the Germans in 1942). Older women and families were wandering, weeping and searching among dozens of corpses of civilians who it appears had been brought out into a field and shot en masse by the Einsatzgruppen (German army mobile killing units). The numbers vary, but it is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen killed 1.5 million Jewish men, women and children in the occupied Soviet territories in mass shootings.

Baltermants was one of the first photographers to document the discovery of Nazi atrocity sites, three years before better-known photographers Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Miller chronicled the liberation of German death camps. His photographs are on view in “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War and the Holocaust,” at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.

Based on David Shneer’s book Through Soviet Jewish Eyes, the exhibition presents more than 50 images seen through the lens of Soviet photojournalists, the majority of whom were Jewish. (Shneer is director of Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder) and this exhibition debuted at the CU Art Museum in September 2011 and features other important Soviet photojournalists: Evgenii Khaldei and Georgii Zelma.

There is a striking duality in the images taken by these photographers. They include elements of Soviet agitprop, in the tradition of socialist realism, glorifying the Red Army and its patriotic soldiers and the nurses doing good work on the home front. On the other hand, these are Jewish photographers documenting the corpses of Jews and other civilians for Yiddish-language newspapers as well. Yet, according to Shneer, they survived by denying their heritage and few of the photojournalists ever embraced their patrimony, refusing to be buried in Jewish cemetery, learn Hebrew or leave for Israel. Their Soviet patriotism and survival came first. Shneer’s book and the exhibition, (which he curated along with Louis P. Singer, Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Lisa Tamiris Becker, Director of the CU Art Museum) utilizes often unseen photographs to tell a story far different from the often-repeated claim that the Soviet Union tried to cover up Nazi atrocities. This exhibition shows that this idea is not only untrue, but that many of the photojournalists of the time were in fact Jewish and kept the violence against Jews on the front page of Soviet newspapers like Pravda.

The opening section of the show contextualizes the photographs within Constructivist and Socialist Realist traditions of Soviet photography in the 1920s and 1930s by including archival materials such as contact sheets, glass negatives, scrapbooks, diaries, Soviet publications and personal book maquettes created by the photographers.

The prints made by these photographers were often no larger than an index card, taken with beat up cameras, but with incredible skill, arranging light and form in a way that puts most landscape photographers to shame. On view are canonical images side-by-side with photographs that have not been widely exhibited. The images are printed in various sizes, with the larger-scale photographs blurring the line between fine art and photojournalism and challenging viewers to question contemporary societies interest in viewing these works in ever-larger scale. In many of these images, documenting horrific events merged with avant-garde modernist sensibilities to create an aesthetic that continues to echo across time— powerful and aesthetically compelling images of war.

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War and the Holocaust will be on view at the Museum of Jewish Heritage from Nov. 16 2012 to April 7, 2013. It will then travel to the Holocaust Museum Houston, Houston, Texas, and finally to the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

“In the beginning the work looked a lot like maps. I’m not appropriating the image of cartography but the visual language of cartography,” Rodriquez said during a recent artist talk at the Dikeou Collection in Denver where they are hosting an Art Swap exhibition with ArtPace in San Antonio, bringing works from the Texas residency founded by Linda Pace (Pace salsa) to Dikeou in Denver. Rodriquez is one of the artist’s whose works are being shared. While maps may be a launching point for Rodriquez, his work also addresses various subjects that on the surface appear to have nothing to do with cartography and maps, but is somehow connected via the symbolism of cartography.

On view at Dikeou Collection is a grid of small drawings, part of a series of hundreds of drawings that developed out of Rodriquez’s early explorations into cartography. He initially created 55 “state” maps called the States of America that were hand drawn using graphic design markers on very porous printmaking paper that gave them a printed look. The maps all featured certain tropes to give the viewer a level of recognition. For example, each map included an island nation and often the names of places and cities in certain states were used, but the artist fabricated the configuration of borders and created a patchwork of cultural identity for the states. The five extra states Rodriquez created were: Disney, Territory, Hollywood, Internet and Monopoly. It was a decade long project launched from a desire to order the artist and the viewer’s experience of the world.

Texas, the final work he did in the series, doesn’t look like Texas. The state borders Indiana, Iowa, New Jersey and Maine in Rodriquez’s version. It’s a triptych and began with Rodriquez including all the places he has visited and lived, the names of people he had worked with. It became a self-portrait and a translation of personal identity, an autobiographical work.

For his residency at ArtPace in 2001 Rodriquez strapped video camera to the front of a truck and drove out of San Antonio north, south, east and west. The camera however was pointed toward the ground resulting in a video that is mostly nonstop static until the shadow of the camera or the highway lines appear as the driver/artist changes lanes. Looking at the video isn’t important. It’s a road. For Rodriquez the art was about delving into an impressionistic relationship to, rather than a representation of, the landscape. In the end, his final artwork looked like a large compass.

After the States of America series and the ArtPace residency, Rodriquez began eliminating text and the urban language of roads and geologic features in his drawings, which led him to the pared down, focused drawings on view in Art Swap at Dikeou. Some look like maps or geographic features, others like biologic objects or organic shapes found under a microscope. The works are precise and created with markers on the same printmaking paper and are held to the wall with magnetic pins in 20 columns and 5 rows for a total of 100 works.

These intimate yet expansive drawings are explorations in a coded language. They are not much different than the individual elements of the States of America, but hyper-focused and hung together and next to each other in a random order, a less precise map of the micro and macro universe. From the microcosmic elements that make up life to the expansive shapes of the Milky Way and distant stars, Rodriquez’s “Small Drawings” are anything but diminutive.

Art Swap is an exhibition built on the concept of exchanging and sharing ideas. Several works from the Dikeou Collection have been shipped to Artpace in San. In exchange, Artpace has selected works from their artists currently on view in Denver. In addition to Lordy Rodriquez, other artists on view include: E.V. Day, Nathan Carter, Juan Miguel Ramos, Katrina Moorhead, Isaac Julian, Katie Pell and Alex DeLeon.

Through December 30, 2012
Dikeou Collection
The Colorado Building
1615 California Street
Suite 515
Denver, CO 80202

The brain is able to process the visual cues and then complete the artist’s suggestion as something realistic from recorded remembrance—the brain completes the picture from a stockpile of images stored in memory. Because of this, each painting then is unique based upon the individual mental recall of the viewer. Not long ago, a Harvard researcher, Margaret Livingstone, who had seen Stoehr’s painting’s approached the artist. In the broader field of neuroesthetics, Livingstone is focused on the physiological processing of visual information. She wanted to know if he was intentionally using equal value complementary colors and placing them together. If he understood that it was the same technique Claude Monet used to create movement. If it was not a conscious, rational decision, then she wanted to know how he stumbled upon it. His answer? Stoehr said he experimented and it looked good, he liked it, so he kept doing it.

“Vision is information processing. Artists make use of the ways the brain extracts information,” Livingstone said in her Penny W. Stamps distinguished visitors series lecture at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design. Semir Zeki, a professor of Neuroesthetics at the University College of London, theorizes that artists unconsciously use techniques to create visual art to explore how the brain works. “…The artist is in a sense, a neuroscientist, exploring the potentials and capacities of the brain, though with different tools. How such creations can arouse aesthetic experiences can only be fully understood in neural terms. Such an understanding is now well within our reach,” Zeki said in Statement on Neuroesthetics.

Stoehr does make use of how the brain extracts information and processes it in his art making, but often this derives from a childlike sense of experimentation and intuition. He is intrigued by ambiguity, defined by Neuroscience as the way our brain tries to instill meaning into our world. It is not that things are indecipherable, but instead that there are several meanings of equal validity providing an alternate certainty. When we see something we may see it as ambiguous and our brain assigns emotion and meaning to it.

Influenced by research, Stoehr began exploring how to create something ambiguous in his art. “When something is ambiguous, it looks one-way in one moment
and different in another moment. When you project one emotion one day and another emotion the next day the painting is more interesting and maybe more real to us,” Stoehr said. Artists achieve ambiguity in art in many different ways. One of the most famous and ambiguous paintings is Leonardo da Vinci’s The Mona Lisa. Livingstone has a theory about The Mona Lisa that Da Vinci harnessed how we visually perceive to drive viewers into seeing the woman as an enigma, perplexed by her expression. If the viewer focuses on the eyes of the The Mona Lisa her mouth is seen only through peripheral vision and in peripheral vision the brain focuses on the shadows by her cheekbones, which cause her lips to appear curved or smiling, but if the viewer focuses on the mouth, the brain ignores the shadows on the cheeks, focuses on the line of the mouth and she appears rather expressionless.

“The brain processes the shading in a different area than it processes color and line,” Stoehr explained. “Shading is more in our peripheral vision. In the eye, Cones are more perceptive to color and line and Rods more perceptive to shading.” Experimenting with this led him to explore other ways to convey ambiguous and ephemeral
expressions. For instance, he frequently gives each side of the face a slightly different expression—painting one expression in the eyes and another on the mouth, one expression on the left side of the face and a different expression on the right side. He also use iridescent paints that change depending upon the intensity of lighting and the viewer’s point of view causing shifting patterns of light and slight changes in expression. Stoehr thinks, “Witnessing these small changes might make these images appear more real to us—more like we actually perceive.”

But it is a higher level of ambiguity that Stoehr is reaching for. He considers Johannes Vermeer’s painting Girl with a Pearl Earring to be an almost perfect work. Vermeer used small scale and local contrast to attract the eye, keep it moving around the canvas, expanding what it takes in. “But there’s something more in that face,” Stoehr said. “There is the formal technique that draws your eyes to the face. I see it, but its very ambiguous and it’s something else. I haven’t put my finger on it yet, but he’s done it, and when I look at it I flip with different meanings all the time. He’s created alternate scenarios that seem very real and that’s the ambiguity that appeals to me.”

Destiny 17
80 x 60 inches
acrylic on canvas

After a trip to Florence, Italy he began adding metallic paints, outlining the women in gold inspired by Byzantine religious iconography. Later he began working the gold paint into the face, merging foreground and background. For a while he took all color out and now he is adding it back in—a bluish green and purple here and there. Stoehr has also been exploring concepts originally espoused by Cubism, but his focus is on what the artists said they were trying to do rather than the flattening distortion of form with lines and geometric shapes. The Cubist’s were asking how do we really see? How do we visualize someone over time, knowing that our brain
doesn’t treat that person as a snapshot? How does an artist capture the theater in the mind and portray the unconscious version of the person. Picasso did this in 1905 when he painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein with a contorted body, a flattened face with distinct angles, misshapen, dark lined eyes and hair that appears artificially
placed. Many friends said the work portrayed her “essence.”

At its core, Stoehr hypothesizes that Cubism was about a way of seeing, rather than a way of creating an abstract style. It was about creating the essential reality. A reality in which the mind believes that what it is seeing is more real than a photograph because it captures the quintessence of the subject and how we perceive and experience a person over time. “If their stated goal was essential reality, they didn’t hit it,” Stoehr said. However, sparked by their desire to create essential reality, he
began experiment with merging a more naturalistic style with cubist like multiple views, letting the viewer reprocess and complete the image. In some works the face is created looking direct and in profile in an attempt to capture the reality of how we experience a person over time, on good days and bad, when they are happy or sad, tired or rested. By subtly combining different views of a face in one painting the brain sees the subject portrayed, as it would experience a person over split seconds to weeks or months or years.

Another concept evident in Stoehr’s work is Global versus Local Vision where what is seen up close and what is seen from a distance is different. The most well known artist utilizing this technique is Chuck Close who creates portraits from series’ of baseball cards or small symbols created on a grid. In Close’s later works, the symbols
in the small boxes processed by local vision are sometimes painted using equal value complementary colors. In Stoehr’s paintings, the local is not created on a grid, but in the area of a portrait’s forehead one will find an abstract painting created from line and pigment. As the viewer moves through this exhibition at Space Gallery, they
will realize that some portraits are hanging on walls while others are located on the floor, mounted on moveable trolleys. Stoehr wants to change the relationship between the viewer and the art and enliven the experience. The viewer is now able to alter the exhibit by moving the paintings around. Through this action, he or she can consider how reorganizing the order and location of the portraits affect each other and how they affect the viewer’s emotional reaction. This experience is powerful and many feel as if they are interacting on a human, emotional level with the portraits.

As stated earlier, in spite of all of this scientific research, Stoehr happened upon his technique intuitively and through continual exploration. Growing up in Burlington, Wisconsin at 17 Stoehr thought he would be an artist, but instead his education took him from a state school in northern Wisconsin to four years of postgraduate education. He ended up as President of the Worldwide Mapping Operation for National Geographic Society. Then one day, eight years ago, he quit and decided to make art recalling his high school art classes and the artists that inspired him in 1965—Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

“It seemed like controlled chaos,” Stoehr said of the late abstract expressionism being taught in school then. “I responded to it. I can’t explain it.”

When he picked up a brush he began making what he called “really crappy stuff,” before getting a sense of who he was as an artist. Those initial paintings were bright and colorful and within months he had two galleries selling the works—one in the Virgin Islands and one in Denver. Then three years ago another Denver dealer, Michael Burnett, suggested the he could draw and paint faces really well. Stoehr then began focusing on the face. His paintings begin with live models and he prefers working with the handful of women seen in these portraits. Stoehr continually challenges himself to dig deeper believing he is only at the surface of where this subject might take him. How would Franz Kline paint a portrait? What if I stop using brushes? How would de Kooning paint this part of the forehead? No more red paint for a year. And he’s constantly going back and adding to the works, never afraid of wrecking or ruining a work. Some paintings might take 40-50 hours others are relatively complete in ten hours. He challenges himself to paint the same women over and over again in different ways. “When I’m in front of an easel with a brush or charcoal, I can tell you that this is what I am meant to do,” Stoehr said.

Leanne Goebel, AICA-USA

In Medias Res, Latin for “into the middle of things,” conveys an in-between period, an in-between region, whether literal or philosophical, between reality and the remembered, chance and the predetermined, abstract and the imagined. “I’ve been working with the organic and inorganic and finding that combination in the middle of things that is representational and abstract,” Trine Bumiller says.

Bumiller creates her paintings on wood panels, combined together like building blocks, to create a composite form of square and rectangular shapes that look backward and forward. The concept was influenced by a year Bumiller spent in Italy viewing altar paintings and predellas, which combine imagery in rectangular shapes to tell a story. On each Bumiller panel, a different organic, flat, geometric element suggests nature or botany. The artist thoughtfully manipulates color, preferring unnatural combinations, such as hot pink and yellow, orange with acid green or lilac contrasted with earth tones.

The lines, shapes and layers of her painting technique hearken back to her training as a printmaker. Using a method known as glazing, each work is created by building up as many as fifty layers of thin oil paint. Bumiller works on tables, with the panels lying flat, allowing the liquid pigment to pool and coalesce. It’s a slow process. One layer a day. And as the layers of glaze are building, so are the cognitive connections. “My process of painting in multiple transparent glazes and building up the form slowly correlates with timelessness and the core issues of life and existence,” she adds.

Viewing Bumiller’s paintings, her interest in science is evident. She explores imagery that is similar yet diverse: spiraling stems developing on a plant could represent the Milky Way, a rippled pool of water might be a recent galaxy discovered by the Hubble telescope. Less evident is her exploration of memory and the environment as repository. “Our memories are part of the landscape and yet we don’t see it,” she says. In this way, her paintings are a bit like Ross Bleckner’s memento mori. And with her use of organic and abstract it’s easy to think of Bumiller as a more restrained Judy Pfaff.

Symmetrical yet random, ordered but disordered, microscopic and macroscopic, Bumiller’s works employ the concrete medium of paint in such a way as to address the mysteries of the universe, and to find the edge where the individual meets the universal.