Six Artists, Six Perspectives from Aspen Magazine – Ajax Axe
Six emerging artists from Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley, exploring various disciplines, are defining what it means to be an artist today.
Six emerging artists from Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley, exploring various disciplines, are defining what it means to be an artist today.
The equivalent word for truth in Dari is: حقیقت. Dari and Pashto are the primary languages spoken in Afghanistan, where the interactive work of public art In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth), by Cause Collective artists Ryan Alexiev, Jim Ricks and Hank Willis Thomas, recently toured. Yes. A work of public art by…
An impressive array of Robert Mangold’s artistic oeuvre, from 1955 to the present, is on view at The Arvada Center. The artist, born in Indiana in 1930, joined the Air Force in 1949 and then graduated from Indiana University with a Masters of Fine Arts. While still a student, Mangold attended the 1955 International Design…
Sculpting is dimensional, physical, even touchable (though we rarely get to run our hands over an object). Michael Naranjo, however, encourages viewers to touch his sculptures. To caress the smooth ebony finish of his bronze figures. To detect the bark of a tree or the wings of a bird. Feeling provides meaning and allows viewers…
Goodnight and her husband, Roger Brooks, live between the brow of Mesa Verde and the La Plata mountain range, near Helmet Peak. Within a 30-minute drive, Goodnight can explore groves of aspen trees, the headwaters of the La Plata River, the barren alpine tundra above timberline, or the red rock canyons to the south. Herds of elk and deer are abundant, joined by the occasional bear, mountain lion or coyote.
Bernier intentionally did not affiliate with the early conceptual artists using text to make art, such as Ed Ruscha or Lawrence Weiner, or with Pop Art, for that matter. Bernier considers himself an original, unaffiliated with any movement or group. His work contains limited thematic content; one of the most striking elements of his practice is that he does not use words to make sense or to reference contemporary culture. “Initially I felt I had to break down the barriers of making sense by just listing words taken at random from the dictionary and putting them on canvas and board, sometimes by themselves, at other times with designed or familiar images in which the words were covered.”
Trefny Dix and Bengt Hokanson relocated their glass hot shop to Durango, Colorado. The two fine artists create cast-glass sculptural and mixed media works as well as a line of production blown glass vessels.
The primary buyers of art seem to be hotels, hospital and blue-chip billionaires hedging their funds in Warhols and Picasso’s. Collectors are not spending their discretionary income because their walls are already filled. Artwork Network doesn’t claim to be an art expert and they are not representing artists. For them, art is a product and they are a tool to help sell that product. Perhaps websites like Artwork Network can build their brand around a new kind of art buyer, one that doesn’t have to know the difference between acrylic and oil, whose willing to spend $500 for something because they like it and it matches the furniture, and for whom art is not a luxury but a necessity.
Today, everything within the walls of the art world, from the educational language spouted by museums to the highly intellectualized language of the critics seems pedantic and purple. …Writing about art was not a job for Judd, it was a declaration and a manifesto.
A blogger since July 2005 Leanne Goebel has moved her blog to wordpress. Her preferred subject matter continues to be contemporary art and culture based in or connected to the Rocky Mountain West and Southwest.