Denver Art Log
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Critical Focus: Ian Fisher @ MCA Denver (Ian Fisher)

Clouds. Billowy gigantic ones that look and feel like a storm’s coming: blasts of cool wet air, ominous greens; towers of steam a thousand stories high, heavy and floating, silently exploding.

They’re stately and awesome, majestic. We’re flying.

The paintings play with color, form, and space in complex ways. A painting might at first glance seem to be structured around an atmospheric perspective shift from one set of colors to another, but look again and see a whole rainbow of hue and dramatic, unexpected tonal inversions. Sometimes these deviations read as the result of out-of-frame structures shaping and obscuring the light; just as often they’re clearly capricious, invented. But the paintings get away with it; the spaces and the apparent realism never ring false, they always ring true.

It’s the same with the forms. Whole columns of cloud might be flattened or deleted, showing the sky behind them in a flight of pure fancy which jars you into seeing the paintings as careful, thoughtful constructions rather than (mere?) representational windows. But you have to look. All of this action is hidden in plain sight.

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The Material Body @ MCA Denver (Senga Nengudi)

The very last thing I wrote in my notebook about this show was “SKIN!” and it's such an obvious connection I can’t believe that it took me so long to make it. Pantyhose is made to contain, hug, and mimic skin; here it’s pinned back, sliced open, splayed and stretched; loaded with sand and tension, filled with ideas about feminism, mass production, materials, the body, and pure form. The common made uncommon: the hose becomes golf clubs and club feet and bridges and butterflies in my mind. Frayed and tearing at the seams; the cutting and tension are violent — how have the pieces survived or changed over forty years?

Black and brown. Symmetry and triangles. Emphatically rough, raw, and handmade, but in a way that exploits the perfect lines and futuristic forms that arise naturally out of elasticity and tension; the forms feel slick and elegant — alien — in a way that is completely intrinsic to the materials. The pieces have been arranged rather than wrought or worked; simply brought forth from the hose, made taut.

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New Growth @ MCA Denver (Rashid Johnson)

What would happen if Sun Ra, George Washington Carver and Robert Smithson started a community together in the desert?

A disparate and limited vocabulary of objects and icons arranged into… nonsense? For instance: an Afgan rug branded with NWA crosshairs and palm trees, with an uncomfortable looking zebra-skin chair and a forty-pound block of butter sitting atop it. Race, certainly; the war in Afghanistan maybe? Carver on the wall tag + a block of African nut butter = self-sufficiency and ideas about agriculture vis-à-vis race? I can start to draw connections but the pieces leave me confused in a very basic way. Puckish absurdist humor. Also the feeling of dark gaudy 1970s domestic spaces which have been shattered and smeared. With butter.

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Night Writing @ MCA Denver (Teresita Fernández)

Architectural in both scale and affect — cold, large, and somehow impersonal? Flowing, flying, falling, colored translucent tubes create a skylight of giant-sized straws; a slightly organic placement of precise and uniform materials. Mostly digital; like a waveform. Weightless. Shiny.

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LUVRS B H8RZ @ RMCAD (Donald Fodness)

Bric-a-brac. Tangled cords, price tags, and trinkets. Memorabilia and xenophobia. Thrift stores and Walmart. Your uncle’s den in Lakewood extracted, distilled, and then just kinda strewn about. Roughed-up and half-assembled, its emotional undercurrents brought to the surface; made raw in a tiny stark white cube up the street at the art school.

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