Denver Art Log

“Critical Focus: Ian Fisher” @ MCA Denver (Ian Fisher)

2014-04-13T03:34:00Z

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.

“The Material Body” @ MCA Denver (Senga Nengudi)

2014-04-13T03:18:00Z

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.

“New Growth” @ MCA Denver (Rashid Johnson)

2014-04-13T03:18:00Z

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.

“Night Writing” @ MCA Denver (Teresita Fernández)

2014-04-13T03:16:00Z

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.

“LUVRS B H8RZ” @ RMCAD (Donald Fodness)

2014-01-10T17:45:00Z

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.

“The Night is Dark” @ RMCAD (Nathan Ritterpusch)

2014-01-10T17:44:00Z

Creepy; beautiful women as victims and objects of desire, who is the creep?

The wall text calls the paintings “cinematic” and it’s right. Frozen, tense moments, before or after action; part of some narrative for which our only context is movie tropes.

Cindy Sherman. Clowns.

And painted exquisitely. Smooth, hi-gloss, photo-real, and somehow also piled high with juicy paint. There is a directionality to the painterly-ness: horizontal, like CRT scanlines, like glitches, or memory, or ripples moving across the face of water.

“Here, Then, and Now” @ RMCAD (Christina Shurts)

2014-01-10T17:43:00Z

Muddy rivers of dirty pastels flowing around scratchy canvases. Huge, sweeping, wide-angle-perspectives filled with flat objects of sometimes uncertain depth or position. Depicting dilapidated delight: windswept beaches, abandoned amusement, Coney Island. Painted with, like, nail polish and housepaint.

“Childhood Cherry Blossoms” @ RMCAD (David Grigorian)

2014-01-10T17:40:00Z

Products of a head full of fantasy art and children’s books. Clumsy, earnest, and kind of wonderful.

“The History of Weather” @ Gildar Gallery (Ashley & Sarah Williams)

2013-08-09T18:02:00Z

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats o’er’head, higher and higher
When all at once I exclaimed aloud,
“Oh my god! Everything is on fire!”

—Wordsworth

Stately, austere, melancholy smoke monsters.

“Blood Lustre” @ Kitchen’s Ink (Andrew Novick)

2013-08-09T18:01:00Z

Eeeeewwwwwwwwwww.

“Sans Souci” @ David B. Smith Gallery (Molly Dilworth)

2013-08-09T18:00:00Z

Vex·il·lol·ogy n. (vek-sə-ˈlä-lə-jē) : The study of flags.

These flags are static and dead in the gallery, which becomes a fake museum presenting fictional artifacts. What kind of pirates were these, anyhow? Swashbuckling hipster geometers, favoring restrained color palettes, sewing drunk? Presumably their ships looked like this.

I want to live in the Kansas that would fly these flags.

I want to see them fly!

“In A Dream” @ Black Book Gallery (Hamilton Yokota aka Titi Freak)

2013-08-09T17:59:00Z

The fish’s marks are light, layered, open and airy; nicely fluid, if you will. The leaves and the faces are deeply nostalgic, conjuring autumn and the 70s. The faces are maybe awkwardly naïve, blunt, over-serious? They remind me of art from the WPA, or, weirdly, church.

The best bit is the interplay between the canvases and the painted walls: the former anchoring, the latter buoying, providing counterpoint and facilitating flow.

“The Void Is Too Large, If You Can Read This” @ Plus Gallery (Donald Fodness)

2013-08-01T14:15:00Z

Worried teratomas full of teeth, hair, household detritus, Saturday-morning cartoons, and anatomical illustrations. Everything neon, coated in spray foam and plastered with googly eyes. The anxiety of accumulation and pumping cartoon machinery. Texting and tongues; a cold, adult sweat shot through with cheap hallucinogens and commercialized teen evil.

“First Draft” @ The Biennial of the Americas

2013-08-01T13:00:00Z

The opening felt like a big deal. A big name — The Biennial of the Americas — a big, beautiful space, and a packed house full of hip- and/or important-seeming people.

The work is big too. Multiples are everywhere.

A lot about Mexico, and a lot of criticism of US capitalism, industry, and marketing — giant systems overwhelming people.¹

There are crisp, monumental portraits which seem to say that the only honest face is a disquieted one. There are immigrants’ longings for identity and community written in the lights of roadside America or in ink on their faces. There are traditional crafts juxtaposed with heavy industry or made into gross sausage-flesh… there are tremendously fun-looking beach-ball catapults being operated with such robotic ritual that they become sad metaphors for dehumanization and conflict. There are plastic-y, perfect, mass-produced products made insidious or banal.

Teresa Anderson encases herself in a very uncomfortable suit.

Then there’s this whole other strand, one of beauty and an awareness of nature, light, and the (gorgeous, raw) architecture of the space itself. Clouds, wind, windows, and light fixed in vinyl and oils. Puffy albino amoeba floating out of the windows. Nine thousand shimmering threads.

The show is supposed to be about drafts but whatever the work, it was certainly not rough. Clean, clever, minimal and sometimes obtuse… political… serious about its joy and dry with its barbs. There’s a mold I have in my head for what a giant, museum-caliber contemporary art show looks and feels like and this giant, important thing fit snugly within it.

“Poltergeists” @ Groundswell Gallery (Evan Isoline)

2013-07-09T05:59:00Z

Perfect bodies chopped and layered, like onions or IDM.

The hollow, doll-like sexuality of fashion magazines. Flat, solid pastels; delicately rendered renaissance anatomy. The show is stylishly soulless and objectifies its subjects: plastic, bloodless bodies with no people inside. Most of the heads have been cropped just below the eyes but a few of the faces have been actively scratched out. Is objectification — the premise that people and bodies can be separated, and that there’s something to be gained by dealing with bodies separately — less troubling if it’s not erotic? If it’s cold, rather than hot?

Classic like Greek busts, without color or appendages.

I wrote “bloodless,” but there are actually leeches on the most intense piece in the room, which is black, shiny, and reminiscent of a clown. In other words: evil.

“Diarios” @ the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (Guillermo Kuitca)

2013-07-09T05:31:00Z

Accreted piles of marks. Doodles piled high.

Peeking at somebody’s notes provides a unique window in, like seeing their body language or their bookshelves. But these are messier and more insane than notes. They are also perhaps too practical and thoughtless for white walls and (presumably) price tags.

The way they were made — offhandedly, out of habit, over long periods of time — affords density and idle experimentation. They’re fun to sort through, both individually and as a group; I hunt for intriguing scraps and watch myself pick favorites.

Maps and floorplans; Braque; Kandinsky; Bejeweled.

“Maelstrom” @ David B. Smith Gallery (Regan Rosburg)

2013-07-05T23:35:00Z

Here are three actual medium descriptions of real pieces in this show:

Acrylic, wood, grackle skull, black widow, birds nest, resin, oil paint, twig, plastic bags, wire, lace

Acrylic, wood, Brood XIX cicadas, Cicada Killer wasp, resin, oil paint, Mylar, lace

Acrylic, wood, hummingbird¹, paper wasp nest, found wire, resin, oil paint, lace

Here are three fakes:

Acrylic, wood, wallpaper, shark’s teeth, pheonix feathers, ivory, resin, crow’s tears, cloud, manna, daydreams, lace

Acrylic, wood, whole milk, Amadeus, distillate of Sofia Coppola, memories of Garth Williams, dashed hopes of becoming a marine biologist, partially hydrogenated John James Audubon prints, xanthan gum, natural and artificial flavors. CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: industrial sludge, spiderwebs

Acrylic, wood, birds, bees, sugar, spice, everything nice, slugs, snails, puppydog tails

”Merely” pretty, and perhaps hollow, with an injected fear of creepy crawlies and heavy industry that falls flat. Nevertheless, they are dissolving, glistening, frozen menageries, whose crevices and crannies are full of discovery.

“For what you have tamed” @ David B. Smith Gallery (Tobias Fike)

2013-07-05T23:30:00Z

An arty thing about fatherhood, and father thinking about art and artifice? Good, I think — clean and clearly thoughtful; I just wish I had access to a few more of those thoughts.

“some of them wear teeth” @ Pirate: Contemporary Art (Amanda Gordon Dunn)

2013-06-15T18:14:00Z

A little bit raw and a little bit slick. Poppy and bright. These would look really good on skateboards (or in Sweet Action!).

“Design-y” which sounds dismissive but what I mean is that the colors and compositions are impactful rather than ponderous. “Illustrative” by which I mostly mean “she’s a good draw-er.”

The protagonists are all animals. Some of them are delicately rendered power animals and the rest are anthropomorphized, cartoonish slackers. Dopey-eyed and tragically hip.

There are probably too many animal slackers? Or perhaps there is not enough happening within their vacant stares. But the paintings and collages show a real knack for mixing and matching (and making and layering) a diversity of beautiful marks.

“Sturnus Saltare” @ Pirate: Contemporary Art (Katie Thomas)

2013-06-15T17:47:00Z

These are supposed to be about emergent flocking dynamics, but no, they are about barnwood and shadows. Also there is a real dead bird in a jar!

“Open Space” @ Pirate: Contemporary Art (Rebecca Cuming)

2013-06-15T17:41:00Z

Rust, soil, tetanus, trash, industrial farming, blight, and sunsets. Everything vast, dead and wasting away; everything enshrined in thick paint and glowing orange. Drippy romanticism. I can't help but think of this, and how these seem like that, lite. A clever shoe.

“Abracadabra” @ EDGE Gallery (Deborah Henson + Garrison Roots)

2013-06-15T17:34:00Z

Who are these people? Look at how they’ve aged!

These photos are mostly the same: the same two (similar-looking) people posed in identical pairs, under identical lighting, wearing the same shirts. Every prop and costume is white or clear. So much careful reconstruction and restraint exercised over so much time — 14 years! — that the differences become charged. The aging, but also the choices. In one, they’re shiny (sweaty?). In another they’re laughing. In others they’re in hockey masks or hair nets. In the last, they’re caked in white. Why?

“Tainted” @ the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (Eduardo Sarabia)

2013-06-03T04:29:00Z

Yo dawg, I heard you like paint. Both as a historical means of representation and also as a pure material with its own implicit aesthetics. Additionally, it has come to my attention that you enjoy vernacular photography. So I put some photos in your paint and some paint in your photos, so that you can contemplate figure/ground, medium/message, and presentation/representation relationships while you look at these paintings of photos (of paint on photos).

First impression: maybe this kind of thing has been done before?

But! The big blobs, in addition to being something of an intellectual hall of mirrors, are also flowers blooming out of a girl’s obscured face. And wadded-up chewing gum, and vandalism, and a sea breeze. They transform within the photographs’ contexts, and act within them; these pictures work your gut as well as your brain. They speak of hot days, suburban vacations, beauty, adolescence, banality, and the smell of spring.

The colors are pretty and smart. They’re caricatures—exaggerated echoes—the difference between what we think and what we see. The grass, greener; the flesh too pink. The sea falsely sea foam green.

Up close the layers collapse; all there is is a single, thin, and uniform layer of merely actual oils.

“Dance Rehersal” @ the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (Karen Kilimnik)

2013-06-03T04:28:45Z

The pristine, formal, structured, and bizarre Rococo aesthetics of 18th century European high art filtered through an emphatically naive (almost punk?) American vernacular: (some pretty terrible?) thrift store paintings and out-of-focus polaroids.

“Alterations Disconnect Memory from the Dream” @ Gildar Gallery (Amber Cobb)

2013-06-03T04:28:30Z

Unspeakable horrors have been perpetrated upon these mattresses. Presumably they’ve been marinated at high heat in some froth of cigarette mud, latex vomit, and urine bile, before being left out in the rain and sun to, like, ferment.

Old men and cats.

Phillip Guston?

They don’t smell?

Gross as it is, the show is also delicate, maybe graceful. The mattresses were simply stretched like canvases, dipped in shiny pink latex, and brought into the gallery... left to tell their own stories. And the hair drawings do so much with so little! Precise and visceral, because it’s hair. Laid out in elegant arcs and coated in rubbery flesh.

“Mirage” @ Plus Gallery

2013-06-03T04:28:00Z

Cyber art. Kind of as hokey as that sounds.

My favorite thing about about these, as a group, is how they — even a few of the paintings — work across scales in this awkward, garish, uniquely digital way? Tack-sharp micro-level precision wielded with merely human levels of attention. I guess that’s what they call the uncanny valley.

The fish-eyed bear is wonderful.

“It Is Not The Same Without You” @ RMCAD (Amande In)

2013-05-24T00:00:00-06:00

Curt and brutal. Which is a strange thing to say about an exhibition which half-consists of rainbow-colored pigment-popsicles, but they’re melting! Slowly and inexorably. When I am there they are still substantial but in ruins, strewn across the podiums and floors. The resulting streams of flowing marks are beautiful.

But the other room! Pairs. Black rug-moons. Cold, dead, flat, and plastic; astroturf rocks cut into clean circles and slathered in a half-inch of Vaseline. Perched throughout are identical squares of glass that are sharper for having been turned 45 degrees, housing single band-aids — there are gleeful whispers that the artist refers to them as “pussies.” And then there are the galvanized twenty-gallon tubs of soap. The smell is abrasive, fluorescent. Being in the room feels like bathing in bleach and gives me a headache. Cascade and Tide made absurd and maybe dangerous by simple accumulation.

“Soap,” the room says, “SOAP,” while punching you in the face, “ALSO PUSSIES.”

“Body Building” @ Groundswell Gallery (Jaimie Henthorn)

2013-05-24T00:00:00-06:00

I missed a performance, which was probably intense. Strong but coy — a fascinating tension between quiet and loud. Loud is the wrong word—it’s all very quiet—but these bodies are doing extraordinary things in stillness: holding poses, defying gravity, arcing, folding, and inverting. Static gymnastics; a strange, sometimes brightly-colored exhibitionism in empty, perfect, or mundane spaces.

The subjects seem introverted, achieving these things for and within themselves. All turned away, rarely much of a face. If there’s an outward-facing affect here it’s stiff and awkward.

The show feels cold?

A theme of famous architecture, which makes me go, oh yeah, “building,” it has two meanings. Which, okay. Is it about ideal forms? It’s definitley about bodies interacting with spaces built for bodies, in ways that the creators of the spaces did not intend.

The videos feel like an inversion of this premise: the Malibu modernist architecture imposing itself upon the thick, sculpted body, which is weird and on display: something something gender, and our deadening, futile culture of surfaces. Maybe a pot shot at Los Angeles.

Strangely spartan. Just a few images, repeated. One thrice: on giant NFS vinyl, small $300 aluminum, and commodified on an iPad. What does it mean?

“A Natural Order” @ the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (Lucas Foglia)

2013-03-15T00:00:00-06:00

Beautiful. Fraught? Communities of hippies and the deeply religious made out to be capital-O Other; more animal than human. Stoic, pure, suspicious, raw. Skittish and dirty; sad and prone to conspiracy theories. Heroically lonely, quietly insane, profoundly strange. Zero smiles: it’s all vacant stares, hollow and without shame. I’m troubled to be in such a clean intellectual building sipping wine with clean intellectual people, staring back at these apparent beasts¹ from a safe distance, crafting assumptions. I have a friend who lives in the woods; she’s super joyful and relatable about it?

“Truppe Fledermaüs and the Carnival at the End of the World” @ Robischon Gallery (Kahn + Selesnick)

2013-03-14T00:00:00-06:00

This show has one foot in steampunk Victorian carnival barker tropes, but the other in something far stranger and more deeply felt — an attitude toward death and destruction that is serene, and terrifying, and far more terrifying for being so serene. Flowers, blooming. Huck Finn and the swamp thing. Monsters in crude suits of wool and twigs. Wagon wheels and voodoo masks. Everything immaculately posed, either with the clenched stillness of a daguerreotype, or frozen in midair, just so. Next to the technical perfection of the photos, the drawings, posters, and sculptures are too crude, or perhaps not crude enough? But it has been a long time since anything has lead my eye around as effectively as the large photos and panoramas; I start dissecting their triangles and circles, their echoes and loops.

Anecdotally: “fledermaüs!” It’s a great word!

Also on view: belts for angry punk giants, northern renaissance fleshy muppet cysts, the deep irony of manufactured pop, and some old National Geographics.

“Seen Unseen” @ Hinterland Art Space

2013-03-14T00:00:00-06:00

Glimpses and glances; things too close. I search for minutes and minutes for a strangely hard-to-find pricelist trying to answer the first and shallowest question: “what is that?” Some reframing, revealing novel beauty; alot of creeping evil: ominous liquids, lifeless bodies, filth, mold, grime, and surveillance.

“Ten Feet Away: My 656 mile trip through New York City and the people I never met” @ Super Ordinary (Steve Whittier)

2013-03-09T00:00:00-07:00

Compositionally interesting, but it’s kind of just the subway? But the subway is fascinating! Sneaking looks at sneaky looks; everyday absurdities; people, in private, in public.

“Sweet Tooth: 1000 Desserts (that I ate)” @ The Shoppe (Andrew Novick)

2013-03-09T00:00:00-07:00

This should be twee and self-indulgent, and is, but might also be my favorite show of the night for its pure, bare exuberance. F-U-N fun.

“Real is a Feeling” @ Gildar Gallery

2013-03-09T00:00:00-07:00

Irony & blasphemy. A dog sits on a $1,200 blanket like “what?” There is a penis; there is a butt. Consumerism is a cult, beauty and religion are insidious lies, truth can be found either in cocaine and yelling or in being deliciously wry, impossibly subtle, and exceedingly clever. I'm getting too old and was probably always too earnest for this kind of thing but the show makes me feel smart sometimes, which is nice, and also makes me think and smile.¹ Which, really, is all you can ask.

“Dialogue with the Unseen” @ Leon Gallery (Georgann Low)

2013-03-09T00:00:00-07:00

Chagall and cafés. Froo-frooey, new-agey, a heavy hand with a light touch and a full heart. Nothing new but mostly delightful. Drawing!

“Conjuring the Sensation of the Sun” @ Groundswell Gallery (Sigri Strand)

2013-03-09T00:00:00-07:00

Chromatic aberrations. Nostalgia for the future. My first digital camera. 1980s video idents. Hot and airless, bronzed, plasticky, static. Airbrushed oranges, brown and purple. Everything sparkles; the blackest black. Smells like a Vogue and tastes metallic. Electronic music, dry rot, fake jewels and lasers. Caravaggio aquariums.

“Divided” @ Pirate: Contemporary Art (Collin Parson)

2013-03-08T00:00:00-07:00

A church from Tron, except they put his name in lights so maybe it’s a low-rent dance club or NBA team introduction.¹ But: the installation conjures spheres — electron micrographed bacteria, whole planets — out of a plain, white, lumpy, wall; it plays with phases in a slow way that makes you wait for, anticipate, and relish in synchronous moments; it indulges all of the pleasures of pure color, black voids, and bright light.

“Contemporary Art Is an Easy Thing to Hate”, a lecture by Simon Critchley @ RMCAD

2013-03-07T00:00:00-07:00

Simon is a big man and affably British. He began with an excoriation: what does a contemporary art event feel like? Alot of vanity, spectacle, and ultra-capitalism, signifying what? These shows and fairs, they’re samey sterile bland internationalist monuments to an aspirational high-culture drenched in gossip and money, full of talk about talk and the excitement of large amounts of money changing hands.

Contemporary art feels like bullshit!

But then he pivoted into an hour or so of experimental philosophy — category-5 brainstorming! — on an exploratory mission to find the value in it all, or at least some of it, as the (exemplary) films of Philippe Parreno played in the background. Afterwards I heard someone describe what Simon was doing as “riffing” and that seems exactly right. A flood of assertions and intellectual constructions assembled hastily, considered briefly and then left behind in the wash. The man has a mind for structures, reductive models, beautiful systems: tightening loops, infinite matrixes, chains of action and reaction, flipped symmetries in time…

Always earnestly. “Does that mean anything? I don’t know I just said it!”

A thread through all of it that I latched on to: the idea that we have these art objects and art experiences — and then there is all of this stuff around it — theories, histories, personalities, markets, institutions — and you can’t have one without the other. These relationships are destructive when they overwhelm the art — separate from it or overtake it in some vital way, but are healthy when they contribute to “a drawing out” that is honest to “the thing in itself.” Good art makes us think and feel more about the world around us, and good theory makes us think and feel more about the art.

I thought alot about Chuck Klosterman. Something about fireflies? Twenty minutes of nodding my head, smugly, followed by sixty spent desperately trying to stay afloat.

“all his strength was concentrated in his fists, including the very strength that held him upright” @ David B. Smith Gallery (Cole Sternberg)

2013-02-22T00:00:00-07:00

The whole gallery a canvas, which is neat, but slapdash – papery, peeling at the edges, done hastily in cheap paint, lacking meat. The pictures on the northeast wall are lovely: words and clouds, loss, lyrics, poems, teary letters handwritten on an airplane. Found objects from a story that I’m telling myself.

“In Situ” @ the Center for Visual Art

2013-02-01T00:00:00-07:00

Desolate landscapes on overcast days. Mud and rocks, carved up recently, raw. Hanging lemon timers. Looking back and forth and back and forth, wait, what?

“Five + Two = Yellow” @ Fancy Tiger (Andi Todaro)

2013-02-01T00:00:00-07:00

How on earth were these made? Analog math, precise and aglow, classy in B&W. They are small and beautiful, but make me think of screensavers, which makes me sad.