Denver Art Log
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Sans Souci @ David B. Smith Gallery (Molly Dilworth)

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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First Draft @ The Biennial of the Americas

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.

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Poltergeists @ Groundswell Gallery (Evan Isoline)

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.

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