12/22/14 Catching Up At Year’s End

Determined to see a couple of shows that were about to close, I drove to downtown Denver Saturday on a bright and quite warm afternoon.  First stop was at Helikon Gallery which was hosting two shows, Muses of Mount Helikon II and Volume: A Post Card Tribute to CPR’s Open Air. 

 Muses included quite a variety of painting, drawing, illustrative work, digital art and sculpture from across the U.S.

Rebecca Green’s Hortense and the Leaf Bug was in two parts, a photograph and a mixed media sculpture, presented side by side. The photograph showing a lab-coated female botanist, Hortense, hearkened back to early days of naturalistic investigations.  The related sculpture featured a poem revealing that, in her efforts to find a new unidentified plant, poor Hortense had mistakenly identified a bug for a leaf.

Holly Chastain’s group of four collages, (l to r, top to bottom) Hester, Small Talk, Reveal and Anthony, also had a somewhat nostalgic feel.  Swirls of color in the first and fourth images helped to unify the group.

Detail

A set of small drawings by Edward Kinsella, Wisp Mask I, II and III, were sensitively rendered in  graphite, gouache and watercolor.

Honoring Colorado’s Public Radio station’s Open Air programming, Volume: A Post Card Tribute had some 80 5”x7” pieces of art.  Proceeds from sales of these works was divided between the gallery and the radio station.  The small size did not seem to hamper creativity.

Melanie Pruitt’s Before the Moment and Realizing the Moment were strong drawings using ink on paper.

Choosing an unusual ground for his small paintings, Vinni Alfonso’s works on CD discs captured the exuberance of the music contained on them.

(l to r) Crowded Disco, Common Demographic, Coarse Delight

Detail-Crowded Disco

Not far from Helicon at Redline, a combination art gallery and artists’ studios, was the last show in a year long series of exhibits of women artists, She Crossed the Line.  Judy Chicago’s retrospective, on view until December 28, 2014, covered well-known examples from her famous installation, The Dinner Party, as well as more recent works (paintings, drawings, textiles and sculptures).  Running throughout the show was her ongoing concern about gender, roles of women and art history.

An entire wall of the gallery was covered with Dinner Party Plate-Line Drawings, 1978 (small section below) showing the comprehensive planning that went into that installation.

Four of the test plates for this piece were shown including Elizabeth Blackwell Test Plate, 1975-78.

Another large and very impressive piece occupying an entire wall was her 1983 textile work, Earth Mother, made from sprayed Versatex and DMC floss on fabric.

Submerged/Emerged 1&2, 1976/2005, made of cast paper sprayed with acrylic, with its pleated folds reminded me of Ann Hamilton’s  Ciliary piece from the previous post.

More recent work, displayed in the first gallery, was a series called Retrospective In a Box, a five year project, started in 2008 in conjunction with Landfall Press of Santa Fe, NM.  The collaborations resulted in ten prints, each referring to an important period in Chicago’s artistic life.

The Return of the Butterfly-2012

Rage Rather Than Tears-2012

Other recent works were a series of sculptural heads made from materials such as glass, china painting and bronze.

Masked Head-2013

Bronze Flowering Head-2013

Au revoir until 2015.  Wishing everyone happy holidays and a very healthy, happy, productive and exciting new year!

12/21/14 The Rest of the Story from Nov. 24

It’s taken me almost a month to get back to the rest of what we saw on Nov. 24.  But, still on at Robischon Gallery until Jan 3, 2015 are Ann Hamilton: Selected Works, Jae Ko: Force of Nature and a group show of work by Linda Fleming, Ted Larsen, Derrick Velasquez and Judy Pfaff.

Ann Hamilton’s work has been mostly very large multimedia installations including The Event of a Thread in the New York Park Avenue Armory last year (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fJ4umqXGjM), a show involving 42 swings and an enormous piece of white fabric.  At the Robischon Gallery, however were two “ciliaries” and a number of “visite" prints.  My eye was immediately drawn to one of the Ciliaries,  a work looking like soft textile but instead made of folded lithographic sheets printed with bands of lines in varying intensities in a the single red hue with a burst of fabric in the center.

Behind the main gallery, in a comfortable seating area, a video of Hamilton’s work from the TV series Art In the 21st Century was running.  It was very exciting to hear her speak and watch her process.

Amazing for her use of simple materials (rolls of paper adding machine tape) to create structures of commanding presence, were the works by Jae Ko in Force of Nature.  Whether compressed in solid form or allowed to twist and turn in waves across an entire gallery wall, her work was both graceful and imposing.

JK446

Force of Nature

Detail

In contrast, Ted Larsen’s Round Corner had a delightful crispness of both color and form, moving the eye back and forth between positive and negative spaces.

Judy Pfaff has been a regular exhibitor at Robischon.  Her work, Sing, was reminiscent of pieces shown last year.  Pfaff played the crispness of cut and dyed file folders against more organic shapes of plastic pieces and origami and artificial flowers.

Robischon Gallery never disappoints me.  Their shows are always thought-provoking and their gallery personnel are always available for a warm greeting and to knowledgeably answer any questions.