I’d read a review in the Denver Post of a show called Constructed Histories at the David B. Smith Gallery downtown and didn’t want to miss it. We made it on the last day and were glad we’d made the effort as the mixture of sculptural and 3-D work provided a lot to think about.
Jeremy Dean was represented by two very different works.
Everything That Rises, a set of 16 used and battered metal folding chairs, joined together in a huge circle, makes us wonder how and where these chairs were used and what topics were discussed by people seated on them.
Convergence 2 is a pair of American flags, amazingly constructed from hundreds of colored parallel threads in several layers, each one attached to a single needle.
Side view-detail
Glenn Kaino, a 4th generation Japanese-American conceptual artist, combined unexpected and unlikely materials in several sculptural pieces. Escala featured a number of scales held in precarious balance by small objects.
Hammers, yardsticks wine bottles and a solid wood rectangle came together to form another strangely balanced piece, A Plank For Every Pirate.
Stitching fragments of antique quilts together and applying acrylic paint and tar on top, Sanford Biggers created strata of references to, for example, quilts that were used to guide escaping slaves along the Underground Railroad.
Dinh Q. Lė’s work required distance and close-up viewing. From across the room what emerged from a highly textured surface were powerful human figures. From mid distance, it looked as if he had woven photographs together to produce this effect. But up close, I was surprised to see that the hundreds of tiny pieces were not woven but glued in place over another photograph, requiring very meticulous work.
Detail
The work of McCallum Tarry also required viewing from several perspectives. Using photographs from the Civil Rights era, he overlaid each photo with a translucent piece of silk imprinted with a ghost of the photograph, creating an image that appeared holographic.
Side view
Christophe Draeger’s large black and white photographs record two instances of man-made destruction, the leveling of Nagasaki during WWII and the World Trade Center in 2001. Presenting these images as large jigsaw puzzles made me think about how these places have put the pieces back together again and, on the other hand, whether we will ever fully understand the puzzle of how and why they happened.
Detail
Just down the street from David B. Smith gallery was Robischon, hosting a large and exciting photography show with many intriguing and haunting images. The gallery’s large windows made it almost impossible to eliminate reflections from outside. My apologies-any cars or unlikely buildings you may see were not in the artwork.
The various artists participating in this show seems to share a common approach of making visible the land of dreams and the unconscious through constructed realities. The contents of Maria Friberg’s large horizontal C-prints are like dreams which have ambiguous meanings and might be peaceful or threatening at the same time. It is hard to know exactly what the young man in the water in Calmation is doing, merging with nature or drowning. The beauty of the color and setting contribute to the confusion.
Over time, we have come to look forward to seeing new work by Halim Al-Karim. In his current work, the evanescent quality of his images works well to evoke a nostalgic feeling of former times as well as the nature of personal memories. Amazing to see was a large collodion print, a technically difficult feat to pull off.
A dreamlike quality continued in Christine Buchsbaum’s work. Her staged images had an eerie feeling that leave the viewer uncertain about the story line. Her photographs also combined both peaceful and uneasy aspects.
Taking inspiration from the Chinese legend of The Monkey King, Chi Peng’s wild imagination gave us nude male winged bodies flying over a wide landscape with a carousel in the distance in June 19, 1981. The Monkey King somehow overlaid the notion of the legendary character with that of the well-known film personality.
David Zimmer showed three works from Finch studies, pieces using sound, motion and a constructed environment. Birdsong could be heard through the galleries. Each bird flitted and hopped engagingly in its own niche.
Placed in a kind of paradise, Ruud van Empel’s image, collaged from hundreds of his own digital photographs, creates it’s own story Dawn reminded me in some ways of an Henri Rousseau painting.
Kahn + Selesnick are also repeat artists at Robischon and always engage with their very mysterious compositions. Like stills from a movie, their current work depicts scenes from a fiction about a traveling cabaret group composed of a strange variety of creatures.
