September 27, 2015 Playing In Traffic Opening Reception

Thursday evening, September 24, was the opening reception for the latest series of my work, Playing In Traffic.  The evening was absolutely gorgeous and balmy and the gallery door was open wide. Carol Ann Waugh, galleries, was her usual welcoming self and friends and family all gathered to celebrate.

This Friday evening from 6-9pm is First Friday.  If you missed the opening, he's another chance to see the show.

September 14, 2015 Playing In Traffic

There have been some wonderful shows in Denver in the past few months but no time to write about them as I have been preparing for my own show, Playing In Traffic.  

No Exit

Tired of detours? Fed up with lane closures?  Having cone zone nightmares?  That’s how I’ve felt over the last year and a half or so.  When the Great Recession eased, Denver seemed to respond with an instantaneous explosion of construction projects that had been “on hold” together with a sprouting of signs saying “no left turn,” “road work 500 feet” and “detour.”  In one area of town that I visited weekly, familiar landmarks disappeared as old buildings were demolished and earth movers rumbled in.  All of this construction played havoc with traffic. Sitting in traffic, taking unaccustomed routes and never being sure about how to get to the same place twice provided the inspiration for this current series of work.

Once again, I used computer manipulations to turn ordinary photographs into abstract compositions of strong color and chaotic shapes to express my frustration and impatience with the complexities of modern life.  Compositions were printed on cotton, sandwiched with batting and backing and stitched.

This series will be on view at aBuzz Gallery, 3340 Walnut Street, Denver 80205 in the RINO art district from September 24-October 17.  Opening reception is September 24, 6-9pm.  First Friday is October 2, 6-9pm.  Artist talk will be October 10, 2pm with the gallery open from 1-4pm.  Closing reception is October 17, 12-4pm.  If you are in the area, I hope to see you at one of these events.

July 14, 2015 After a long absence, back in downtown Denver

It’s embarrassing to think that I haven’t posted since returning from NYC in early May but I’ve been glued to the sewing machine completing work for a September solo show.  This past weekend, however, my husband and I took time off for a downtown art infusion.

The Denver Art Museum had a number of smaller shows on view.  We started out on the top floor of the Hamilton building with Showing Off: Recent Modern and Contemporary Acquisitions, a very varied collection of artworks.  Some of the artists whose work had been acquired had shows at the museum in the past year or two while others were well-known names, now mentioned in art history books.

Just inside the entrance to the gallery, Julian Opie’s  stripped down paint and wood constructions referred to real places while, at the same time, acted as symbols of aspects of our contemporary culture.

Baroque Tower V 1996, Modern Tower 6 1999, You Pass An Office Building 6, 1996

In contrast to the economy of Opie’s work,  Leonard Drew’s Number 162, 2012 exploded across the wall with all kinds of wooden shapes loosely attached to canvas.

With all of the video and installation art visible in many museums, it’s refreshing sometimes to see drawing-and humor.  A great example was Self Portrait with Pricey Mountain Homes, 2008, a graphite work on paper by Bill Amundson.

Another drawing, Tongue-Cut Sparrows, 1996 by James Drake had an interesting explanation.  Drake noticed that families and gang members communicated with prisoners in the El Paso, TX, County Jail by using sign language messages.  After asking the people to translate a variety of poems into their sign language, he produced a video and a group of drawings documenting what they did.

I’d always admired Betty Woodman’s Japanese Lady ceramic sculpture at the DAM and so was pleased to see another ceramic sculpture as an acquisition choice.  Annabeth Rosen’s Ztheo, 2009 (meaning “two” in Greek) had an interesting tension produced by the writhing ceramic forms held together with baling wire.

Back in the main contemporary gallery, I noticed two large Chinese paintings I hadn’t seen before.  Occupying an entire gallery wall, Yang Shaobin’s Untitled (1999-4), 1999 was powerfully done and also hard to look at.  I wondered whether the agony and pain depicted should be interpreted as personal to the artist or as a more general comment on the consequences to the Chinese people of the Cultural Revolution.

Mask Series No. 10, 1998 by Zeng Fanzhi showed some intriguing contrasts.  Are the facial expression, unusual in Chinese painting, on the masks and what emotions are the masks hiding underneath?  What is the relationship between these two rather prim and contained men?  The museum’s label suggested that the painting alludes to the “loneliness and difficulties of being homosexual in China during the post-Cultural Revolution era.”

En route from the Hamilton building to the Ponti building we encountered a small but lovely group of paintings on the mezzanine level of the Ponti.  Highlighted there was the work of Gunther Gerszo, a Mexican painter who drew inspiration from art history and the Mexican landscape.  He developed a style of painting from 1960-1981 that portrayed overlapping planes of translucent color.  In Southern Queen, 1963, these layers were reminiscent of ancient Maya faceted stone walls.

In Bajio, 1964, Gerzso utilized some of the techniques of Northern Renaissance artists, laying down layers of thin oil paint glazes.

From the DAM, we moved on to Redline Gallery and Artist Studios where the second part of a year long exhibition around the theme of Play was on view, Play Grounds.

It was impossible not to gape at the work of Dan Tobin Smith, present as an installation and also documented in large color photographs.   Creating a path throughout the gallery and organizing the space was an enormous collection of found objects laid out on the floor in gradated values of consecutive colors melding from one to the next.  The objects called “kipple” in The First Law of Kipple 2014 are discarded objects of everyday life, found or donated.  The objects attract because of their familiarity and also keep the viewer at a distance because of their fragility.

After that cacophony of shape and color, Simplified World, 2014 by Agustina Woodgate was quite a contrast.  Using sandpaper, the artist removed all the shapes and boundaries from a vintage world map, resulting in an object with a beautiful mysterious glow.  What is she saying about the fickle nature of borders and countries?

Wrapping around several corners and meandering across an enormous wall was Conor McGarrigle’s Walking West, 2014.  Walking 26.2 miles over some eight hours along the entire length of Colfax Avenue, a main east-west street in Denver, McGarrigle documented this piece with a video and a satellite photograph of the route.

Detail

May 19, 2015 Springtime In Manhattan

Who could pass up a chance to be in Manhattan in the Spring?  When we received an invitation to a birthday party for a 90 year old friend, we didn’t waste a minute making plans and hotel reservations.  Ever have a magical week?  Mild temperatures, sunny every day and the opening of the new Whitney Museum-what could be better?

The official opening of the Whitney was May 1 but the following day was the neighborhood block party with free admission to the museum.  We had secured our free advance timed tickets online before we left home.  Were we ever grateful for those tickets when we got to the museum that day! The line for people without tickets stretched for blocks and blocks.

Museum staff kept everyone in order and stuck to the timing of the tickets.  When we finally got through the doors at 11AM, we took the express elevator to the eighth floor so we could walk down.  The elevator interiors were designed by Richard Artschwager.  

Even though the museum was full of people that day, the spacious galleries and the 30 ft. ceilings created plenty of space for viewing the art. The outdoor stairs were like an elegant fire escape with viewing platforms on each level and seating on several levels.  

Everyone hung over the railings capturing views of the Hudson River and The Highline.

As we’d once been New Yorkers and had been at the old Whitney many times,  this time was like visiting old friends.  Some favorites were Charles Burchfield’s Noontide In Late May, 1917 and George Tooker’s Subway 1950, a much smaller painting than I remembered. 

One of John Chamberlain’s crushed car sculptures, Velvet White 1962 captured my attention with its wonderfully contorted metal.  And I stood for a long time wondering at Jay DeFeo’s The Rose, 1958-66.  Weighing one ton, this work was built up out of layers of paint and carved.

 Loved the building, the art and the restaurant, appropriately named Untitled.  After lunch we took the Highline for a little way and then got off to see galleries in Chelsea.

Looking back at Whitney from The Highline

We’d read about an intriguing installation in Washington Square Park and visited that another day.  Only half installed with completion due by June 1, it was wondrous nevertheless.  Entitled Fata Morgana, the work is a creation of Teresita Fernandez.  Consisting of many mirror-polished irregularly shaped discs suspended in the leafy canopy in a metal framework,  the work  alters one’s perceptions and does create a mirage-like environment.

April 7, 2015 After the reception

A full moon with lights over the city of Boulder, CO provided a beautiful conclusion for the opening reception of my show, Then & Now, last Friday night.  Jazz guitar music by Ted Potter added a wonderful dimension to the evening.  Here are a few photos.

Setting up before the show

March 31, 2015 Then & Now

Announcing a show of my own work, Then & Now, featuring compositions from two series, Transformations and Playing In Traffic.  Work will be exhibited at National Center For Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, March 30-May 30, with an opening reception April 3 from 6-8PM.  Hope to see you there.

Sneak peek

March 31, 2015- No April Fool-That’s Tomorrow

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.