DARIA Art Magazine

Welcome to DARIA: Denver Art Review, Inquiry, and Analysis, a publication devoted to art writing and criticism focused on the Denver-area visual art scene. DARIA seeks to promote diverse voices and artists while fostering critical dialogue around art.

All in Review

Apr 13

Apr 13 In Between

Ashten Scheller

At the Downtown Aurora Visual Arts (DAVA), Viviane Le Courtois has put together the current show In Between, a printmaking exhibition. It’s part of the Month of Printmaking (or Mo’Print, for short), and Le Courtois has curated an exhibition showcasing local Colorado artists from various backgrounds. Each artist is in some way “in between” two or more identities: gender, culture, language, religion, place, nationality, ability, or ethnicity. The artists not only examine and describe their own identity (or identities), but also question the validity of having to belong to one group over another.

Impressed: Transcendent Glitch

Apr 5

Apr 5 Impressed: Transcendent Glitch

Transcendent Glitch—the title for Art Gym Gallery’s fifth iteration of the Impressed national printmaking exhibit—sets an interesting tone for the show. Referring to an extraordinary error, it’s a surprising description for a juried exhibition featuring works of impressive technical skill from 27 different artists. Further, the term “glitch” connotes flaws in both the digital and electronic realms.

In the Garden, In the Distance

Mar 29

Mar 29 In the Garden, In the Distance

With the origins of abstraction dating back over a hundred years, I would never blame an artist who felt stuck or intimidated by the challenge of expanding upon abstraction during this 21st century. However, it is evident from Jennie Kiessling’s exhibition In the Garden, In the Distance made up of 83 artworks that she feels no such intimidation but is rather inspired. From January 14 to April 10, Kiessling brings her abstract works to the Loveland Museum in three series: In the Garden, In the Distance, The Disciplined Painting, and Your Hunger Betrays You.

Josef Hoffmann’s Vienna

Mar 24

Mar 24 Josef Hoffmann’s Vienna

Ashten Scheller

It’s clear that great attention to detail and careful planning have been put into the exhibition Josef Hoffman’s Vienna at the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art in Denver. One of the key elements of the period and of the Vienna Secession in particular—the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk—is in its very definition. The German term describes “a total work of art,” with the “it” perhaps referring to an entire room, or even an entire building, like Hoffmann’s most recognizable architectural work, the Stoclet Palace (located in Brussels and constructed between 1905 and 1911).

African America: Contempt of Greasy Pigs

Mar 15

Mar 15 African America: Contempt of Greasy Pigs

In the first exhibition at east window SOUTH, emerging artist André Ramos-Woodard presents a straightforward and concise visual display of the ongoing struggle of African Americans at the hands of cops through photographic collages, ubiquitous images from social media, and a video projection. The fifteen photographic works of art and the video in African America: Contempt of Greasy Pigs make up the inaugural exhibition in the newly opened gallery east window SOUTH managed by Todd Herman.

Deborah Zlotsky, Altoon Sultan, Kate Petley, Scott Chamberlin, and Stephanie Robison

Mar 10

Mar 10 Deborah Zlotsky, Altoon Sultan, Kate Petley, Scott Chamberlin, and Stephanie Robison

Jillian Blackwell

The five solo exhibitions currently on view at Robischon Gallery each capture a delicate and masterful use of color and texture. When entering the gallery on a gray winter day, one is washed over with the bright palette of Deborah Zlotsky’s paintings. In contrast to Zlotsky’s large cartoonish paintings, Altoon Sultan’s serene works are in praise of small things—diminutive compositions, small repeating loops of wool, and closely cropped images of parts of a whole. Kate Petley’s photographs utilize a slight of hand to engage the viewer in active seeing. And nestled in the back room are the works of Scott Chamberlin and Stephanie Robison, who approach materiality and texture with the same vigor that the other artists approach color.

The Horizon and Everything Within It

Mar 7

Mar 7 The Horizon and Everything Within It

Dani/elle Cunningham

Every year, the Center for Fine Art Photography (C4FAP) in Fort Collins and Loveland's Artworks Center for Contemporary Art (ACCA) collaborate on a lens-based exhibition. As the C4FAP and exhibition curator Hamidah Glasgow notes, the significance of such exhibitions to the art community is that they counter the notion that successful art can only be made in a competitive vacuum. This year's offering is a double testament to this sentiment, as it highlights the collaborative spirit between C4FAP and ACCA while exhibiting several collaborations among artists.

Visitors can expect to be confronted by the contemporary theme of identity, but what sets the exhibition apart are the processes of identity exploration these artists are willing to share, including visceral representations of the intimate steps they have taken to know themselves better. From manipulating mediums to manipulating their own bodies, each artist questions their physical and psychological limits, the constructed boundaries of the world, and even the fluidity of art media. The exhibition features Alicia Rodriguez Alvisa and Lidzie Alvisa, Kristianne Riddle, Rafael Soldi, and Lorenzo Triburgo and Sara Van Dyck.

Mar 1

Mar 1 As of Now

Jillian Blackwell

K Contemporary’s As of Now exhibition sums up the gallery’s last five years of existence, not only in the work that it has shown, but also in how it has approached the world. With owner Doug Kacena at the helm, K Contemporary navigates the troubled waters of our times, exploring relevant cultural matters, current events, and how the pandemic has affected us all. Kacena champions artists who do not shy away from hefty topics that are difficult to handle, whose works add insight or nuance to discussions of subjects like race, politics, and death. As of Now not only highlights the featured artists’ work, but also explores how the gallery built connections between those artists and the broader world.

Traitor, Survivor, Icon

Feb 25

Feb 25 Traitor, Survivor, Icon

Madeleine Boyson

Around 1503-1507, a Nahua girl later known by various names—Malina, Malinalli Tenépatl, Doña Marina, Malintzin, La Malinche—was born on Mexico’s Gulf coast. Malinche was a principal, if overlooked actor during this period, garnering a complicated, yet impassioned heritage of criticism and admiration as both a traitor and “the mother of Mexico.” Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche at the Denver Art Museum is the first ever comprehensive art exhibition examining Malinche’s significance.

Pitit Tig / Children of Tigers

Feb 18

Feb 18 Pitit Tig / Children of Tigers

On a wintry Sunday, I had the pleasure of walking through Leon Gallery with Viktor El-Saieh, the curator of Pitit Tig / Children of Tigers. Featuring works by ten contemporary Haitian artists, including El-Saieh himself, the exhibition tells many interweaving stories. Bright colors warm the air. Deities, mermaids, and townsfolk depicted as cats play-out cultural rhythms through densely painted scenes, textiles, carved wood, and clay sculpture. The artists’ work speaks for itself—brilliant in technique, craft, and character. Most of the pieces were lovingly created thousands of miles away. Despite the distance, Pitit Tig / Children of Tigers is embedded with a reverence for Haitian culture, history, and spirituality that gives art patrons a glimpse into this faraway home.

Feb 14

Feb 14 New Horizons

Community Forms

Feb 8

Feb 8 Community Forms

Community Forms is an outdoor installation on the TAXI Campus in Denver by artist Matt Barton (b. 1975), created for the nonprofit, nomadic art museum Black Cube. In 2021, Barton received an 18-month artist fellowship with Black Cube to produce a site-specific work that expands audience engagement with contemporary art. To that end, Barton designed Community Forms as Black Cube’s first permanent site-specific artwork.

Jan 21

Jan 21 Deep Space

Ashten Scheller

Walking into the white cube space of the fooLPRoof gallery—originally a 1930s warehouse in the increasingly-trendy RiNo neighborhood, attached to an equally trendy bar—the high ceilings make the physical space optimal for the various media on display. From large-scale installation to traditional sculptures atop plinths and canvas paintings mounted on the walls, the individual components that make up the current Deep Space show are varied in both media and orientation.

Voices of the Desert

Jan 5

Jan 5 Voices of the Desert

Carissa Samaniego

If you’d like to see something different when you imagine the desert, Cherish Marquez offers us a counter narrative in her solo exhibition at Union Hall in Denver called Voices of the Desert. Marquez uses imagery, animation, natural materials, virtual objects, and tactile experiences in this exhibit to capture the quiet, humble wisdom that you can find in the desert. The artwork offers a slow look at a cast of non-human characters symbolic of desert life who share glimpses into an unseen mystic consciousness.

Dec 29

Dec 29 I’m

Deborah Roberts’ latest exhibition, I’m, is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver until January 30th, 2022. Using a combination of acrylic paint, collaged found faces, and ink, her works carry worlds of meaning. “I want us to see ourselves as a heroic people,” she says. I’m speaks directly to the humanity of being, specifically being Black. Through I’m, Roberts not only brings new, meaningful representations of Black children into a cultural conversation, but further implores viewers to witness cultural expectations of Blackness, through the eyes of a child.

Sinners, Saints & Fools

Dec 22

Dec 22 Sinners, Saints & Fools

Encompassing 25 individual works and one large installation, Sinners, Saints & Fools—the exhibition currently illuminating the main gallery space of Valkarie Gallery—is the largest solo show of artist Maria Valentina Sheets’s stained glass art to date. The impressive display demonstrates her deep knowledge and appreciation for the material and the traditions of the genre. However, it also captures her impulse to experiment and expand the potential of the medium. Through a combination of complex portraiture and contemporary parables with not so simple answers, Sheets works to bridge the divide between the binaries of timely and timeless and worldly and unworldly, all while renegotiating social and cultural consecration.

Dec 17

Dec 17 Fervor

Jillian Blackwell

Ana María Hernando’s exhibition Fervor at the Denver Botanic Gardens is a well-balanced, harmonious display of embroideries and sculpture. Hernando also fills the two gallery spaces of the exhibit with sound. In one room, bird calls echo against the hard walls and collide mid-air with the abstract embroideries that dangle from the ceiling. In the next room, Hernando’s own voice swells, reciting her own poem accompanied by dissonant orchestral music.

Tools of Conveyance / Staring into the Fire

Dec 13

Dec 13 Tools of Conveyance / Staring into the Fire

A luminous, violet-hued skull greets viewers as they enter Tim Whiten’s exhibition Tools of Conveyance—a retrospective of work from the last 40 years—at the University of Colorado Art Museum in Boulder. Kate Petley’s Staring into the Fire prods us toward different sorts of awareness. Her striking abstract prints and paintings challenge our understanding of surface, depth, color, and representation.

Where Is Every Body? / Wandering Spirit

Dec 3

Dec 3 Where Is Every Body? / Wandering Spirit

To contemplate the impact and ideologies behind fashion locally, the Avenir Museum in Fort Collins is well worth visiting. In the exhibit Where Is Every Body? Mannequins and Mounts—a nod to body types, the sense of absence created by social distancing, and the ubiquity of clothing on bodies across the globe—the history of the mannequin is tied into the history of art. A traveling exhibition titled Wandering Spirit: African Wax Prints charts the history of African wax print fabrics through their unlikely origin in Indonesia, to the textile mass production factories of the Netherlands, to where they have received commercial success in West Africa, the exhibition tells a story of global trade, colonization, and commerce through the medium of fashion and textiles.

The Fantasy Show

Nov 23

Nov 23 The Fantasy Show

Madeleine Boyson

The Fantasy Show is a group exhibition of eleven participants, on view through December 17. Six “Design and Build Emerging Artists” join five 2021 Artists in Residence in a curious blend of styles and materials under a generalized “fantasy” theme. By inviting viewers to reignite their relationship with play, The Fantasy Show asserts that great art depends upon good make believe. Moreover, the works demonstrate that art is a playground to indulge the senses, a medium to contact our inner children, and a carte blanche to imagine the world we want, even as we try to escape the one we don’t.