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.
The Storeroom is a relatively new exhibition space located next to Vine Street Pub & Brewery on 17th Street in Denver. Opening less than two years ago, the installation space has already featured almost a dozen shows. For The Storeroom’s most recent exhibit, local artist Frankie Toan has transformed the one-hundred square foot gallery into the artist’s third installment of a series called Queer Gardens.
One of the most arresting things about Colorado-based artist Melanie Walker’s 2020 exhibit Ghost Forest—now showing at the Denver Botanic Gardens until Dec. 6—is its exacting use of space…and silence.
The photographs in Walker’s exhibition depict trees, branches, and leaves, all printed on various fabrics. Some are pressed and slight, others crumpled to create tactile creases. Yet each image is an eerie, mirror-counterpart to something else in our own world. The fold in a leaf reveals lips, the knobs or gashes on aspen tree bark become eyes peering out blankly. Nature, after all, is ancient and humans are just passersby, stealthily observed by lifeforms such as these.
Dear Future… at University of Northern Colorado’s Campus Commons Gallery in Greeley exhibits the work of artists Jessica Houston, Ariel René Jackson, Jen Liu, and Sherwin Rio. Entering the dark and gloomy gallery space located off of a student commons area devoid of students due to a global pandemic, the space evokes an eerie and somber feeling, though perhaps not for the reasons originally intended.
Described as “an environment for artistic growth,” Artworks Loveland Center for Contemporary Art sits across from the railroad tracks in Loveland, CO in a repurposed industrial building with concrete floors. With the smoke looming overhead from nearby fires when I visited, the stark, apocalyptic aesthetic of 2020 seems ubiquitous and unescapable. Inspired by what she called “the beauty of survival,” curator Sarah LeBarre working with co-curator Sharon Carlisle decided to lean into the aesthetic of the moment. They assembled a show simply entitled Respond, which features 10 artists’ response to these unique and harrowing times.
Sculptor and painter Julie Maren wants to know what we’re making of it all. Prompted in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s onslaught of socio-political upheaval has taught us about our fears, vices, loyalties, and internalized systems. In Covidia, a small but whimsical exhibition at Bricolage Gallery, on view inside Boulder’s Art Parts Creative Reuse Center until November 21, Maren explores another lesson of 2020: that is, our deeply human impulse to continue creating, no matter the crisis at hand.
When you walk into the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CPAC) to see the current exhibition, the gallery radiates with sunshine and is filled with photographs that tell an intimate story as part of the centennial celebrating the 19th Amendment. A Yellow Rose Project: Photographs by 100+ Women in Response to the 19th Amendment, the exhibition at CPAC, takes a different tack while reflecting a wealth of information. Themes include the fight against inequality and gender rules, and the importance of women’s roles and history through the ages. The curators built on this title in reference to the Tennessee General Assembly, which was the final state to ratify the 19th Amendment, and the yellow rose that became an emblematic symbol during this hard-fought debate.
Walker Fine Art’s latest exhibition Land Lines, showcasing work by six of their Denver gallery artists—Christopher Hassig, George Kozmon, Ellen Moershel, Heather Patterson, Ben Strawn, Christopher Warren—dives into the various aspects of and concepts surrounding cartography. The artists draw influences from the natural world via reinterpreting mechanisms of record keeping and maps, displaying the landscape of invented worlds, examining the history of Colorado, looking at Polynesian methods of mapping navigation, and more.
Phase Change, at the Curtis Center for the Arts in Greenwood Village, is the fruitful result of a collaborative effort between K Rhynus Cesark, Andrea Gordon, Annakatrin Kraus, Bruce Price, Sara Ransford, Chandler Romeo, Martha Russo, and Tina Suszynski—a group of ceramic artists who completed the “Artists Invite Artists” residency at Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, Montana. The title of the exhibition, Phase Change, nominally highlights the artists’ investigation of ceramic materiality, surfaces, and firing styles. However, the scope of their exploration is much more holistic, encompassing the treatment of the gallery space and the way the objects were made as well as how they interact with the viewer.
Marsha Mack and Lindsay Smith Gustave are masters of expansion and collapse. Their exhibition Animal, Vegetable, Mineral at Leon Gallery in Denver sheds light on the microscopic, constituent cells of natural and unnatural objects and uses imagery that alludes to our contemporary experience of dwelling. The title of the exhibit comes from the 1950s British television show that asked archeological experts to identify ancient objects without any prior information.
At the Foothills Art Center in Golden, Colorado, artist Mattie O.’s solo exhibition Held in Suspension represents the lives of women caught within strictly prescribed ways of how to present themselves. Made up primarily of sculptures of dresses, the exhibit displays a range of feminine attire from traditional gowns to revealing, fanciful costumes. The dresses are constructed using wire armatures covered in a paper produced by the artist with abacá—a fiber created from the leaves of wild banana trees. Though this natural material is fragile, the dresses represent women in their solid being.
Once spotted amidst the mess of brick on Walnut Street, the delight of Lane Meyer Projects’ newest window installation draws in a beleaguered mask-wearer like a moth to flame. A single print called Blue Smiles and a handful of hanging plexiglass “stickers” by the artist Shadow, from her project Shadows Gather, decorate the LMP PDA space as part of an ongoing window series curated by Brooke Tomiello and Rose van Mierlo. Blue Smiles recalls the bustling Denver nightlife of the “Before Times” and reminds viewers that even in the midst of global meltdown, there is still joy to be found in the city and in each other.
The connection of care between parent and child is what inspired Denver artist Tiffany Matheson to create her installation Lullaby at Pirate: Contemporary Art. Matheson was born and raised in Denver. Her work is generally based in geometry and mathematics with an emphasis on human interaction and perception. Many of her works speak to our senses of sight, sound, and touch and incorporate light, texture, color, and nature.
Center for Visual Art’s newest exhibition The Walls Between Us depicts not only the literal and metaphoric walls in our contemporary world, but also the experiences that happen in the space between those walls. Featuring work by The Artnauts, an international social justice-oriented collective, the exhibition includes nearly 40 artworks ranging from traditional drawings and paintings to edgy installations and sculptures. Many works express the artists’ relationships to walls and boundaries, establishing an empathetic environment that is aesthetically diverse yet conceptually similar.
A visit to view Letitia Quesenberry’s work at David B. Smith Gallery in Denver is particularly appealing. This is one of her few exhibitions west of the Mississippi, and she brings with her the unusual ability to create a different world. Recently, she received a 2020 Southern Prize and a grant from the South Arts program as one of the nine winners who submitted works for an exhibition in Columbus, Georgia. Her work is all about space, color, and light.
The latest exhibition at the Santa Fe Art district’s iconic hot pink building, Museo de las Americas, is Rhythm and Ritual: Music of the Ancient Americas curated by Jared Katz. This collaboration with the Denver Art Museum focuses on musical instruments from the Andean, Mayan, and Olmec cultures (in modern-day Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru) with dates ranging from 2500 BCE to 1550 CE. Encompassing a wide range of places and times, the exhibit provides a comprehensive view of the uses—in private and public—as well as the lasting legacies of these instruments.
One of the things Samantha Johnston, executive director of the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CPAC) in Denver, likes best about her job is the opportunity to pair artists whose work wouldn’t otherwise be shown together. The Space Between combines photographs by Kris Sanford with photographs, video, and audio from Philip Matthews and David Johnson. These artists use black-and-white portraiture to explore queer identities.
This past week, I walked into Urban Mud art gallery in Denver to see Martha Daniels's solo show The Pleasures of Surface in Uncertain Times. The exhibition title was indicative of the experience—I found great pleasure in Daniels's surfaces, which were bright and colorful with great depth and emotional charge. The work in the show spans many years of her career and explores themes that she has been working with for some time. I had the opportunity to speak with Martha by phone to learn more about her process and her experience working in ceramics.
Glittering, bold, slab serif installations are cropping up all around the Denver metro area. Namely, Anuar Maauad’s multi-location SHARE installation series that has caught the attention of Denver mainstream outlets. Each one of the nearly 100 installations reads: “To share is precious, pure, and fair.”
The phrase is sampled from the song “I Want You,” often attributed to singer Marvin Gaye, but written by Leon Ware and Arthur Ross. This instrumental, romantic, atmospheric disco song was a far cry from Gaye’s usual funk range, and the lyrics make an intriguing pairing with a font sourced from the Chicago Trump Tower sign.
Stacey Steers is an internationally-recognized filmmaker whose work is currently featured in solo exhibitions at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (MCA). These coinciding exhibitions offer a mid-career survey of Steers’ work that spans collage, film, installation, and sculpture. Steers’ dreamlike aesthetic uses the vernacular of Surrealism to explore ideas of memory, longing, and agency through her female protagonists yet these ideas are often overshadowed by a sole focus on her process.
Nari Ward: We the People at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) features selected sculptures, multi-media works, and large-scale installations from the span of Jamaican-American artist Nari Ward’s career. The exhibit was curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, the Kraus Family Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and has previously shown at the New Museum in New York and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. We the People arrives in Denver as though planned to coincide with current Black Lives Matter events, immigration anxieties, and pandemic news
