Lumonics Mind Spa

Lumonics Mind Spa

Mary Grace Bernard
Review

Lumonics Mind Spa: Light Intersection is bringing much-needed color and light to downtown Denver. The exhibition presents works by Dorothy Tanner (1923-2020) and Mel Tanner (1925-1993)—an artist couple who dedicated their life and art practice to the immersive experiences of visual art and to promoting the importance of physical, emotional, and spiritual awareness. While Lumonics Mind Spa has been on view in other art spaces around Denver, the show’s current iteration at Understudy forges an atmosphere not seen elsewhere.

Pioneer Project & Mothers and Daughters

Pioneer Project & Mothers and Daughters

Jillian Blackwell
Review

Stepping off of a snowy street on a gray winter day, one is grateful for the two vibrant shows currently on view at Visions West Contemporary. Pioneer Project by Jennifer Nehrbass and Mothers and Daughters by Madeleine Bialke create intriguing and colorful worlds to enter into. Pioneer Project by Jennifer Nehrbass is a collection of landscape paintings, portraits of women, and small sculptures. Mothers and Daughters by Madeleine Bialke, is another world unto itself with contrasting complementary colors blue and orange.

Todd Edward Herman

Todd Edward Herman

Mary Grace Bernard
Artist Profile

When looking at artist Todd Edward Herman’s artwork, such as his 2007 film Cabinet, viewers must face images of death, the realities of physically disabled people, and the lives of mentally disabled people, among other non-normative bodies and minds. Herman creates films and photographs that deal with themes of the body and transience, representational taboos and spectatorship, and the historic consequences of othering.

Four years ago, Herman moved from San Francisco, California to Boulder, Colorado to be closer to family. He lives with his two children and runs a small art space called “east window” in Boulder. His art practice includes thirty years of working and collaborating with writers, performers, filmmakers, and curators to promote and advocate for bodies that are largely invisible in the public sphere.

Helen & Alice at the Museum

Helen & Alice at the Museum

Dani/elle Cunningham
Review

Known for weaving non-traditional materials, fiber artist Steven Frost pushes his material scope to extremes this year with a new monumental installation. This work is the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s (BMoCA’s) newest temporary commission for its InsideOut program, hangs over the external northwest corner of BMoCA’s building. The woven green-and-white plastic form is sourced from lawn chairs, evoking stereotypical, mid-century images of white American families, and perhaps even generating feelings of nostalgia for a “simpler time.”

Contrasting with this picturesque notion, the work rests against the red brick pattern of BMoCA’s facade to create a nauseating combination of color and geometry. And that’s the point. The clash of the artwork with the building underscores the queer identity of the women to whom Frost pays homage with the work’s title: his aunt, Helen, and her partner, Alice. For them, family life was far from simple.

Freedom of Speech

Freedom of Speech

Samantha Hunt-Durán
Review

Freedom of Speech is a monumental triptych on the southeast side of the Denver Performing Arts Complex that features three images by Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur in collaboration with Eric Gottesman and Wyatt Gallery. It is on view until February 2021. These images are adaptations of Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting by the same name and are part of a larger series of referential photographs that re-conceive Rockwell’s America via his Four Freedoms paintings.

Queer Gardens: Lost at Home

Queer Gardens: Lost at Home

Mary Grace Bernard
Review

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.

Ghost Forest

Ghost Forest

Jamie Sheffield
Review

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…

Dear Future…

Jillian Blackwell
Review

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.

Respond

Respond

Emily Zeek
Review

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.

Covidia

Covidia

Madeleine Boyson
Review

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.

A Yellow Rose Project

A Yellow Rose Project

Mary Voelz Chandler
Review

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.

Land Lines

Land Lines

Courtney Lindly
Review

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

Phase Change

Jillian Blackwell
Review

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.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

Derrick Velasquez
Review

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.

Held in Suspension

Held in Suspension

Lauren Shults
Review

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.

Blue Smiles

Blue Smiles

Madeleine Boyson
Review

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.

Lullaby

Lullaby

Mary Grace Bernard
Review

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.

The Walls Between Us

The Walls Between Us

Dani/elle Cunningham
Review

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.

Somewhere in the Future I am Remembering Today

Somewhere in the Future I am Remembering Today

Mary Voelz Chandler
Review

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.

Rhythm and Ritual

Rhythm and Ritual

Courtney Lindly
Review

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.

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