The best new gallery space in Denver is Plus Gallery at 2501 Larimer Street in the ballpark neighborhood. Owned by Ivar Zeile, the gallery has been operating since 2001, but moved into their new space (pictured below) in March.
On April 24, the gallery opened a solo exhibition of urban ambler Jean Arnold’s movement paintings.
“Onrush” is a series of oil paintings taken from Arnold’s sketchbook. When she travels, whether by bus or train, drawing allows her to gather visual information that is in a state of flux, contextualizing urban clutter. Arnold re-interprets her journeys on canvas, distilling specific portions of her sketchbooks into segments with cultural and compositional value. Her gestural techniques promote a broad, dynamic color range, converting her notes into forms that balance between the recognizable and the purely abstract. Several of the works on display were taken from sketches done during a previous visit to Denver. The work addresses issues of urban sprawl that are prevalent in cities like Denver and, as Arnold says, “essentially define our lives at this time.”
The geometric and colorful abstract paintings convey a dense layering of geography and complexity. Through her work Arnold breaks down barriers of time and space.
Arnold is currently in residence at RedLine an urban contemporary art laboratory in Denver. A talk with Jean in her studio at RedLine is tentaviely set for Thursday, May 7. She’ll present an artist talk in conjunction with her Residency at Redline next Friday, May 8th starting at 5:30pm, followed by a stroll over to Plus Gallery to hear her thoughts relating to the work on view here.
UPDATE: Jean Arnold will be in attendance Friday, May 1 at Plus Gallery. Plus Gallery will be open late till 8pm for First Friday.
Judith H. Dobrzynski takes the Denver Art Museum to task on her blog Real Clear Arts. She questions why the museum did not agree to host their former curator R. Craig Miller’s show “European Design Since 1985: Shaping the New Century.” An expansive exhibit she reviewed in the Wall Street Journal calling it “exactly the kind of show serious museums should be doing. It’s ambitious, it’s rooted in scholarship, it’s aesthetically interesting, and it’s displayed well.”
Read her full post by clicking on the hyperlink below:
The exhibit is currently on display at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and will travel the High Museum in Atlanta and perhaps a venue in Europe. The Denver Art Museum claims to be a partner in presenting this show, but according to Miller: “The Denver museum did not view his show as a big draw.”
So what does the museum consider a big draw? Well, Instead of a 250 item design exhibit that looks forward to where design is going, Denver Art Museum’s new design curator Darrin Alfred has put together a show currently on display that looks backward:”The Psychedelic Experience, Rock Posters from the San Francisco Bay Area, 1965-71.”
Other temporary exhibits at DAM this year? Charles M. Russell through September 2009 and a show called “New and Noteworthy: The Hopkins Family Quilt in Context,” through December 31, 2009. Wow! How exciting! I’m sure both of those will be “a big draw!”
Modernism’s deepest and broadest penetration in the United States was in southern California, from the 1930s to the 1960s. No one has recorded this architectural era as admirably and admiringly as the photographer Julius Shulman, who at an energetic 98 is the subject of a film about the relationship between photography and the built modernist environment around Los Angeles. Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman — a film by Eric Bricker — will screen Sunday at the Marfa Film Festival, which begins today.
Los Angeles and Palm Springs never looked so good.
If it weren’t for Shulman, the taste for modernism would not have encouraged so much of that architecture to have been commissioned. Now that the same work is threatened by the usual suspects – developers — Shulman as photographer and activist is also crucial to preserving many of those structures that are still standing.
Visual Acoustics has been playing at festivals for a year now. I saw it at the International Festival of Film on Art in Montreal (FIFA) , the most important event of its kind in the world, where you can see dozens of films on architecture and design that are unlikely to play at a theater near you.
Visual Acoustics was one of the few exceptions to that rule at FIFA. It has a commercial distributor. Continue reading →
I called nic up for more on this post and heres what he said nic2 First musing - Since the networks decided that every FBI/CIA team on their prime-time cop shows needs a “soap opera” beauty as the lead character let’s amuse ourselves with: Who would be the toughest and win a fight? Would it be Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) from Fringe, she’s tough and has an excellent mind but no, she might make 2nd. FBI Renee on 24 has no fear but would be better with a gun. What about ECHO (Eliza Dushku) from Dollhouse? Okay she’s not FBI or CIA but her brain can be imprinted with all the information from a super agent as she “becomes” that person with physical abilities included…but then again, at any moment, Echo’s brain could short-circuit and she could forget who she was or why she was fighting.Then there is CIA Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) from Chuck. I think she would win hands down. Smart, but not as brainy as Olivia, way tougher than FBI Renee with lots of experience kicking several “Fulcrum” agents ass all at the same time.
Since moving from Houston to Colorado twelve years ago, Kate Petley has explored the searing white light of the high elevation Rocky Mountains and how it influences our perception of the landscape. Using a complicated method of film and collage with resin on acrylic panels she created juicy, flat screens that played with light reflecting and casting images of images of images, somewhat like a house of mirrors.
However, Petley found that people were more interested in her technique than in exploring the meaning of the work. In a significant departure in method from previous work, Petley is now creating images on opaque panel surfaces. But there is little departure from practice. Petley is still exploring light, landscape, reflection only this time she’s added a human element. Graffiti.
These new panels are not paintings and Petley is not a painter. They are collage-based constructions and she continues to use film as a primary medium of expression. In much the way that collage artists like Robert Rauschenberg began using prints of magazine images, Petley is using photographs of graffiti from around the world in isolated fragments and sources. The fragmentation of these sources speaks to how we read the visually oriented world. The graffiti is stripped of its original meaning and negative associations.
There is a consciousness to the appropriation beyond color, outline, graphic quality, and dynamic composition. Petley cuts, traces, and scales up the isolated elements and in this work the viewer is aware of each decision that goes into the work as each move is made visible. Each layer is evidenced. Continue reading →
Check out the airstream rentals listed in the May 2009 issue of Budget Travel magazine.
An Airstream rental in Vegas (Courtesy Kampgrounds of America)
An earlier issue also listed refurbished airstreams available at the following hotels:
# Lazy Meadow Mt. Tremper, N.Y., lazymeadow.com, from $150
# The Shady Dell Bisbee, Ariz., theshadydell.com, from $70
# Starlux Hotel Wildwood, N.J., thestarlux.com, from $74
# Ten Thousand Waves (pictured) Santa Fe, N.M., tenthousandwaves.com, from $99
Note: This story was accurate when it was published. Please be sure to confirm all rates and details directly with the companies in question before planning your trip.
Zoe Danae Falliers’s archival pigment prints, part of the artist’s Great Plains series, debut at a show called Vivid in Santa Fe, with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. on April 24th. Vivid, curated by Cyndi Conn , hangs at Webster Collection at 54 1/2 Lincoln Avenue. It also includes photography by Robert Stivers, Michael Eastman, David Levinthal and Chuck Ramirez. Blur clearly (bad pun) remains a fixture of compelling minimalist photography like Falliers’s. The metaphor for fast-seeing, fast-driving, fast-living, appears particularly apt for this fast-approaching late-night fast art writing. Electrons meet, converge, bend at warp speed. Say it: street, field, horizon. Prove it. You can’t. Sometimes art captures just right the phenomenon (impossible) of wanting to match I see to I know. Over the edge of some long-gone rainbow a tornado or a dust storm might be only friction or tumult. Not long ago a woman I know offered that new fields (generic) offer seething potential but one must enter them “clean.” Clean was her word. Good word. Here’s to the clean line where blurred vision meets the field seething with proximity to some next contrast. How’s that for late night? Okay, not that late, but dark, okay?
For me the Travel Channel is about making the world a smaller place; sharing destinations I might not ever get to visit, telling me about other cultures. I choose to ignore the lame and trivial aspects of their programming: Their ranking of sexiest beaches, hottest resorts, beach goers exposed. I can’t ignore the sordid programming of the Travel Channel any longer.
When I first saw the promos for Bridget’s Sexiest Beaches, I hoped the show would not be as cheap, slutty, and stupid as the promos. All hopes were dashed when I watched for the first time. It was downright embarrassing. The sight of Bridget and Sara Underwood, 2007 Playmate of the Year, having dinner beach side in Croatia, wearing hardly any clothing and babbling on like airhead American tourists incensed me. This is the culture we export? Buxom, blonde beach babes?
Below, a selection of architectural work by Harry Teague, Stephen Dynia and Ricardo Legorreta–three of the seven panelists at the Jeff Harnar Contemporary Architecture Symposium that I moderated at the new Thornburg campus Saturday. A Robert Reck photo that he kindly lent for the event is also included here, so that blog readers may get a small look at what was shown. I’ll be adding more new things on contemporary architecture over the days and weeks.
Thornburg’s new campus by Ricardo Legorreta is important new architecture. (If I can upload my Instinct phone photos to my Imac, I’ll show you snaps this week.) As a building type of corporate headquarters, a work environment, a display of green architecture, and a volume that uses the site intelligently and maximizes Mr. Legorreta’s intense pattern language, the building works on all levels. The Saturday symposium was attended by close to 300. Mexico City’s Ricardo Legorreta, Harry Teague of Aspen, Stephen Dynia of Jackson Hole, Suby Bowden, Steve Oles, Robert Reck and Linda Durham all dialogued with me and each other on contemporary architecture issues.
The world we live in is global, the architects agreed. Teague argued for sensitivity to local conditions without falling into sentimentality. He considers authenticity a high architectural value. Teague, incidentally, is the Aspen architect of record working with Pritzker Prize winner Renzo Piano on Piano’s first residence–a house for the Pritzkers in Aspen. We’ll be following. Continue reading →
Breaking Bad has got to be my favorite show these days. Cinematographer Michael Slovis does incredible things. Tonight’s show opened with a video montage of Los Cuates de Sinaloa doing a narco-corrida, that is a song about the bad business called drug trafficking that is a cash economy of immense proportions. Bryan Cranston continues amazing as Walt White, high school chem teacher and cancer patient turned kingpin of the Albuquerque meth corridor. A friend of mine said last week that he can’t watch the show, “because I grew up in Albuquerque.” Enough said. Even if you’ve never seen the show it captures something incredible about our times. Last night’s denouement concerned the tougher streets encountered by DEA narc Hank (Walt’s bro in law) at his “promotion” to El Paso. I recommend you to Charles Bowden’s book Down by the River. Best taken on an empty stomach.Below: Hank (Dean Norris) on the watch being funned about no stomach for turtle hybrids. Sayonara, Tortuga.
Bathouseproject.org does appear to have been infiltrated. It apparently includes drawings and animations for a proposed bathouse in the UK. Bathouse: environment for bats.
Monday was day 17 of the Creative Time roadtrip. It found Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller, with compadres Sgt. Jonathan Harvey and Esam Pasha, hanging on the Santa Fe Plaza. Nato Thompson of Creative Time was there to record the day’s events for his blog. Jeremy talked to me and Conrad talked to Esam. We found out that the RV had a little fender bender in Tennessee, explaining in part Jeremy’s wish that they arrive safely in L.A. An angry citizen had approached the group in the morning, and generally reactions in Santa Fe had been mixed, Jeremy said. According to Nato’s blog, Jeremy and Jonathan had gotten into an argument with a “local art critic” at the house of Site Santa Fe director Laura Steward Heon the previous night. Ah, the art world. The rumpus was over whether work like this is art or not. Jonathan, the Platoon sergeant who worked in psyops in Iraq, called this old saw “tiresome.” I agree. And Esam Pasha, incidentally, reported to Conrad and me that when he was translating for the 21st Airborne at the start of the war, the military lacked sufficient body armor, water, even food. “If you don’t have a plan for the soldiers how can you have a plan for the civilians?” Esam asked rhetorically. And he noted, when we were talking about our late mutual friend Steven Vincent, who died in 2005 in Basra, that times became hugely more dangerous in Iraq post-invasion. “Before the invasion there was one Saddam. After the invasion, 1000 Saddams.”
I’ll be adding photos of the car, which reportedly was a car bomb detonated in Baghdad, soon.
Esam Pasha, an Iraqi on the road with Conversations about Iraq, talked to Ronald Lewis of the House of Dance and Feathers.
On April 7th the Creative Time Project It Is What It Is: Conversations about Iraq was in New Orleans. Today, April 13th, the participants will be on Santa Fe Plaza from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. conducting conversations and adding to the blog. I interview Jeremy Deller by phone tonight and will be reporting more about this project soon.
I have read John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany four times. Among late 1980s novels this one soured me on other fiction because it was singular in its nimble dealings of the relationship of the picaresque to fate. Hence, when I was in Denver in February and saw that the Denver Theater Center was set to produce A Prayer for Owen Meany come April, I thought well why not? When I actually committed to going I fretted a little bit (well, a lot) over would the play ruin the book for me? Could any actor really do justice to Owen, a character whose smallness, voice and intellect produced a clairvoyant with a taste for Liberace, and no truck with authority? On the drive up I-25 toward Denver, tire blowout and all, my husband asked, “how are they going to produce a book that has so much description?’ And frankly, this was a problem.
John Irving speaks on another novel with a shared theme of the absent father.
As Owen, recent Circle in the Square Theater School graduate Michael Wartella is both comic and resolute, and does a bangup job. And Cheryl Lynn Bowers is terrific as Barb Wiggins. And it bears mention that having spent the show’s opening night at Discount Tire in Pueblo, I had ample time to fix on the part the book played in my life, two decades ago, and what is was going to be like to see it now that Reagan-era policies and Vietnam are that much farther in the past. Continue reading →
Kindle, and now Plastic Logic. Can a tech gadget save print media? Lots of companies seem to think so and all are scrabbling to provide the perfect digital reader. Rumor has it, Apple is working on one, Amazon just released their new Kindle, and now there is a stunning form factor in the 8.5 x 11 inch flexible Plastic Logic reader. Thinner than a pad of paper and lighter than many periodicals Plastic Logic offers a high-quality reading experience – better than alternatives of paper or other electronic readers on the market today. Yet it is still only shows black-and-white. Continue reading →
I have been watching some TV shows but my current photographic piece and the state of finances are making my mind drift and my hand punch the remote. I see the images – and maybe that’s all I really care about - but not much is interesting enough to hold my attention. Plus, the writer’s script formulas for the FBI cop shows are so dadgum predictable I usually change the channel or turn the TV off about 10 minutes before the end. Like, who doesn’t realize that the “team” on Criminal Minds will save the victum who is just about to be killed by yet another serial killer right before the knife comes down? Or they take their final breath inside a plastic bag wrapped around their head. TV serial killers, it’s always the knife the rope or the plastic bag.
I did watch 24, and poor Jack is still fighting the chemical pathogen, but low and behold there is a stem-cell treatment that can save him and it’s on the way! Can’t wait. He and FBI Renee are still in the FBI office and the show will be yada yada until they get out-o-there and start kicking butt in the “field.”
I realize that Spectacle, Elvis Costello with… are reruns but they are new to me. Again only Elvis can make Sting and the Police less irksome.
Entering The Cell (The Center for Empowered Living & Learning) in Denver is like entering a high-tech prison. You step inside a room filled with screens and wait for the doors to slide closed behind you. Suddenly you are surrounded by images of Denver, the Civic Center plaza, bustling sidewalks on the 16th Street Mall, people going about their day, shopping, working, pushing baby strollers, enjoying a summer day in the park. Boom. An explosion. People running. Screaming. Smoke fills the air and bloodied body parts lie scattered around. Terrorism can strike anyone, anytime, anywhere, is the message.
Terrorism is the premeditated use of violence or the threat of violence targeting civilians or their property for political, religious or ideological gain. It is a tactic used to create an environment of fear, chaos and intimidation in order to further the terrorists’ objectives.
On the ground floor of the Daniel Libeskind-designed residences that occupy the spot across the plaza from the jutting planar angles of the Denver Art Museum, an art exhibit attempts to educate, empower and engage visitors about this difficult subject—terrorism. This state-of-the-art art show attempts to explain and define terrorism while tracing the tools, the money, the myths and the facts of terrorism. Continue reading →
Gabriel Sunday stars in David Lee Miller’s My Suicide, which has taken two major festival prizes now: the Gen Art film festival, last week in New York, and the Crystal Bear in Berlin. But the film is still seeking a distributor. Luminaria Films of Santa Fe produced.
My Suicide, a self-described “self-inflicted comedy,” is a parody of a “the making of…” documentary, in which a teenager’s project to dramatize his own suicide makes him a popular guy at his California high school.
It’s a mock-umentary of a shock-umentary with an earnest message. The motivational film’s goal is to entertain a young audience into understanding and fighting teenage suicide. Does it already sound like a movie that might make you want to jump off a cliff?
Next Monday this British artist, about whom some have asked, “is he really an artist at all?,” conducts conversations on Iraq on the Santa Fe Plaza. Tomorrow he is in New Orleans, sadly also become a war zone in our own United States.
Oh those were the days. Lisa Yuskavage’s “Night” sold at Christie’s in May 2007 for $1.384 million.
On view, as of April 2, are twenty paintings, sculptures, works on paper and photographs in “Women: A Loan Exhibition from the Collection of Steven and Alexandra Cohen.” The selection includes early feminine images such as Cezanne’s austere Portrait of a Woman (1900) and Edward Munch’s Madonna (1895-7), a siren with the look of a sacralized prostitute. By way of van Gogh, Modigliani, a Matisse sculpture and Picasso, it moves to Cindy Sherman and to Richard Prince’s 1983 jailbait photo-collage of Brooke Shields, Spiritual America, and on to Lisa Yuskuvage’s soft-porn Night (1999-2000).
“Women” smells like the kind of theme one gives to a group of works drawn from a larger collection that lacks any deeper thematic consistency. It can be anything. If you’re collecting figurative art, there’s a good chance that at least half those works will depict women. In this case, it’s a “best buys” selection, although works like Yves Klein’s female form using the body as a paint brush, Anthropologie de l’Epoch Blue (ANT.78) (1960), shows that Cohen isn’t just out for the obvious trophies.
Sotheby’s is calling it a loan exhibition. The auction house’s specialists would not say how many works Cohen owns, but the Stamford hedge fund executive has been a major buyer in recent years. His purchases over the last decade, when this collection was formed, have been estimated at between $500 million and $1 billion. Continue reading →
