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.
In her solo exhibition Second Body—currently on view at Meow Wolf’s Galleri Gallery—New Zealand native and Denver-based artist Jodi Stuart draws inspiration from our complicated and expansive relationship with plastics, creating works that are not meant to solve the plastics problem necessarily, but rather give new life, forms, and purpose through upcycling and artmaking.
A library collapses linear timelines and provides a space where many stories can intermingle and unusual analogies begin to form. This is similar to how Kylee Covili and Jim Kearns approach their materials in their Reconstructing Perspectives exhibition at the Lyons Community Library. Using precise construction and unexpected patternmaking, the two artists work with materials embedded with stories of previous lives and create something new out of the collected parts.
In a collaborative effort to tell a more complex story of this collection and the institution, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center invited four guest curators—selected from a diverse set of community stakeholders—to reimagine its exhibition spaces. The historian Bill Bryans describes how such a collaborative practice enables public history, “doing history for and with the public,” often with “non-academic partners.”
The two concurrent exhibitions at Nick Ryan Gallery feature the work of New Englander artists Galen Cheney and Clark Derbes. Brief Transit showcases paintings by Cheney, a self-described “painter’s painter” from Massachusetts. In Time Travelers, Derbes, who lives in Vermont, displays a selection of polychromed wooden sculptures.
Libby Barbee’s solo show, one of Denver International Airport’s latest temporary exhibitions on display in the Airport Office Building, sits at the nexus of these considerations of art and place. Consisting of six collaged works from over the past 16 years, the show is a sharply focused exploration of Barbee’s career-long examination of our connection to our environment.
Dedication to creation requires long bouts of solitary contemplation, configuration, and general manual labor. Inevitably, the work also starts demanding external materials and inspiration to keep the unpredictable muse in motion. Susan Wick wrangles with this joyous tension in her Eyes On exhibition of works at the Denver Art Museum, which combines imagery of everyday home objects with glimpses of faraway lands, all curiously abstracted by a menagerie of enticing materials.
But originality and purity are not synonyms. And as Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick’s Dark Matter, Stacey Steers’ The Stars Fell From Long Ago, and Kim Dickey’s And All the Meadows Wide at Robischon Gallery attest, the subtleties between cherishing source material and overwhelming it can be the difference between breathing life into work or sucking the air out of it.
A continuation of Abecedarian Artists’ Books’ participation in the biennial Colorado Mo’Print, or Month of Printmaking, Printed Page V explores how books are an essential component of the legacy and continuing expansion of printmaking. Jurors Katherine Crowe, Special Collections Curator at the University of Denver, and Alicia Bailey, Director of Abecedarian Artists’ Books, have brought together thirty-eight works by thirty-two U.S. artists, unified by their use of traditional techniques ranging from letterpress to botanical printing.
At the Colorado Photographic Art Center (CPAC), the two current solo exhibitions of works by Leonard Suryajaya and Matthew Finley queer family photographs. Family photography has been and continues to be a tool of nationalism and imperialism as well as a mechanism of constructing and enforcing normative visions of the family as a happy, white, heterosexual, nuclear unit. Against these disciplinary and exclusionary histories, Suryajaya’s and Finley’s images use photography as a method for imagining and practicing kinship otherwise.
A chain reaction can lead to catastrophe or creation and the end result may sharply veer from the original intent. Each point of contact crackles towards a crescendo, but the connection remains precarious. Eleanor Sabin’s exhibition Soft Skills at Colorado State University’s Directions Gallery ponders and mournfully unravels this complexity of connection through a variety of contrasting materials.
Living up to its name, Shared Journey at the Museum of Friends in Walsenburg is a glimpse into a shared artistic life, poignantly marked by Jann Vail’s passing in April last year. Well-known in Huerfano County, the Vails’ work is visually distinct yet united by a sense of purpose and an undercurrent of resistance. Tom’s digital collages, monumental hand-cut wood paintings, and satirical sculptures lean toward surrealism and abstraction, while Jann’s whimsical menageries and repurposed figurines in cigar boxes create intimate, playful vignettes. Despite differences, both practices reflect attentiveness to power structures and the quiet poetry of defiance.
Tim McKay’s solo exhibition Time and Materials at Pirate: Contemporary Art invites viewers to engage in these meta considerations by playfully utilizing obscured labels that become legible with the use of blue lens glasses provided by the gallery. With this “opt-in” system, McKay makes the audience choose how they experience the show and how much information they are given about the art on display.
On display at the Loveland Museum and overlapping with Colorado’s Month of Printmaking, is an exhibition by Massachusetts-based printmaker Julie Lapping Rivera. The show invites us to reacquaint ourselves with accomplished women in history that deserve a little more consideration. Inspired by the New York Times obituary series “Overlooked,” Look Again: Portraits of Daring Women consists of woodcut and collage portraits of an international selection of past female trailblazers: artists, writers, scientists, activists, and beyond.
When Chris Bristow makes a work of art, he makes it slowly, stitch by stitch, hand-embroidering surfaces that he later paints over. He makes it quickly, creating drawings in Procreate®, where he can try out different elements and colors, working with multiple layers. In many ways, his art pulls in opposing directions. It contains both a tongue-in-cheek irreverence, but also a yearning for slowness, both of which feel quintessentially millennial.
In Nourished, her exhibition on display at the Denver Botanic Gardens, Jazz Holmes pays homage to the Creole food that has shaped her. But these paintings are not still lifes, and the relationship to food isn’t one of subject to object. Holmes’ work is vibrant, living, dynamic; it elevates the raw materials of Creole cuisine to co-creator alongside the people who harvest and prepare it. These paintings flip the idiom “you are what you eat” on its head, showing us that food is more than an object to be consumed—it’s a partner and a mirror, inseparable from the humans who nourish it and are nourished by it.
As the first African American woman to hold public office in Colorado, Dr. Rachel Bassette Noel worked to desegregate Denver Public Schools, insisting with a “soft-spoken grace” that education is a right. Dr. Ellamaria Foley-Ray’s “clay and cloth” quilts weave together her own connection to Dr. Noel, while emphasizing the importance of family, community, and faith.
Through March 27th, the O'Sullivan Gallery at Denver's Regis University is hosting Román Anaya and Louis Trujillo's En La Memoria—a series of self-portraits, sculpture, and paper flowers that confound traditional ideas of gender, illness, and the religious.
Paco Sanchez Park, named after a vital member of the community who in 1954 brought Denver its first Spanish language radio station, buzzes with inviting energy. The park’s design honors his legacy, featuring a microphone shaped playground tower, music note footholds, a bridge adorned with tinkling chimes, and rolling hills reminiscent of sound waves. Joyous shouts from the playground and soccer field provide a lively soundtrack. In the middle of it all, the steel sculpture Que Viva Paco by Carlos Frésquez spins the story of Francisco “Paco” Sanchez’s legacy.
A green man once told a donkey that ogres were like onions, but he may as well have been talking about Emily Joyce’s work. The paintings in her third solo exhibition at David B. Smith Gallery are practically peelable, layered as they are with color, shape, symbolism, history and science, mock texture, mathematics, and source material. But unlike onions (which may cause tears), the art in Deal, or, How I Became Radioactive, now on view through February 21, has a friendly exhilaration that chatters off the walls. And best of all, Joyce’s work attests that the best art always knows the shape of its own container.
In Tricia Waddell’s studio, a vibrant menagerie of eight- to fourteen-inch-tall soft sculptures rest on various shelves and plinths. Each work has a powerful presence. Some appear amoeba-like with boldly patterned, multi-colored surfaces.
