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.

geometric frustrations / Volumes

Sep 1

Sep 1 geometric frustrations / Volumes

Dani/elle Cunningham

The relationship between presence and trace dominates in two exhibitions by Boulder- and Limassol, Cyprus-based artist Marina Kassianidou. Trained in art and computer science, Kassianidou focuses on mark-making and surface and the ways in which drawing is a responsive combination of both. She also emphasizes the role of multistep, transformational processes by displaying each step of creation as artworks in their own right. In geometric frustrations at east window SOUTH in Boulder, Kassianidou illustrates the process of evolving trash into glorified art objects. The artist’s love of mark-making is apparent in her two-person exhibition Volumes at Lane Meyer Projects in Denver with Maia Ruth Lee.

PROCESS: Making Things on the Way to Making Other Things

Aug 23

Aug 23 PROCESS: Making Things on the Way to Making Other Things

Laura I. Miller

With Process: Making Things on the Way to Other Things, curator Rick Griffith offers the viewer a glimpse into the mind of the artist. The 17 works presented at the Art Students League of Denver, ranging from paintings to video to sculpture, reveal mistakes, leftovers, and happy accidents. They re-contextualize works meant for other purposes or address directly the mind behind the object. By showing us their “rubbish, or trash,” or works that aren’t “good enough to show others,” as Griffith says in his curator’s statement, the artists reveal their vulnerability and present us with works that are more relatable, and more human, than what many of us are accustomed to viewing.

The Contour of Feeling

Aug 15

Aug 15 The Contour of Feeling

Dani/elle Cunningham

Monstrous cedar sculptures as large as small trees characterize Ursula von Rydingsvard’s exhibition The Contour of Feeling at the Denver Botanic Gardens. The title reflects both the poetics of the sculptures and the tragic, triumphant poetry that could be made about the artist’s childhood. Along with her family, German-born Ukrainian and Polish artist Ursula von Rydingsvard spent her early years as a forced laborer under the Nazis. After World War II, the family traveled among displacement camps. These are experiences she sometimes references in her work, though minimally.

Zoid Room: The Black Dreamscape

Aug 9

Aug 9 Zoid Room: The Black Dreamscape

Appealing to our curiosity, dreams, and affirmations of resilience, J. Benjamin Burney’s exhibition Zoid Room: The Black Dreamscape is an immersive installation suffused with emotion that reorients our perceptions of the world. The exhibit is now on view at The Storeroom in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Denver through August 13.

Juried BFA Exhibition 2022

Aug 1

Aug 1 Juried BFA Exhibition 2022

For the art majors in the graduating class of 2022, it’s the end of a several years-long journey of artistic practice and scholarship at Colorado State University’s Department of Art and Art History. Student work by these graduates is currently assembled in the white cube Hatton Gallery in the Visual Arts Building on campus. Gallery Director Silvia Minguzzi describes the Juried BFA Exhibition 2022 and the pieces displayed as the “best” work of the class of 2022, as chosen by local artists Anthony Guntren, sculptor, and Kris Barz Mendonça, illustrator.

Clyfford Still, Art, and the Young Mind

Jul 25

Jul 25 Clyfford Still, Art, and the Young Mind

I’ve smiled and giggled along with children, aged six months to eight years, throughout my visit to Clyfford Still, Art, and the Young Mind. It is the first exhibit I have seen in collaboration with children. From exhibit videos and staff, I learned that teachers in preschools and grade school classrooms asked children which of the paintings they liked the most. Younger children’s faces lit up as they stretched their hands towards their favorite prints of Clyfford Still’s work. Older children stuck sticky notes above their favorite paintings and stated with total clarity, “Yes. I like this one.” These are just two examples of how children chose art for the exhibit.

Jul 22

Jul 22 Transformation

Laura I. Miller

Transformation at the Parker Arts, Culture & Events (PACE) Center invites fiber artists to repurpose materials ranging from tea bags to tablecloths, reducing the artists’ carbon footprints while interrogating quilting as a medium. The works featured by these 24 artists address themes ranging from women’s rights and gun violence to conservation and memory, showcasing the medium’s versatility and bringing attention to the labor of domesticity that so often goes ignored.

Jul 11

Jul 11 Ascent

In early June, a pair of monumental exhibitions opened at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities and RedLine Contemporary Art Center. They feature a prolific array of artworks, nearly one hundred individual paintings and sculptures, spanning half a century, by Colorado artist Floyd D. Tunson. Considered a major survey of Tunson’s artistic output over the past five decades, the two exhibitions, collectively titled Ascent, were conceived by curators Wylene Carol, Daisy McGowan, and Collin Parson. They are designed to complement one another while maintaining their own autonomy. Though each exhibition contains a different collection of original artworks, they are curated so that both exhibitions contain examples of the artist’s historical practice. They can each independently impart to the viewer a comprehensive understanding of the landscape of Tunson’s career.

Malinalli on the Rocks

Jul 8

Jul 8 Malinalli on the Rocks

Madeleine Boyson

Denver has hosted three shows about Malinalli this year, and it’s been instructive to view them in conversation. But the final show to close—and perhaps the most visionary—is Malinalli on the Rocks at Museo de las Americas, curated by Maruca Salazar, the museum’s former executive director. In a deliberate move to amplify new aesthetics for Malinalli’s 500-year legacy as the “Mother of Mexico,” Salazar assembles eleven other Chicanx and Latinx artists for a regenerative exhibit that requires everyone to “choose sides.”

inVISIBLE | hyperVISIBLE

Jul 1

Jul 1 inVISIBLE | hyperVISIBLE

inVISIBLE | hyperVISIBLE came to the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder as we neared the end of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month and offers an incredible bounty of work from 16 different AAPI artists. The exhibition reaches beyond political and cultural bounds—a uniquely contemporary account of the lived experiences of a diverse demographic, with emotional depth and aesthetic playfulness in equal parts.

Jun 28

Jun 28 Us

Ashten Scheller

Now at Bitfactory Gallery in Denver, the exhibition Us is a celebration of queer joy, community, and identity. An annual exhibition (this year being its third), its intent is “to bring attention and awareness to marginalized groups of artists and [to demonstrate] the universal nature of art.” Showcasing members of the LGBTQIA+ community, works by artists Christopher La Fleur, James Mullane, Clint Ramstetter, and Louis Trujillo fill the gallery with primarily two-dimensional works—paintings, fiber art, and drawings.

Venus: A Space to Hold

Jun 24

Jun 24 Venus: A Space to Hold

Denver-based video artist Annette Isham asks viewers to rethink the romanticism of westward expansion with three augmented reality artworks entitled Venus: A Space to Hold. Through these works, visitors are presented with an alternative and experimental method for engaging with the art object, hosted within the Popwalk app, developed by David Chapman Lindsay, and set against the backdrop of The Yard and the surrounding Divine Redeemer neighborhood in Colorado Springs.

Jun 17

Jun 17 Stephen Shugart

Madeleine Boyson

Stephen Shugart—a local Denver author-turned-artist who works in sculpture, installation, and painting—has a unique perspective on light. Using it as paint and poetry alongside natural and human-made objects, Shugart captures transcendent moments of reality to literally illuminate the dark. And while not all of his work features a bulb, the light in and behind Shugart’s visual oeuvre is a narrative foil to darkness, a mechanism for wonder, and a path to self-discovery.

Patterns of Consumption

Jun 9

Jun 9 Patterns of Consumption

Dani/elle Cunningham

In the exhibition Patterns of Consumption at the Littleton Museum, Kalliopi Monoyios converts cast aside objects, including single-use plastic, cords, and snack packaging, into new states of being as art materials, quilt-like wall hangings, sculptures, and three-dimensional framed works ranging from minimalist to maximalist styles that are nearly unrecognizable from their original forms.

The Folly of Dominion / Transient Objects of Desire

Jun 3

Jun 3 The Folly of Dominion / Transient Objects of Desire

Brenda Mallory’s exhibition The Folly of Dominion explores “making do” as both a resource for material usage and for engaging with the practice of frugality and resilience. It is on view in Colorado State University’s Lory Student Center Duhesa Gallery. Lenka Konopasek’s exhibition Transient Objects of Desire, in the Lory Student Center’s Curfman Gallery, focuses on the dichotomies flowing between tension and solace, beauty and destruction, and brute force and gentle intimacy.

May 25

May 25 Discoveries

The artwork of Jean Herman and Taylor Coble is currently on view at Sync Gallery, located at the heart of Denver’s creative district on Santa Fe Drive. The exhibition is titled Discoveries. While both artists use vastly different styles, it is hard not to see connections between the two in subject matter and spirit and their use of mixed media.

May 17

May 17 Story Line

Mary Grace Bernard

Susan Cooper’s installation Story Line, A Visual History from Poland to the USA, on view at the University of Denver’s Anderson Academic Commons, is a visual autobiography told through the depiction of buildings, ships, houses, and vehicles. It chronicles Cooper’s and her family’s journey from Poland to Los Angeles to Denver. Like Cooper’s storyline, the exhibition has travelled from Chmielnik, Poland to the University of California, Los Angeles and now is on display at the University of Denver.

i fly (petAow) / Hothouse

May 10

May 10 i fly (petAow) / Hothouse

J. Benjamin Burney

The concrete and steel of SPACE Gallery in Denver sparkles in the sun as I am greeted and directed towards the works of the artists Philip Tarlow and Noelle Phares. You first encounter Philip Tarlow’s exhibit titled: i fly (petAow). The series of abstract collage works are inspired by two events: the jubilance Tarlow felt watching the 2020 Olympics and also a surgery around the same time he underwent to save his eyesight. Noelle Phares’ exhibition titled Hothouse speaks to the Anthropocene and the greenhouse gasses caused by human pollution. Phares is able to bring our attention to a very concerning topic without making us want to run out the door.

Washi Transformed

May 2

May 2 Washi Transformed

Featuring the work of nine contemporary Japanese artists—Hina Aoyama, Eriko Horiki, Kyoko Ibe, Yoshio Ikezaki, Kakuko Ishii, Yuko Kimura, Yuko Nishimura, Takaaki Tanaka, and Ayomi Yoshida—the exhibition Washi Transformed at the Longmont Museum unifies the artists’ diverse practices through an exploration of their shared use of the ancient medium of washi (和紙), handmade Japanese paper. The result is a show both distinctly focused and wonderfully abundant in unique expressions created through the artists’ contemporary aesthetic interventions.

Architecture of Form

Apr 26

Apr 26 Architecture of Form

Jillian Blackwell

This spring, Core New Art Space in Lakewood presents the exhibition Architecture of Form for its third year running. It’s a love letter to geometry for geometry’s sake. A viewer may rest their eyes on balanced arrangements of squares and rectangles, angular compositions in pleasing palettes, and repeating patterns and shapes. The exhibit statement boldly declares, “Geometry intrinsically rejects contemporary transient socio-political and cultural involvement as well as the interpretive bias of the viewer.”