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.
All in Artist Profile
The word that seems most apt to describe Deborah Jang’s sculptural works is “lyrical”—each piece is built from a motley assortment of disparate objects which, once together, find balance and rhythm. According to Jang, her constructions are a study in radical inclusion.
Albert Chong is perhaps the most acclaimed photography, installation, and sculpture artist in Colorado who you’ve never heard of. His long and illustrious career includes pieces that he hopes, as his artist statement proclaims, “[give] expression to [his] human visual intuition, [operating] at levels inhospitable to verbal or literary expression.”
Raymundo Muñoz profiles Denver artist Yazz Atmore—a.k.a. “Chatty Ancestors”—who creates collage-based works, murals, and installations inspired by her personal connection to the spirit world, ancestral wisdom, and the young people and community she engages with. Atmore’s vivid mixed-media collages combine analog and digital elements, based on portraits she cuts up, filling and surrounding them with natural forms such as plants and animals. These dynamic compositions suggest an otherworldly and often ebullient cast of human characters, each with their own story to tell.
The meandering lines and poetic washes of color in Marina Eckler’s work offer an entrance into her arena of paradoxical structures. Feelings of tender uncertainty coexist with confidently defined forms. Working across various media–including drawing, painting, interactive objects, and performance–she constructs a visual language that unearths all the humor and heartbreak in the gentle slope of a mark.
Thomas Yi grew up around food in Littleton, just south of Denver. His parents—both Korean immigrants—owned an American-style diner where Yi spent his afternoons as a teen. Eventually he worked at that diner, before transferring his skills to various kitchen jobs in Denver. In 2016 he was admitted to CU Boulder to study film, but a BFA foundations class redirected him toward photography. His images reference both the food and the cinema that have influenced him, a wily mix of Wong Kar-wai and City Wok takeout.
With a seemingly endless supply of painter’s tape and vision in equal parts, Rob Hill has already made a big impression on the art scene in his new home in Denver, Colorado. Born in Los Angeles in 1986, Hill made Denver his home in 2020. Dedicated to an ever-evolving vision for himself and his art, Hill continues to build on his use of abstraction through various mediums, from painted canvas to public art to fashion. Whether working with paint, wood, metal, or fabric, his signature style utilizes clean-line triangles that he organically and repetitively layers in bold color palettes.
What do keys, buttons, peanuts, rocks, and chewing gum have in common? You might find them on the roadside, and you might find them in the work of artist Paloma Jimenez. Jimenez is an artist who takes in the world, processes it, and reflects it back to us. She has been recreating bits of the world since she was a child growing up in Denver, “making small shoebox houses or miniature food out of polymer clay.”
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.
If art is alchemy, then Margaret Kasahara is an alchemist. Using common items like toothpicks, buttons, and her own hair, the multi-disciplinary artist elevates these objects through her art processes, transforming them from common to sacred. And she takes her wizardry a step further, sometimes seemingly stopping time through her transformations while also reminding viewers of time’s unstoppable passage.
Amy Young (b. 1995) is a master weaver of binaries. Originally from Shawnee, Oklahoma, Young is a recent MFA graduate from Colorado State University living and working in Fort Collins, Colorado. As a bisexual, mixed-race woman growing up in the American Great Plains, Young’s identity in relation to her surroundings is a key component of her art practice. In this practice, she explores the boundaries of weaving and the complexities of gendered spaces and individual development.
If an artist makes art and a pandemic keeps us all in our houses away from exhibition spaces, can the art still make an impact? Alejandra Abad has been answering that question in an innovative and resounding fashion. Since well before the pandemic, she has been making art for the people—art that explores and explodes the traditional boundaries of art world spaces. Her art derives meaning from its interaction with and amplification of the voices of underrepresented groups of people.
Abad is an MFA candidate in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder. Even at an early age, her interactions with others helped forge her identity as an artist.
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.
In her most recent body of work, which focuses on the delta of the Rio Grande and the border towns of Brownsville and Matamoros, Ayala questions the existing violent narratives associated with that area through a meandering approach that mirrors the ever-evolving path of the river.
