Colorado Abstracted
Colorado Abstracted: Five Artists Capture the Transcendental Experiences of Nature
Littleton Museum
6028 S. Gallup Street, Littleton, CO 80120
January 22-February 27, 2021
Admission: Free (Reservations Required)
Review by Emily Zeek
Through the end of the month, the Littleton Museum is highlighting five abstract artists who explore the unruly and stormy but transcendent power of nature. By referencing landscapes, skies, and natural forms through the lens of abstraction, these artists communicate states of mind and perception that go beyond the material world but are often inspired by nature. Surveying a range of processes and mediums such as acrylics, cold wax, printmaking, and resin, Patricia J. Finley, Annamarie Mead, Lydia Riegle, Janet Rundquist, and Cyncie Winter channel modernist influences as well, the likes of Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Georgia O’Keefe.
An installation view of the exhibition Colorado Abstracted on view at the Littleton Museum. Image by DARIA.
But their work also has a contemporary dynamic. As peers, the five artists operate a sort of support group that entails giving each other constructive feedback, hiking together, and sharing in the successes of their artistic accomplishments. One could call their interdependent collaboration a type of engaged social practice—a cooperative one that can be specifically hard to maintain, nurture, and cultivate between five peers in the competitive, often egocentric atmosphere surrounding art, not to mention American society.
In the artists’ talk on Friday, February 5th, which can be accessed on the Littleton Museum of Art’s Facebook page, the Curator of Collections at the Littleton Museum Jenny Hankinson reflects, “There’s a concept everything can be commodified and for a museum we’re here to keep things for historic and intrinsic and aesthetic value.” That is to say, visitors to a museum should leave an exhibition feeling as though they received value from simply experiencing the work even without having to purchase it. And in that respect, this show is wildly successful.
A view of the virtual version of the Colorado Abstracted exhibition available on the City of Littleton website.
The user experience in the exhibit, even online through the virtual gallery, transmits the artists’ social practice psychological element of solidarity, their breakthroughs, and the resultant calm, reverent feeling which is viscerally felt through viewing the work and listening to the artists’ talk. The exhibition becomes not only a reflection of nature but a performance of it.
Annamarie Mead, Hope Over the Mountains, 2020, oil and cold wax on cradled birch board, 40 x 48 inches. Image by DARIA.
Annamarie Mead, who is originally from Wyoming, and Janet Rundquist, originally from West Virginia, both work with a similar process using oil and cold wax. The cold wax medium creates a cloudy and atmospheric look in both of their bodies of works. Although similar in tone and composition, Mead’s works come across as more definite moments of lucidity and enlightenment. In Love Rising, an orange sunrise crawls over a deep red horizon. Hope over the Mountains, a four panel quadriptych, feels as if you just climbed either a physical or psychological mountain and have the clarity of accomplishment.
Janet Rundquist, Yet, Closer Than You Think, 2018, oil, cold wax medium, and wood ash on wood panel, 48 x 48 inches. Image by DARIA.
Janet Rundquist’s abstracted atmospheres feel foggier, as if the breakthrough is still on the horizon but the horizon is nowhere to be seen. Yet, Closer Than You Think almost comically calls this dynamic into focus by directly acknowledging and gently coaching the viewer. Possibilities I and II allude to the insights and the breakthrough moments that are, as the title suggests, possible but not here yet.
Cyncie Winter, Lacewing, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches. Image by DARIA.
If you are waiting for that breakthrough moment, perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Cyncie Winter—a trained psychotherapist—delivers. Chaotic and thunderous amber compositions, like Lacewing and Take the Road Up High, are majestic, magnificent, and regal. They are not shallow discoveries, but deep, insightful moments of self-critical reflection and humbling lucidity. They are atonement manifest in paint.
Patricia J. Finley, Pure Vida I, 2020, ink and resin on wood panel, 36 x 36 inches. Image by DARIA.
Not only does the artwork in the exhibition speak to the healing transcendental power of nature, but it literally becomes an environment in which these qualities are directly transmitted to the viewer. Patricia Finley, who works with resin and ink, experimented with a fluid new process for the pieces in this show, allowing for both malleability—by using acetone and ink—and rigidity—through her use of resin. Laying down the wood panel substrate, she poured the resin over the ink, creating dynamic pieces like Pura Vida I and II that evokes puddles or rain drops and Je ne sais quoi, which alludes to rivers and mountain streams.
Finally, Lydia Riegle serves as a bridge between all of these artists’ approaches. Her work is slightly tilted to the contemporary and, if anything, feels out of place among the otherwise cloudy and wet abstractions. Blue Sky, Big Sky and Gathering Stories depart from the show’s predominantly porous shapes by depicting more defined forms and rigid lines. Viewing these pieces within the context of the exhibit, it’s difficult to say whether the audience has transcended or relapsed back into a rigid form of thinking. Not that the work isn’t compelling in its own way, but it contradicts the aesthetic murkiness of the rest of the exhibition. Perhaps not surprising, Riegle produced these printmaking and collage works during the more tense conditions of the Covid pandemic.
Lydia Riegle, Gathering Stories, 2020, monotype and collage on archival paper, 33.5 x 33.5 inches. Image by DARIA.
But Riegle, whose work Gathering Stories graces the exhibit brochure, is persuasive in a subtle way. Her other works such as Exploration of Time and New Perspectives speak to the hazy forest that we’ve just emerged from and seem to provide the modernist, abstracted backstory in which the rigid pastiche environment of contemporary art arises. It’s hard not to see these artists working in concert, relaying one fulfilling psychological experience in five equally important segments and birthing a departure. As Riegle continues to explore printmaking, it will be interesting to see how it impacts and influences her peers’ work.
For these particular artists, the chaos of history and the discomfort of confrontation is left on the canvas/wood panel/archival paper. Their calm presences belies a reputation artists typically have as radical non-conformists. And the chaotic content of the artwork contrasts with the well-mannered, polite, and professional dispositions of the artists (as evidenced in their artists’ talk). The exhibit is taking place in a municipal government museum after all. Perhaps well-behaved women can make history?
Emily Zeek is a transmedia and social practice artist from Littleton, Colorado. She has a degree in Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines and will graduate with her BFA in Transmedia Sculpture from the University of Colorado Denver this spring.
