Jivan Lee, Cheryl Ann Thomas, James Cook
Jivan Lee: Monument; Cheryl Ann Thomas; James Cook
William Havu Gallery
1040 Cherokee Street, Denver, CO, 80204
November 15, 2019-January 11, 2020
Admission: Free
Review by Kathryn Lichlyter
The William Havu Gallery is located in the Golden Triangle Arts District, a few blocks away from the Denver Art Museum. Currently the gallery is showing artwork by three artists who build surfaces and vessels that reference the natural world.
Installation view of oil paintings by Jivan Lee and a ceramic sculpture by Cheryl Ann Thomas at William Havu Gallery. Image by DARIA.
Jivan Lee is a Taos, New Mexico-based artist whose work fills the lower level of the gallery. His exhibition, titled Monument, features a series of plein air oil paintings that depict the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument and the Rio Grande Gorge in New Mexico. Lee sculpts the landscape onto the canvas, using strong, impasto brushstrokes that seem like a passionate response to the scenes he paints. His use of color transforms the real life vistas into something fantastical, even mythic.
Jivan Lee, Monument #8 – Sundown Storm, not dated, oil on panel, 30 x 104 inch triptych. Image by DARIA.
Lee’s oil on panel triptych entitled Monument #8 - Sundown Storm, for example, spans the viewer’s entire line of focus and periphery, swathing you in the color-soaked landscape. His controlled use of warm tones slowly gradating into the cool of the oncoming night evokes the change in weather and time but also an otherworldly sense of drama.
Cheryl Ann Thomas, Compress, not dated, hand-coiled porcelain, 21 x 32 x 20 inches. Image by DARIA.
Muted ceramic sculptures by Cheryl Ann Thomas are scattered among Lee’s paintings, providing a contrast to the intense colors within Lee’s work. Thomas’s sculptures are made of fluid, contorting porcelain coils, all dyed using natural oxides and minerals. While the coiling technique for ceramics traditionally involves a final step of smoothing to create an even surface, Thomas keeps her small coils intact. She refers to some of these works as relics and artifacts, stating that they are the “remains of human intervention,” with her hand prints and interactions with the material left permanently on the pieces.[1]
Her sculpture titled Compress is made out of multiple coiled forms stacked and resting upon one another, forming a collective mass. Resembling a pile of textured fabrics or collapsed paper wasps’ nests, it demonstrates what Thomas calls “the physics of failure” that occurs during the production process—her works go into the kiln completely symmetrical and uniform, but undergo warping during firing.
James Cook, Adam’s Creek Cascade, not dated, oil on canvas, 70 x 42 inches. Image by DARIA.
On the upper mezzanine floor of the gallery James Cook’s large oil paintings feature similar impasto painting techniques to those found in Lee’s works. This collection of classic American landscape paintings transports the viewer to various scenes of the American West. His Adam’s Creek Cascade, which is nearly six feet tall and three and a half feet wide, features a massive water cascade speckled with small glints of red and yellow activating the blue water and a lively composition bouncing from one side of the canvas to the other. The work in fact borders on abstraction.
With their impasto and rippled surfaces, all three of these artists evoke the natural world both materially and through the direct representation of nature.
Kathryn Lichlyter is a graphic design student at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. Although she plans to pursue a career in User Experience design, she also has an affinity for the fine arts.
[1] Quoted on the William Havu Gallery website: http://www.williamhavugallery.com/category/cheryl-ann-thomas/.
