Nancy Lovendahl | Sara Ransford | Andrew Roberts-Gray
Nancy Lovendahl, Sara Ransford, and Andrew Roberts-Gray
Michael Warren Contemporary
760 Santa Fe Drive, Denver, CO 80204
August 31-September 18, 2021
Admission: Free
Review by Mary Voelz-Chandler
Remember 2020, and even early 2021? Those were tough times for artists, when exhibitions were put up but then came down, or closed. But Michael Warren Contemporary is making up for lost time for their gallery artists, featuring a series of short exhibitions where the artists can display their works for about three weeks.
This current exhibition, which includes sculpture, paintings, and ceramics, allows each of the three artists to balance each other. The works together—by Nancy Lovendahl, Andrew Roberts-Gray, and Sara Ransford—impart a vision that is clean and clear. And all three artists live in the Roaring Fork Valley to the west of Denver, surrounded by breathtaking landscapes and inspiration.
Nancy Lovendahl has been working in Old Snowmass for more than 30 years. Her perception is finely tuned. She has an understanding of the mountains around her, and particularly the stones, that enables her to bring out their unique beauty in her work.
A view of Nancy Lovendahl’s Cathedral, 2018-2019, cast acrylic resin and polyurethane on glass and metal stand, 72 x 94 x 14 inches in total, with each individual form 4.5 x 7.75 x 4 inches. Image courtesy of Michael Warren Contemporary.
Earlier this year, Lovendahl filled multiple galleries at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College with an exhibition titled Small Glimpses, Many Times. But, as things seemed to change with that state of the pandemic, it was difficult to know if you could go or not go. In the end, I spent time viewing a virtual tour of Lovendahl’s works, even though there was no way to get close to them.
Many years ago (like 1998), I wrote about a public art project where Lovendahl created a set of stone pillars in Cuernavaca Park in Denver (which before had been called Rockmont Park). The project was administered by Denver’s Percent for Art program. Lovendahl attended the University of Illinois, then moved to Colorado in 1974 to attend Colorado Mountain College, and finally she attended Loretto Heights College’s University Without Walls, graduating with a BA in 1982.
Though she began in ceramics, she has worked in various media to create her own version of a mountain. That “mountain” is Garrett’s Peak, which Lovendahl sees just about every day. As noted in the catalog from the Fine Arts Center show,
“The artist takes the mountain form as a metaphor to explore the difference between the object itself and her concept of it. With an understanding that all people experience the world through a lens of their own biased perception, the mountain comes to represent all assumptions that can obscure the truth of an experience or person. At first, the mountain presents a sense of myth and stability when viewed from affair; however, once one immerses themselves in the environment, the assumption shifts. It quickly becomes clear that the mountain is no more than a pile of rubble giving the appearance of solid form.” [1]
At Michael Warren Contemporary, Lovendahl’s works create a wide path in the middle of the gallery. A piece titled Cathedral displays numerous small “mountains” that are in various colors, from blazing blue to soft gray and a blazing yellow, all of them created in epoxy resin that is dazzling.
Nancy Lovendahl, Mountain 4.0.1-10, ceramic, epoxy resin, and polyurethane, 12 x 12 x 5 inches each. Image courtesy of Michael Warren Contemporary.
She inserts other “mountains” in her stone works in the exhibition, including Mountain 3.0.10 (Pink), in limestone, epoxy resin, and steel; Ice Mountain, in a pale bluish-green inserted in a piece of Yule marble with epoxy resin; and Jade Mountain, a deep green in limestone, epoxy resin, and steel. All these “mountains” sparkle when the sun hits them. And she still works in ceramics. Pieces entitled Mountain 4.0.1-10 hang on a wall, looking like a series of topographic maps, with homes, rivers, barns, and an eponymous mountain.
Her works are impressive, and viewing them together we begin to understand her concept of that one special mountain.
Turning to painting and mixed media, Andrew Roberts-Gray combines numerous references and types of information together in his layered artworks. Roberts-Gray has been working in the gallery (the gallerists term it an “open studio”) creating his latest works in the series Dystopia Utopia.
Andrew Roberts-Gray, Solaris (blue), mixed media on panel, 24 x 24 inches. Image courtesy of Michael Warren Contemporary.
Born in northern California, Roberts-Gray spent stretches of time in San Francisco and New York City (as a 1987-98 senior exhibition technician at the Guggenheim Museum), and received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. After all that traveling, Roberts-Gray now lives in Carbondale, Colorado, and has been invited to various residencies and awarded a number of fellowships.
In his works, he assembles together allusions to landscapes, Japanese and Chinese influences, computer information (his father was a computer scientist), and an exploration of sandblasting on Plexiglas that looks quite silky, with tiny mirror strips, and of course painting and mixed media in bold colors. He even includes references to Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron) who worked with what was called the “Thinking Machine” (i.e., the first computer).
As we were talking about this, it came to me that the best word to describe his pieces is “coalesce.”
Andrew Roberts-Gray, Re-Processor, mixed media on panel, 36 x 72 inches. Image courtesy of Michael Warren Contemporary.
Roberts-Gray’s knockout painting in mixed media is Re-Processor, inserting traditional Chinese-style large brush strokes with lists of bars, something like spitting out a line of code from a computer. But all of the paintings succeed in uniting disparate elements: Merlin, again adding large brush strokes, with angular elements in yellow and blue, and Solaris (blue), with a bold vertical rectangular in blue, but yellow rays bursting from the sun with rain coming down in blue, while balancing everything together. And finally, Yamato-e is a bit more integrated in neutral paint strokes that harken to lakes and rivers in a placid light gray.
His work is captivating because there is so much going on each painting. But Roberts-Gray has honed his ability to tell a story—even in code.
As for the ceramics, noted at the beginning of this review, Sara Ransford’s experimentation is different from regular clay. The delicate nature of porcelain paper clay translates into exquisite wall works that include rigorous geometry, but also cells that appear to be part of an aquatic animal. Looking at these pieces from Ransford, the “cells” seem so amazingly slim.
Sara Ransford, Crop Circle Study #4, porcelain paper clay, 15 x 18 x 3 inches. Image courtesy of Michael Warren Contemporary.
The way Ransford’s works turn the corner in the gallery makes it imperative to walk by them, with interesting colors (reds and blues) and neutral colors (including black) that are quite striking. Some works are elongated, some appear entrapped, and a crop circle study, titled Sojourn in Balance, that stretches into four areas looks almost lacey.
Ransford received her BFA from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she studied under Betty Woodman and Anne Currier. In 2001, she attended Alfred University. She has exhibited in numerous galleries since then, increasingly finding new ways to work with porcelain paper clay.
Sara Ransford, Sojourn in Balance Series 16, porcelain paper clay, 7 x 7 x 3 inches. Image courtesy of Michael Warren Contemporary.
And as she has noted:
“I explore the natural world in my sculptural forms. I am fascinated by the complexity in nature, and how that complexity reflects itself in our own world. The forces of erosion, the aspect of time, and things being created over eons, only to be changed in a single moment can create such vulnerability and duplicity in things we do not anticipate changing. These components culminate to represent the monumentality of even the most intimate, complex spaces.” [2]
The exhibit as a whole presents distinct ideas of landscape and the natural world by three strong artists who have mastered their craft.
Mary Voelz Chandler writes about visual arts, architecture, and preservation. She held the position of art and architecture writer for many years at the former Rocky Mountain News in Denver. She has completed two editions of the Guide to Denver Architecture and was a co-author of the 2009 book Colorado Abstract with Westword critic, author, and historian Michael Paglia. Along with numerous awards for her writing, Chandler was honored by the Denver Art Museum in 2012 with the Contemporary Alliance “Key” Award, and received the AIA Colorado 2005 award for Contribution to the Built Environment by a Non-Architect.
[1] From the introduction to the catalog for Small Glimpses, Many Times by Joy Armstrong, an independent curator and writer and the former curator of modern and contemporary art at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College.
[2] From Ransford’s bio on her website, www.pyrogirlaspen.com.
