gallery openings

Vis-A-Visage, a group exhibit now on-view at Object+Thought, focuses on the question of the feminine, specifically the female face as it relates to beauty, pop-culture and history, but successfully avoids all the bad metaphors that can disempower the subject. Formal comparison of woman-to-flower, singular emphasis on fertility, and the idealization of female sexuality are not to be found here. The images though striking (and in a few cases, rather disturbing) also avoid hyperbolic gestures of female identity that push and thus expose the cultural/masculine gaze to the nth degree.

This Friday June 6th, Jay Paul Apodaca will open a gallery that is, well, situated completely off the gallery scene. Located on Sheridan Blvd, Apodaca’s space will showcase several rooms of his work, mostly paintings. The artist was born and educated in Denver, and was a student of local talents like Dale Chisman. He is known for live-painting performances in the LoDo club scene and has been commissioned to do permanent work for several.

More than once have I heard in the last few months that RiNo (River North Art District, located in the warehouse neighborhoods, an expansive square between Park Ave W and 30th St, and extending from Welton to Wingsby Ct) is the new "it" scene in Denver. The entire district, founded by local artists Tracy Weil and Jill Hadley Hooper, includes almost 50 galleries, workshops, and studios, as well as the widest collective of Denver's most energetic figures, ranging from savvy Plus Gallery owner, Ivar Zeile, to hip and innovative Travis Egedy at Rhinoceropolis.

Flourish, a group exhibit, opened today at Robischon Gallery, featuring ten abstract artists. Primarily paintings as well as sculpture by Brad Miller, and installation by Katy Stone, the work is sensual, composed of rich candy colors, sparkling synthetic material (in the case of Stone), and delicate though daring formal composition. The title of the exhibit which connotes perhaps a sense of the lush and brilliant not only presents work that lives up to the suggestion, but artist’s whose technique demonstrates that sparseness can be just as ornamental as intricacy.

Florence Knoll, Defining Modern, a traveling exhibit that has already appeared in New York and Boston, among other places, opened yesterday at the Vance Kirkland Museum.

You might have seen, on more than one occasion, an orange Greyhound with the words “Worland Warriors,” on the side, and perhaps you’ve even been so lucky as to observe the group of 20-somethings in band T-shirts and arty/ragamuffin garb step off, talking about how one really ought not to purchase The Communist Manifesto with a credit card, and then maybe you’ve wondered to yourself what-on-Ginsberg’s-angelheaded-hipster-grave (may he rest in peace) this whole thirty-nine-foot-long oddity is about.

The Spring 2008 Show opened at Vertigo last night, featuring photographs by Richard Peterson and Bob Coller Jewett and stone sculptures by Scott Davis. Peterson exhibited a series of double-print photographs, half of which were fully developed and the other half consisting of the same images developed by solarization (a technique invented by ManRay that creates a reversal effect of positive and negative space in black and white film).

Xi Zhang, Recent Paintings exhibit, opened at Rule Gallery last night, displaying an acrylic on canvas series. Originally from China, the now Denver-based artist balances the traditions of Taoist religion with the conditions of contemporary Western experience. The paintings depict masked faces, which give little clue to gender, social rank, or other cultural signifiers and are instead evocative in emotional articulation, primarily via the eyes. Zhang explores the paradoxes of universality versus individual solitude, spirituality versus material existence.

Draw Rings 2, an exhibit of twenty-two, hot-blooded Colorado artists, opened at Rhinoceropolis, a gallery and music venue where, “dudes, a lady, two cats, and one dog” also live.