zingrecsDENVER

16th Street Mall is well-known locally and beyond as a vibrant area where street performers gather.

This past week, in separate conversations, I heard two nearly unrelated things, concerning how one could approach contemporary art. The first was from a good friend, who said something to the nature of, “I don’t like most contemporary art because it’s not art.” When I asked him to explain what he meant, he referenced several controversial public art pieces in Denver (which I’ll leave unnamed, as those debates have been well-trodden elsewhere).

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.

Every year, Naropa University in Boulder hosts the Summer Writing Program. Included on the roster is a series of readings featuring some of the most celebrated, strange, equally intellectual and down-to-earth writers of poetry and fiction.

Personally, I especially look forward to:

If the political is personal, then Jonson Y. Kuhn and Ariel Marks catch us with our pants down. “4 Days In Bed,” a play based on a true story and co-written by Kuhn and Marks documents the confusion, exaggeration, banality, joy, aggravation, error and quirky brilliance of Denver, a penniless, frustrated writer, and Tucson, his girlfriend, a recovering alcoholic visiting him from Arizona.

The Brad Kahlhamer exhibit recently opened at the MCA Denver, featuring two mixed media-pieces from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna and a totem-pole sculpture from the Logan Collection. Kahlhamer combines rock n’roll with landscape, spirituality with a raw sexuality, gritty realism with dreaming-life. Recurring motifs of provocatively clothed women (though never quite nude), death and American identity create a combined imagistic effect of vertigo. Form seems to occur two ways simultaneously for Kahlhamer: kaleidoscopically and vertically.

D. Biddle is getaway music, the kind you listen to when everything you cherish has burnt down, then before the dust even settles you pack-up whatever’s left and head for oblivion. The tension between oft-haunting melodies and lyrics that edge towards the poetically elegiac, quiver with urgency as well as immobility. D. Biddle traces the fallen structures of disaster, capturing in slow motion the gesture of catastrophe. Guileless emotional pitch tends to crescendo from an almost tender, though dark nostalgia into a series of aching blows and repetitions.

NEW IN VISUAL ART

Jack Balas exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver

New solo-exhibit and Artist-in-Residency at the MCA (with exhibitions coming up later this summer at Robischon Gallery). Balas specializes in painting and photography but is known for sculpture and writing as well. Interesting because of his diverse medley of interests which all seem to feed into each other and in a wider context of his work, have the unsettling (but familiar?) quality of a novelesque narrative. www.mcartdenver.org

NEW IN POETRY

Diesel Powered Poetry Readings

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.

Denver’s 3rd Annual Zine Fest took place today at 1st Unitarian Church.

Here’s a survey of some of the top locally published:

Drippy Bone Books
Focused on art and comic zines. Most recent publications are comics by Ed McDonald. General vibe speaks to the political position of artists, writers and whoever else haunts the underground. www.myspace.com/drippybonebooks

il.lit.er.ate Magazine