“MADE IN COLORADO”
The sweeping exhibit shows how some things are changing — and how some will always stay the same
The exhibit, “Made in Colorado” starts off with a curious, and somewhat ominous, video by artist Tobias Fike.
“When I’m Gone” depicts a man, dressed in a hooded, white body suit, painting himself invisible. He dips his brush into a bucket and whatever body part he touches — legs, arms, head — disappears. Until the only thing left in the frame is his shadow in front of a rugged, mountainous terrain.
Fike, no doubt, is evoking the very thing driving America to insanity these days: the notion of the fading white man and the fear and panic over what will fill the landscape next.
But then calmly, and in colorful, comical and comforting ways, “Made in Colorado” spends the rest of its time answering the question, via objects produced by artists who make their home across the state.
To the left, visitors see Trinidad-born photographer Renluka Maharaj’s image of a person — a man or a woman, it’s hard to tell — covered in bright orange garb and surrounded by
layers and layers of pink, purple and yellow flowers. It’s a lush setup, meant to recreate the bright surroundings of the Eastern Indian-rooted home she grew up in.
To the right, they encounter Albert Chong’s “Christiane,” a dreamy, pinkish portrait of woman of unknown ethnicity that is part of a body of work the Chinese-jamaican-american photographer hopes will illustrate “the complex nature of the struggles of the displaced peoples of the Asian and African diaspora.”
And so it goes in “Made in Colorado,” a sweeping survey of contemporary work created by 40 artists and set up in the Emmanuel Gallery on the Auraria campus and Gallery 808 in the Santa Fe Arts District.
Multi-culturalism isn’t the theme of this exhaustive exhibit. Let’s be clear about that. But it is a byproduct and the thing that makes it interesting and, I suspect, will make it shocking to people who haven’t been paying close attention to the region’s evolving demographics. More than half of the artist are female, and almost half are in that category we conveniently generalize as non-white.
This insider view of Colorado art was assembled by two outsiders, visiting jurors Olga Viso and Cameron Gainer, both with considerable national reputations. It wasn’t just a drop-in effort: they researched the artists, made studio visits and helped develop some of the final pieces, as well as the way they were presented.
It was a highly competitive process. More than 1,000 creatives submitted work, and that included several of the state’s most-commercially successful artists, a handful of esteemed art-school professors and a slew of promising newcomers.
The end result includes artists from all those categories and, in that way, offers a complete pic- ture of where Colorado art is now and where it may be going.
There are familiar names on the checklist, like Ian Fisher, Denver’s respected “cloud painter,” who is represented by one of his gloomier creations, “Atmosphere No. 78,” which captures a crack of lightning breaking through a stormy, Colorado sky.
Front Range gallery regulars will recognize one of Mary Ehrin’s fluffy pillows, covered in purple faux-fur, titled “Pool II,” and one of Derrick Velasquez’ untitled explorations of form and material expressed in thousands of thin strips of vinyl placed so-precariously over a wooden dowel.
There are also numerous pieces by artists who are reshaping the local scene in the 2010s and who make frequent appearances museum shows here and beyond, artists like Amber Cobb, Christopher Coleman, Gretchen Schaefer, Laleh Mehran, Monique Crine, Melissa Furness and Trine Bumiller. These are all established names, super talents, and their appearance in “Made in Colorado” gives the show credibility.
Their presence also opens our eyes to the potential of newcomers, like John Defeo, who surprises the scene with handmade, latch hook “Swimmer Rugs,” depicting single male forms taking laps in downy pools of blue. Or Sammy Lee, who covers an actual a set of luggage in black acrylic paint and Korean mulberry paper for her piece, “Arrived,” presenting a darkened perspective of identity for those who live in a place they were not born.
“Made in Colorado” takes a wide view of what it means to live and work here as an artist. There’s definitely a global village feel to it, though it can’t escape its personal geography. It is grounded in Colorado.
Sometimes that fact comes with an edge of doom and gloom. Erika Osborne’s “Chasm of Bingham” is an oversized landscape that evokes the wilderness paintings of the great Western artists who worked here a century-plus ago. It’s dense, green and lovely — until you realize it depicts the Bingham Canyon Mine, the largest copper excavation site in the world and by all definitions, an unsightly gash on the planet.
But there’s also a sense of joy in the mix. Kendra Fleischman’s “Autumn Leaves” is a star of the show, a five-minute, eight-chanin nel video of kaleidoscoping patterns of oranges, yellows, greens and reds. The artist pulled all of the colors from actual leaves that fell from Colorado trees as the cool weather hit in 2017. It’s mesmerizing, and beautiful, too.
Fleischman’s piece, as current and high-tech as it is, gives the show important context because it is rooted in the consistency of nature. “Made in Colorado” makes it clear — the people here are changing, quickly, irreversibly. But all who inhabit this state, now, then and forever, share its natural beauty.
Some of us are born into it, some adopted by it, but we are all influenced by its overwhelming personality. Wherever you live, look toward the center of this state, that’s what we all have in common; the famous divide that unites us.