At RedLine, Darrell Anderson’s “Risk & Change”
Walking into this career retrospective of artist Darrell Anderson’s work at the RedLine Contemporary Art Center gives a visitor the feeling of going home. The artist has been a fixture in the local scene for decades, and his style is familiar to people who venture out into the streets to see his larger projects or into the many Denver homes and workplaces where his paintings are featured on the walls.
Anderson has contributed art objects big and small, private and public, and via numerous media. No doubt, his best-known work (and a personal favorite) is the tile mosaics installed on the floor of Denver International Airport’s A Concourse. The piece — titled “Patterns and Figures, Figures and Patterns” — consists of a series of 8-foot squares, and it is interactive. From the ground floor, the squares look like fully abstract and undecipherable artworks, but if you go to the terminal’s upstairs walkway and look down, portraits of travelers from different countries emerge in the scenes.
“Risk & Change,” curated by JC Futrell, puts that work front-and-center among a sprawling exhibition of Anderson’s lifetime of art-making, and breaks down Anderson’s process. There is a wall of colored-pencil drawings that Anderson used as the models for the piece, and there is an actual mock-up, on Redline’s floor, recreating one of the mosaics. The display explains how the work came together without sacrificing its mystery.
That’s just the start of this exhaustive show from a local veteran. (BTW, Anderson’s an actual veteran, pulling military duty during the Vietnam War.) There are scores of pastels, charcoals, pencils and three-dimensional pieces, often capturing dancers or musicians, or famous folks, from Charles Burrell to Nelson Mandela.
Anderson is well-known for his community involvement — he is a winner of the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District Award for Civic Engagement — and this exhaustive tour, through the twists and turns of his professional life, feels like a late-career gift to his Denver fans.
Through Aug. 4, at 2350 Arapahoe St. Info: 720-769-2390 or redlineart.org.
At CPAC, the Annual Juried Members’ Show
This is the 61st Members’ Show sponsored by the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, but the first to take place in its current headquarters at 12th and Lincoln streets in Denver, where it moved late last year. The new place is larger than the cramped quarters the center previously occupied and that allows this show to have a grander, more leisurely air than in the past.
That expanded real estate serves the endeavor well. The work is spread out just enough to permit a good look at the contributions of the 34 artists showing their wares, 21 of them from Colorado.
Guest juror Brent Lewis made the selections from 1,092 images submitted for the exhibition. His tastes leaned very much toward portraiture — there are a lot of faces in the visual mix, rather than the usual landscape shots that tend to define photo displays in our scenic state.
That works and it doesn’t. Some viewers might prefer a more Colorado feel with familiar urban and wilderness settings; that, to me, is one good attribute of a regional art show. But, in return, the images on display are more personal, more human and possibly more compelling overall.
There is both attraction and perplexity in such pieces as John Bonath’s “Self Reflection,” a manipulated color photo that has a model staring intently at his own hand and foot, which have been separated from his body and placed on a pedestal. A similar surrealism pervades Wendy Wetmore’s monochromatic “Triadisches Huldigung,” which captures a dancer, in a hyper-modern costume, balancing on one toe. Both of these shots ask a viewer to stare for a long time
The lack of a specific sense of place also gives the show a global feel. That works best with a photo like Laurie Smith’s “Migrants Requesting Asylum at the Wall,” a photojournalistic, black-and-white print of a real-life moment capturing a long line of anguished humans at the famous, slotted metal border wall that divides Mexico from the United States.
It is a pleasure to watch this Members’ Show evolve year after year and to see it take different forms. The photographers’ names might be familiar but the vision they bring to the annual outing changes with considerable creativity over time.
Through Aug. 10, at 1200 Lincoln St. Free. Info: 303-837-1341.
At Leon Gallery, Julie Puma’s “Field Day”
Julie Puma has been a prominent figure in the regional art scene for some time now, both as a teacher and as a painter whose intimate portraits and domestic scenes, rendered in oil, transcend the personal and offer clues into how life, and memory, unfold for all of us.
Her paintings, currently on display at Leon Gallery, show Puma at a powerful point in her career. The large works capture ordinary people at work and at play, though Puma instills each of them with an atmosphere and intricacy that makes the moments they are experiencing feel special — both for them and for us as viewers.
The works are based on family photos and home movies, and it is clear Puma has an affinity for her subjects and fond memories of shared moments. But she has a keen way of distancing herself from these people, allowing her sharp portraits to fade into abstraction around the edges. The specifics of facial lines and background scenery blur freely.
The gallery materials refer to this as a “degradation of detail,” and in some ways it is just that. But it also seems to be a magnification of perception. She allows us to see the person, but also the aura they give off. There is a recognition that people are more than their physical appearance. It is that extra bit of energy we hold on to when seeing them in real time that gives way to the memories we have of their beings when they are away from our presence.
In that way, the paintings capture the nostalgia we hold for the folks we know without falling into sentimentality. Puma keeps common things a mystery and that keeps us looking.
Through Aug. 3, at 1112 E. 17th Ave. Free. Info: 303-832-1599 or leongallery.org.
Originally Published: July 8, 2024 at 6:00 a.m.
