This middle room at Aperture also features a group of digital prints from the last five years. More than anything else, these are the kind of works we associate with Bonath.
Some may be surprised, as I was, that Bonath doesn't use a digital camera. "The technology just isn't there, but they have been improving a lot lately," he explains. Until they are perfected according to his exacting standards, he prefers to use an old-fashioned three-by-five camera. He prints the photos traditionally and then scans them into a computer. Because he likes to make work that is content-rich, these digital prints are crammed with images. Many of the symbols he uses, like hands or newborn babies, are redolent of multiple messages; others, like butterflies or flowers, have more obscure meanings.
"View From the Right Palm, Zen Koan #751 (self-portrait)," silver print.
"Passage," silver print.
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Through May 28
303-561-0635
Aperture Gallery, 3208 Tejon Street
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For obvious reasons, exhibition designer Curfman has installed the most disturbing and shocking of Bonath's images in the small back gallery. "Anna #2" is a silver print done this year from the series "Mastectomy, Lyrical Studies of Two Women," in which a woman looks directly at the viewer while revealing her mastectomy scar. More lighthearted, but also jarring, is "Sid With Dildoes," a silver print from 1992 that shows a young man cradling a clutch of enormous dildoes. Then there's the queasiness brought on by the 1983 portrait of a shameless neo-Nazi -- a former student of Bonath's -- complete with swastika flag, a piece innocently titled "Eric #13."
John Bonath, though not a genuine career survey or retrospective, does come close, and it gives everyone a chance to see a large body of good work. It shows off Bonath's ability to combine a pair of presumed opposites -- his relentlessly varied yet somehow thoroughly consistent art.
On a completely different note, with all the talk about nepotism in city hiring -- which has been illuminated by the Paul Torres scandal at the Civil Service Commission -- many have perhaps forgotten that Mayor Wellington Webb himself likes to help out his family. Although his wife, Wilma, doesn't receive a salary for her work on the Mayor's Commission on Art, Culture and Film, unlike Torres's teenage dependents, she has wielded a lot of power.
In the past, when she was the head of the commission, she made executive decisions in the field of publicly funded art. For example, she once enacted by fiat a moratorium on new public art.
Now, as part of the City Selection Committee, she will help pick the architect for the Denver Art Museum's new wing. But the First Lady lacks the credentials -- and the credibility -- to make these kinds of decisions, and it's only through her family ties that she finds herself holding these important positions.
