Art Beat

Michael Paglia's brief sketches of what's happening in the Denver art scene.

Comments (0) By Michael Paglia Thursday, Aug 3 2000

Ties That Bind, at the Singer Gallery of the Mizel Arts Center, though nominally a group show, is actually three solos, as each artist has been given a separate section.

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The first featured artist is Amy Lee Solomon, who rarely exhibits locally. Her Structures of Atmospheric Turbulence: series, which is made up of nine large paintings, is neo-pop in style, with montages of images -- some realistic, some cartoon-like -- set against each other. Solomon also incorporates hand-painted printing and sketches of math problems in many of her pieces, which are remarkable for their strong colors. In Near Neutral,: for instance, it’s a fiery orange, a flaming red and an acid green.

Opposite the Solomons is the Life Layers: series of collages by Susan Goldstein, which include Eye on Fashion: (above). This series was shown last year at Edge. Goldstein combines found objects such as book pages, stamps and labels with found images that have been transferred onto transparent or translucent sheets. The see-through elements allow images to float over one another. The results are elegant and, at times, grotesque.

The third artist represented here is Janet Kabili, who photographs Jewish domestic ceremonial artifacts that she finds in the china cabinets of her friends. Kabili then takes the photos and converts them into inkjet prints or dye-sublimation fabric transfer prints. In the exhibit, the inkjet prints are hung on the wall, and the fabric transfers hang from the ceiling. The bowls and candlesticks photographed by Kabili are the things her friends use on holidays. They are lovely, if mundane. For this project, she chose only Jews living in Boulder and Denver; interestingly, many of the artifacts speak to the Holocaust and were brought here by emigrés who escaped from Europe just half a century ago.

As usual, Singer director Simon Zalkind has put together an interesting and stimulating show. But the only tie that binds these three artists is the show itself.