Hip in Hicksville

The first show, just beyond the newly dedicated foyer, is the outrageous Lewis deSoto: Paranirvana (self-portrait), a solo focusing on a notable California artist. The exhibit is made up of a single enormous sculpture installed in the atrium, which, astoundingly, is more than enough to carry it off. The twenty-six-foot-long sculpture depicts a reclining Buddha that looks, at first sight, like a carved-stone monument dating from antiquity. But it isn't: It is inflated cloth, something like one of those balloons from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. There's another difference, too, between this piece and its ancient prototype: The artist superimposed his own face onto the Buddha. It's a marvelous sight gag, but deSoto did not mean it to be disrespectful. Rather, it expresses the spirit of Buddhism and the spirit of the individual in the world. The piece is incredible and, in spite of the lighter-than-air-material out of which it was made, it is extremely substantial looking and very monumental. You've really got to see it to believe it.

To the right of the foyer is another solo, Linda Foster Leonhard: Suspended Reality. Leonhard, a Fort Collins artist Gilmore came across while running FCMoCA, uses found materials, including doll parts, to create mixed-media sculptures and installations. Her constructions are somewhat creepy, including, for example, "Sullenly Stretched and Suspended She Waits," in which long industrial gloves and a doll's head are used to pull off a grungy "Winged Victory" -- with arms, no less. There's definitely a tip of the hat to the work of late surrealist Joseph Cornell in Leonhard's pieces, especially the morbid effects she gets from orchestrating everyday junk into coherent sculptures. I do wish, though, that she'd avoid the trite house shape she uses in a handful of pieces; it has really worn out its welcome.

Heading toward the back, viewers will need to pass through the empty gallery (which should, as far as I'm concerned, be fitted out with a show) in order to get to Dismas Rotta: Dizplayed, Dizcover, Dizclosure, the last of the three solos in the Lower Galleries. Rotta is a Boulder artist whom Gilmore met while running the CU Art Galleries. The Rotta show includes prints, mixed-media collages and an installation featuring a painting of a diabolical clown's head with found objects -- dominated by toy airplanes -- mounted on the wall next to it.

In the Upper Galleries, at the top of the grand staircase off the main entry lobby, is Facing Off: Alternative Portraits, a show put together by curatorial assistant Bolton -- though Gilmore confesses he did make a suggestion or two, such as the inclusion of Peru's Luis Castellanos Jara. As Gilmore says, this space is terrible for art shows, and smaller things, such as the wonderful photos by Andrea Modica from Manitou Springs and the equally diminutive cyanotypes by Annie Lopez of Phoenix, tend to get lost among the windows and hallways. Paintings can hold their own against the architectural features -- but just barely. The works of Denver's Sharon Brown manage to do just that; she used bold color and striking imagery in her "Damage Series" paintings, a grid of individual panels, most of which depict very tough-looking guys. (They look like they could do some damage, but I think Brown's title implies that they're the ones who are damaged). The small easel-sized canvases are done in a stilted commercial illustrator's style that seems very new pop.

Among the standouts in Facing Off are the three idiosyncratic surrealist portraits by Matt O'Neill, one of the region's best painters. Though he's in his forties, O'Neill has been able to keep up his enfant terrible reputation thanks to off-the-wall works like those on view in this show. "Terri," an oil on linen, is presumably meant to be a portrait of O'Neill's wife. In a Picassoid gesture, the head of the figure was turned into an abstract shape, and the eyes are placed one above another. On top of the portrait, O'Neill painted 1940s-style comics. O'Neill originally did "Terri" and two others of the same type back in 1999, but he partly repainted them earlier this year.

The Arvada Center has always been one of the places to see contemporary art in Colorado, and, with Gilmore now at the helm, that looks like something that's not likely to change anytime soon.