Artbeat

Brief sketches of what's happening in the Denver art scene.

A A A Comments By Michael Paglia Thursday, Sep 18 2003

For its fall opener, the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (1513 Boulder Street, 303-455-8999) is presenting the theme show Recreated Realities. Though a wide variety of mediums are on display, from primitive pinhole to up-to-the-minute digital, all of the photos were created by assembling multiple images.

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The photographers included are an unlikely group, and their work is related conceptually rather than by any stylistic affinities. Thus, some of the photos are surrealistic, others are hyper-realistic, and several lie somewhere in between.

Of the seven photographers represented, only two -- Angie Buckley and John Davenport -- are from Colorado. Buckley's four pieces are photos of photos placed in the environment. The most intriguing one features a pair of portraits in which the faces are cut out and viewers can see the now-lost World Trade Center through the resulting hole. Davenport does enlargements that pair ordinary if unlikely objects, such as "Oak Leaves With Porcelain Doll Parts," shown above.

Two of the artists are from California: Nell Angelo, who is represented by a trio of disturbing female nudes (in two of them, one of the model's front teeth is missing), and Kathryn Dunlevie, who unifies disparate images of outdoor scenes by using passages of acrylic paint. Warren Padula, from New York, does monumental abstractions based on wrecked cars and geometric shapes. Seattle's Jan Cook is interested in feminism, and her group of prints depicts beefcake models holding home appliances, lampooning the common pin-ups of cheesecake models holding tools. Finally, Sian Bonnell, who's from England, captures detailed close-ups of domestic interiors.

Interestingly, several of these photographers do not actually make photographs, but rather create photo-based pieces that are so altered they essentially become paintings. Recreated Realities runs through October 18 at CPAC.