Artbeat

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

A A A Comments By Michael Paglia Thursday, Apr 1 2004

The Sandy Carson Gallery (760 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-8585) is the flagship art venue of the Santa Fe arts district, which makes it one of the top spots in town. High-quality exhibitions are the reason why -- and the current offering, 3 Search and Converge in the Creative, is just the latest example.

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The impressive and wide-ranging exhibit fills the spacious gallery, even pushing its way into the conference room. As indicated by the title, the show includes the work of three artists. But their pieces haven't been mixed together; instead, each has been given a discrete display area.

In the series of rooms up front are recent sculptures by Nancy Lovendahl, a prominent artist who lives in Snowmass and has long been part of the art scene. Lovendahl works in ceramics, wood and cast paper, and she typically refers to nature, at least obliquely, in her otherwise abstract pieces.

Many of the sculptures in this show are from Lovendahl's "Egg" series, in which bowl-shaped forms are suspended on cord or wire, or pierced by twigs. The various mounting methods are evocative, especially combined with the implications of the "Egg" title. Several of the pieces incorporate rubber sheeting, including "Of the Flesh" (above), a wonderful bas-relief mounted on the wall. The sensuous and supple rubber -- not to mention the work's suggestive title -- provides another evocative element.

The work of Boulder's Lorelei Schott is displayed in a side gallery just beyond the information desk. Schott works with photo-based digital technology to create her montages, the majority of which concern nature. The most compelling of the Schotts are from the "Mothblur" series -- color photo enlargements of a dirty window that may or may not have had a moth alighting on it when the picture was taken.

The show concludes with a tightly focused series of abstract paintings by one of Denver's most noteworthy emerging artists, Jim White. Surprisingly, the essentially abstract-expressionist paintings of scribbled gray lines on an off-white field are based on the landscape. And though they were done during White's residency at the Bemis Art Center in Omaha, the landscape isn't in Nebraska, but nearby Iowa. While White is only a few years out of college, his work looks fully mature, as demonstrated by these very accomplished abstracts.

3 Search and Converge in the Creative, at Sandy Carson Gallery through May 1, should not be missed.