Far and Wide

Lucier's soundtrack is particularly well-chosen. It involves a twangy minimalist prelude by Lucier and her longtime collaborator, composer Earl Howard. The prelude leads up to the arc of the piece, a hypnotic rodeo sequence set to George Strait's plaintive and haunting ballad "I Can Still Make Cheyenne." Most of the time, the piece has a documentary character, aside from the absence of a voiceover, with shot after shot of empty highways and abandoned buildings driving home the point that life on the plains is dying. But the rodeo sequence is transcendent. Lucier splits the screen so that each side is a mirror image of the other, making the images on the walls symmetrical and very abstract — or, more properly, surrealist. It's very sad and very beautiful.

In an interesting move, Lab director Adam Lerner decided to pair the Lucier installation with Last Place, a series of conceptual works by local legend Phil Bender. It's an immediate emotional shift in gears. The Lucier induces sadness, whereas the Benders are more likely to inspire nostalgia.

Bender is Colorado's chief proponent of the almost-century-old idea of Marcel Duchamp that if an artist says something is art, it is. For decades, Bender has picked up discarded objects and assembled them in their original states to create installations or sculptural cycles. The initial Benders, which have no titles but can be described by what they're made of, have a vaguely rural feeling to them, thematically linking his work to Lucier's. The first things visitors see are grids of circular crocheted doilies mounted on black boards. At first glance, they look like quilts. Over a long period of time, Bender has found them in thrift shops and has brought together the ones that are roughly the same shape and size but have different details in terms of both the stitching and colors to pull off this monumental piece.

Adjacent to the doily panels is a row of old wooden ladders, each different from the other. Other works are made of kitchen utensils, or Chinese checkerboards — even reproductions of the same cheesy painting — and all of them are similar with differing details.

It's amazing how much visual mileage Bender has been able to get out of his single revelation that art is about perception. And as thoroughly different as his method and means are from Lucier's, the two shows somehow work well together.

When the Lab opened in 2006 at precisely the same moment as the Hamilton Building of the Denver Art Museum, Lerner led me to believe that he had little interest in showcasing regional art, and instead wanted an international cast at the Lab. Apparently it didn't matter where an artist came from, as long as it wasn't from here. With the inclusion of Bender in the current exhibit, it looks like Lerner has happily reconsidered.