In Passing

Golemboski has apparently thought a lot about the relationship between mechanical magic tricks and mechanical reproduction, and her odd photo hybrids are the products of that musing. To achieve her desired results, she heavily retouches her negatives, drawing on them, scratching them and tinting them up with vegetable-based natural dyes. The results, done in gelatin silver prints, look like photos of paintings.

In addition to the magic-themed photos, Golemboski has a show within a show featuring a group of anthotypes that were done using photosensitive fruit juices. This is an archaic technique from the early nineteenth century but was little used even then. The images are dusty two-tones contrasting an ecru ground with the soft purples of the imagery.

Gallery director Biety paired Wonders & Marvels with Exposed, a large group show with eleven artists. His intention was to include as broad a range of expressions as possible, and he did, from Gwen Laine's surrealistic still life shots and Andrea Modica's famous takes on the natural environment to Peter de Lory's shots of lighted neon signs and Rusty Scruby's three-dimensional weavings made of photos.

Another Month of Photography show running on overtime is In the Woods, at the William Havu Gallery, featuring lyrical landscape photos by Gunnar Plake. (A fabulous abstract painting show, Desire in a Gypsy Cloak, is there as well. See Artbeat.)

With a three-decade-long career, Plake, who lives on the East Coast, first exhibited at Havu almost ten years ago when the gallery featured a dozen artists it represented who were also in the collection of the Denver Art Museum. A year earlier, Plake had been a fellow at the prestigious Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, thus establishing his presence in the West.

Made up of eight large-format C-prints mounted on aluminum panels, the exhibit is handsomely installed. In these photos, set in the West, Plake captures various sights from misty primordial woodlands, throwing them out of focus, which adds to the atmospheric quality he invokes. In the title piece, "In the Woods," Plake has taken a close-up of the base of a stand of trees. Though most of the photos in the show are vertically oriented, this one is in a horizontal format, typical of landscapes. The foreground is taken over by a small hill that's somewhat darker than the rest of the picture. In the mid-ground are two large tree trunks, cut off by the top of the picture below their leafy canopies. The background is bathed in light as the sun streams through, illuminating the sylvan glade.

I thought all the Plakes were great, and though he is clearly doing landscapes, many have abstract characteristics as a result of the blurry effect and the way they're cropped, which puts the attention on the trunks and not the tree itself. The strong and gorgeously rich colors Plake captures also adds to the sense of abstraction.

The Month of Photography was a big success for gallery-goers, but it has mostly come and gone. Many of the participating shows have closed, and others are about to. But the joy of seeing Jerry Gilmore gone from the Arvada Center is something that will go on forever.