Foothills Art Center explores its past in XL: Forty Years on the Frontier of Art and Foothills.

Comments (0) By Michael Paglia Thursday, Aug 7 2008

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The first of the four is Denver painter Lui Ferreyra, who grew up in Golden and studied with Gene Youngmann and Joe McGinnis at Golden High School. Ferreyra, who shows at Carson/van Straaten Gallery (formerly Sandy Carson Gallery), does representational images that are fractured into hard-edged shapes in an updated cubist-goes-digital style. For this show, he did a painting of the church that houses the institution, called "Foothills Art Center," and another of Table Mountain, Golden's predominant topographical feature. Both are great, and both are signature Ferreyra. Chavez hopes to acquire "Foothills Art Center" (it's hard to imagine a more appropriate home for it), but needs to raise more money to do so.

Next is an impressive, intelligent installation, "Silent Origin II," by Denver multimedia artist Gwen Laine, who also shows at Carson/van Straaten. Laine has taken photos of the forearms and hands of 127 people with some association to Foothills or Golden and printed them on transparent sheets of polyester before framing them in balsa wood lathes. They are suspended from the ceiling, and viewers can go in amongst them and see them from either side. The work is closely related to a Laine installation at Carson/van Straaten that also uses suspended images printed on transparent sheets (see Artbeat, page 47).

"Ceci n'est pas une église," installation, by Marc Berghaus.

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Foothills Art Center

809 15th St.
Golden, CO 80401

Category: Galleries

Region: West Denver Suburbs

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Through August 31, at the Foothills Art Center, 809 15th Street, Golden, 303-279-3922, www.foothills-artcenter.org. For a slide show of this exhibit, go to slideshow.westword.com.

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Denver's Dave Seiler, who works as an art installer at Foothills, is the only member of the group not connected to Carson/van Straaten. Seiler has created "XL Mini," in slip-cast ceramic, based on a mold of a conventionalized depiction of the old church; he also made a hundred little knick-knack-like versions that have been finished in a brick red and are available at $20 each. Seiler is a conceptual artist, and he gave untreated casts of the church mold to other artists, who incorporated it into their own works in any way they saw fit.

The last of the group is Marc Berghaus of Kansas, who has created "Ceci n'est pas une église," a scale model of the church using full color photo transfers to convey the building's details both inside and out. The title is French for "This is not a church," which references surrealist René Magritte. Viewers can venture inside the installation, but those over the age of eight might be a little big for it without taking a yoga class in preparation.

The four artists make an odd grouping, and Chavez's original idea was pretty odd, too. But the show is still interesting, especially the Laine and Berghaus installations.