Review: Where You Begin at Pirate Is Full of Familiar Topics Leading to Strange Creations

Pirate member Christine Buchsbaum invited her friend and fellow artist, Michael Bhichitkul, to help her curate Where You Begin, a group show in which artists employ ordinary subjects in unusual or extraordinary ways. Both Buchsbaum and Bhichitkul included examples of their own works, and both are genuine standouts. Buchsbaum's is...

By Michael Paglia

September 25, 2014

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Pirate member Christine Buchsbaum invited her friend and fellow artist, Michael Bhichitkul, to help her curate Where You Begin, a group show in which artists employ ordinary subjects in unusual or extraordinary ways. Both Buchsbaum and Bhichitkul included examples of their own works, and both are genuine standouts.

Buchsbaum's is a photo of a pair of women's legs standing in an ice-filled bathtub being used to chill fish. Bhichitkul created an image of a chunk of wood, then used an ax to chop into it and, as a consequence, the wall behind it.

The show is filled in with work of the other invitees, who include two famous artists, Tony Oursler and William Lamson and a mix of others from Denver and across the country.

In the Associate Gallery in the back, Laura Phelps Rogers has mounted Strangely Decadent, a selection of vignettes with a whiff of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about them, owing to the inclusion of an old wall clock, a gaudy chandelier and a neon sign that reads "eat."

Through October 6 at Pirate Contemporary Art, 3655 Navajo Street, pirateartonline.org, 303-458-6058.

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Michael Paglia is an art historian and writer whose columns have appeared in Westword since 1995; his essays on the visual arts have also been published in national periodicals including Art News, Architecture, Art Ltd., Modernism, Art & Auction and Sculpture Magazine. He taught art history at the University of Colorado Denver.

Contact: Michael Paglia