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Best Reunion Show

Vault: MSU Denver Alumni Exhibition

The largest art department in Colorado is at Metropolitan State University of Denver, and because of its focus, Metro — founded in 1965 as a state college — has played an inordinately large role in the city's art world. In fact, so many artists have graduated from the institution that a jury was required to cut down the number of those who qualified to fit into the (admittedly very large) Center for Visual Art, where the resulting Vault: MSU Denver Alumni Exhibition was presented. Leila Armstrong, an MSU graduate who teaches art history at Metro, and Matt Chasansky, another alum who works in art administration, served as the jurors. CVA curator Cecily Cullen took charge of the exhibition design, and in doing so, somehow managed to make sense out of the rather disparate lot. Many Metro grads have become well-known Denver artists — among them Phil Bender, Virginia Folkestad, Mark Friday, Jennifer Ghormley, Jason Lee Gimbel, Dania Pettus, Dave Seiler and Mario Zoots — and the show perfectly reflected what a significant contribution the school's former students continue to make to the Denver scene.

Best Salute to a National Park

Trine Bumiller: 100 Paintings for 100 Years

The McNichols Building in Civic Center is undergoing renovation and won't open again until this fall, but one of the last shows there before it closed was decidedly one of the best efforts of the year. Titled Trine Bumiller: 100 Paintings for 100 Years, the show celebrated the centennial of nearby Rocky Mountain National Park. Bumiller was an artist-in-residence there, and the idea came to her of doing 100 paintings to mark each of the park's 100 years. While living in a cabin during the residency, she created sketches of the scenery she encountered; back in her studio, those sketches led to preliminary watercolor studies for the final abstracted takes on nature. All of the paintings were 24 inches tall, but they had nine different widths, ranging from 6 to 48 inches. Each panel was numbered, with their order in the exhibit determined by a random-number generator. Bumiller installed them at the same height around the entire space so that they functioned as an eye-popping painted band wrapped all the way around the top floor of the McNichols. Like the park itself, the result was simply sublime.

Best Memorial Show

The Seen and Unseen: Roland Bernier

Roland Bernier, who worked in abstraction and text-based conceptualism and had been showing his work at many of Denver's top commercial galleries and museums since the 1980s, died last summer. But it was his involvement in the alternative art world as a longtime member of the Spark Gallery co-operative that explains why members there overwhelmingly voted to mount a show to honor his memory. The group gave over all three spaces to The Seen and Unseen: Roland Bernier, an economical survey of his incredible output that was curated by members Sue Simon, Elaine Ricklin and Madeleine Dodge. Among the earlier works were an elegant '80s abstract and a sophisticated pattern painting based on graffiti from the '90s. The show was dominated, however, by his 21st-century pieces, wherein Bernier used words as his principal compositional device. In some, words were spelled out in 3-D letters, while others employed words appropriated from photocopied newsprint. This memorial exhibit only hinted at Bernier's tremendous range, because Spark isn't big enough to accommodate even a single sample of every kind of thing that he did.

Best Homage to a Denver Legend

Starring Linda

John DeAndrea, who grew up on the west side when it was still "Little Italy," became a world-famous artist in the 1970s — fairly unusual for someone in Colorado. DeAndrea's signature style is hyperrealist figural sculpture, and his most famous work — and one of the Denver Art Museum's most popular pieces — is "Linda," an incredibly lifelike reclining nude woman in oil on polyvinyl with human hair. As important as it is, and in spite of the frequent requests that it be out on exhibit, it spends most of its time in a darkened, air-conditioned room because light and heat are slowly destroying it. Every so often, it's taken out of wraps and brought into a dimly lit gallery, as it was for the magical Starring Linda last summer at the DAM. For this show, Modern and Contemporary curator Gwen Chanzit put Linda together with two other DeAndrea sculptures — an older sculptural group and a recent female nude, both of which were perfectly complementary and provided just the right weight for this delightful show.

Best Abstract Show — Group

Beyond the Plane

Michael Burnett, owner of Space Gallery, has a particular interest in contemporary abstraction — and as proof, he's made it the standard fare of the place. Last summer's Beyond the Plane was the third Space exhibit in a row that showed off separate groups of artists from the gallery's deep bench of abstractionists. The venue is so large that those participating were represented by entire bodies of work. There was even a solo that was both a part of and separate from Beyond the Plane, with its own subtitle, Fresh; it featured smudgy paintings by Patricia Aaron that she had done during a residency in Hawaii. Lewis McInnis was another star of this show, his elegant paintings perfectly juxtaposing hard edges with soft margins. The McInnis paintings worked beautifully with super-sophisticated Howard Hersh compositions that incorporated geometric forms. The show was rounded out with constructivist sculptures by Stephen Shachtman, architectonic assemblages by Duane Noblett and expressive paintings by Judy Campbell.

Best Abstract Show — Solo

Mark Brasuell: I am not the same person that I was once before

Denver abstract painter Mark Brasuell was the subject of a career survey last winter that included many of his wildly colored paintings as well as a bunch of his large drawings. So many Brasuell creations were crammed into Regis's O'Sullivan Gallery that it was an embarrassment of riches, but crowding was the show's only true shortcoming. Brasuell has been exhibiting his work in Denver since 1988, and since then he's been a major player in the city's alternative scene; he co-founded Edge Gallery with Ken Peterson and was the co-op's president for many years, and he's currently a member of Spark Gallery. For Brasuell, each painting or drawing series is infused with secret narrative content that he essentially paints over. One series might address a death in his family, another the struggle for LGBT rights, but regardless of the topic, there's an overall consistency to just about everything he's done over the past couple of decades.

Best Contemporary-Realist Show — Solo

Michael J. Dowling: Forgotten Scoundrels

The guys who run Point Gallery, Frank Martinez and Michael Vacchiano, have primarily focused on artists who work in one or another contemporary variant of good old-fashioned realism. That was the case with the drawings and paintings in Michael J. Dowling: Forgotten Scoundrels. Dowling's enigmatic portraits were inspired, at least in broad terms, by Italian old master Caravaggio, an artistic genius and a known rogue. This source of inspiration, both aesthetically solid and ethically disreputable, explains why Dowling's figures were expertly done but had a dark and edgy quality to them, especially in the handling of faces and garments. Dowling grew up in Colorado and studied with John Hull years ago, when Hull taught at the University of Colorado Denver, and the mentor's influence is easy to see in these works. Dowling also spent two years in Italy studying traditional painting techniques, and that is revealed in the work, too, partly explaining his creation of 21st-century works inspired by an artist from the sixteenth. It also neatly explains why he's such an expert at conveying the figure.

Best Contemporary-Realist Show — Group

Roadside Attractions

Bill Havu, owner of the eponymous William Havu Gallery, and Nick Ryan, the gallery's manager, organized the compelling Roadside Attractions, which included paintings by a quartet of contemporary realists. Well-known Denver artist Rick Dula was given the starring role in the festivities, as well as the lion's share of Havu's expansive spaces. Dula is a photo-realist who's made a career of depicting the built environment, either old industrial buildings in otherwise bucolic settings or urban buildings that are so new, they're not finished yet. The Dulas were supplemented by stylistically similar views of small towns by Lloyd Brown, while the exceptionally traditional-looking vistas in the unadulterated Western landscapes of Jeff Aeling's atmospheric paintings represented a shift in gears from both groups of photo-like works. The show finished upstairs, where expressive and simplified glimpses of contemporary rural life by Lori Buntin were on display, their abstract simplicity distinguishing them from the super-realistic depictions downstairs.

Best Show Done With Erasers

Mind Over Matter: Teresa Booth Brown

Boulder-area artist Teresa Booth Brown is best known for her non-objective paintings, but for this impressive solo at Ironton, she decided to do something different by presenting her distinct, if conceptually related, drawings. For most of them, she embraced an unusual process unlike ordinary drafting: Instead of making her marks with pencils, she did it with erasers. Brown began with found book pages that she chose based on their appeal to her; she then evenly covered the chosen pages with graphite powder, selectively erasing the graphite to introduce compositional elements. Put all together, the small works made a big impact. Sadly, though, this was one of the last shows at Ironton Gallery, which closed in January, though Ironton's studios remain up and running. Since 2004, artist Jill Hadley Hooper had run Ironton Gallery — with help from her partner, Hugh Graham — and invited some of the area's most interesting artists, such as Brown, to exhibit.

Best Installation Solo — Soft Materials

Gentle Infestation

Nicole Banowetz does something kind of odd: She makes installations using inflated forms that have given her an easily recognizable signature. It's not like the medium is completely unknown, but it's safe to say that few artists anywhere work in this way, and in Denver, she's cornered the market. Her unusual approach was most recently displayed in Gentle Infestation at Pirate: Contemporary Art, with a unified installation of gigantic shapes that seemed to be abstract but were in fact representational, based on single-celled sea creatures called Radiolaria. Their complex forms were done in white-colored, plastic-coated fabric, with some elements suspended from the ceiling. In places, tiny white porcelain sculptures were visible through transparent acrylic portholes. These little shapes inspired the show's title, but the whole thing felt like an infestation. Big inflated forms are more likely to be used for holiday decorations than for any kind of art, but it turns out that Banowetz was inspired by such things when she learned to make them for the Museum of Outdoor Arts.

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