Audio By Carbonatix
You don’t have to wait until First Friday to see new art in Denver — there are plenty of shows up right now that include thought-provoking content that’s just plain beautiful. Here are a few exhibits opening tonight to get you started.
Joel Swanson: A.K.A.
David B. Smith Gallery
March 27 through April 25
Opening Reception: 7 to 9 p.m. Friday March 27
Joel Swanson’s new works riff on the ridiculous and tax the imagination: For the series Color Poems, he’s taken pages straight out of image-conscious design catalogues, leaving only the fancy descriptors — “Rookwood Sash Green” and “Fading Rose” — to make a statement. The theme also runs through new neon works, which are named after car fresheners, and minimal steel wall installations that anonymously mimic the flattened boxes of products while sporting Madison-Avenue names. Art for thought!
Confected: New Work by Jason DeMarte
Rule Gallery
March 27 through May 9
Opening reception: 6 to 9 p.m. Friday, March 27
In a similar vein, but on an opposite path, photographer Jason DeMarte plays with pictures from the natural world by dressing them up with consumer-ready imagery — flowers so lush that they seem fake and candy sprinkles — for Confected, a solo Month of Photography offering that upends our need to dress things up with a commercial sheen. Catch the work at tonight’s reception; tomorrow, DeMarte gives a 2 p.m. slide talk about the work, “An Artificial Relationship to Nature: Work by Jason DeMarte,” at RedLine (where some of his photographs also hang as part of MoP’s Playing With Beauty exhibition).
Figurative I
Gallery 1261
March 27 through April 24
Opening reception: 6 to 9 p.m. Friday March 27
Gallery 1261 greets spring with a group exhibit that’s a figurative-art lover’s paradise. The human face and form is studied by more than 25 masters of the genre — a mixture of gallery artists and special guests — in the show, which demonstrates the genre’s many-sided contemporary edge with large, showy canvases.
