Friday Night’s All Right (For Hopping)

The galleries are all on to First Fridays now, which is why they don’t necessarily always open shows to coincide with the monthly community event — two receptions are better than one, after all, and the more the merrier. This month’s First Friday offers a great opportunity to see some new shows and catch up with others you might have missed. Here are a few, both high- and lowbrow, worth looking in on.

At Edge Gallery, 3658 Navajo Street, artists Melissa Borman, Rian Kerrane and Anastasia Pelias shared their personal connections to the sea for the collaborative multimedia installation mara/thalassa/kai the SEA, which includes Kerrane’s nostalgic nod to a Galway childhood, where she walked from her grandparents’ house “to the shore, which was basically the end of the road”; Borman’s Hawaiian horizon of stacked photographs in metal frames; and Pelias’s video remembrance of Greece. Visit tonight from 7 to 10 p.m.; the show ends April 18. Call 303-477-7173.

Joining Craig Marshall Smith’s Paintings for Airports (www.westword.com/2010-03-25/calendar/painting-to-music) at CORE New Art Space, 900 Santa Fe Drive, are a couple of other shows, including Claudia Roulier’s The Tattered Circus, which blends drawing and collage with a carnival theme, and For: Fear, paintings by Donnie Dixon; see them from 6 to 9 p.m. or through April 11.

And on South Broadway, side-by-side galleries INDYINK and Illiterate, at 82 and 84 South Broadway, will celebrate First Friday with a couple of shows, both opening from 6 to 10 p.m., that were practically made for each other: Life's a Beach, featuring cartoony new works by pop-culture psychedelicist Ryan "Craptical" Riss, and The Dave DeVries Monster Engine, a show that INDYINK gallery director Chris Huth thinks could catch some national indie attention. Based on the original Monster Engine book and Internet phenomenon for which comic artist Dave DeVries collaborated on drawings with kids (see http://themonsterengine.com), the exhibit includes a collection of DeVries’s work paired with a local spinoff of works by Denver artists and the children in their lives. “Every year for last three years, I’ve had a father-son show, so this year, I wanted to open the idea up a little more,” Huth explains. “Since a lot of talented guys and girls I know in town are beginning to gestate children, I wrote down a short list of them to invite, and the response has been great.” Riss’s show hangs until April 25, and Monster Engine until May 6; visit www.illiteratemagazine.com and www.indyink.com.
Fri., April 2, 2010