The impressive Margaret Pettee Olsen: Relay, showcasing the Colorado artist’s large, all-over abstracts, is now on display at 808 Projects. The venue isn’t a traditional gallery, or even a co-op — even if it looks like one.
Originally a grocery store, the old building was derelict when Wayne Rogers rehabbed it earlier this year, dividing the structure into exhibition space up front and offices and studios in the back. The story of how this particular show came to be is poignant: Pettee Olsen was preparing for an upcoming solo at Goodwin Fine Art, but last month owner Tina Goodwin announced she’d be closing by the end of this year. “Tina came to my studio to break the news,” says Pettee Olsen. In a lucky happenstance, she was soon contacted by Jeff Lambson, director of the Emmanuel Gallery, who told her she was ideally positioned to fill an unexpected hole in the fall schedule at 808 Projects. Art historian and art writer Stephanie Grilli cherry-picked the collection meant for the ill-fated Goodwin display to curate the show at 808 Projects. (Pettee Olsen is represented in Goodwin’s send-off group show, Coalesce, on view there now.)

"Distraction with Orange Redaction" (left) and "Value Scale" (right) in Margaret Pettee Olsen: Relay at 808 Projects.
Courtesy of Wayne Rogers, 808 Projects
Getting unusual and unexpected results from pigments (and other materials) is also a hallmark of Same As It Ever Was: Nina Tichava, on the second floor at K Contemporary. Based in New Mexico, where she spent part of her childhood, Nina Tichava is interested in creating work as “unplanned as possible,” she’s written, though she does rely on a special process she developed for her mixed-media paintings typically done on top of linear collages. Following penciled grids on the collages, she lays in a pattern of dots that are brush-painted on. As the pigment dries, the individual dots take on the hydrostatic shape of water drops, which they resemble even though they are opaque rather than clear.
Same As It Ever Was includes examples from three Tichava series — “Lanterns,” “Botanicals” and “Weavings” — that all reflect the artist’s life experiences. In appearance, the three cross one another: “Lanterns” is dominated by circles, “Botanicals” is evocative of stands of trees but doesn’t depict them literally, and “Weavings” sports dense linear arrangements of narrow shapes. One distinctive Tichava signature is the array of marks she creates across an individual panel that is then paired with another, but instead of fitting the panels together in a specific way, the pieces are composed so that they can be rearranged with the shapes on the panels fitting together in multiple variations. This show also includes a large selection of miniature versions of the same idea and, as an adjunct, scenic postcards covered in dots of pigment like the large paintings.

Nina Tichava's Same As It Ever Was at K Contemporary.
Courtesy of K Contemporary, photo by Jordan Spencer
More quiet in their appeal, though also striking, are the elegant paintings of Cobbled Landscapes: Karen Roehl, snuggly installed in and by an exhibition space in the back. Roehl does two distinctive kinds of work, straddling contemporary and traditional genres with abstracts that broadly refer to nature but are essentially non-objective, and illusionistic impressions of horses that are semi-abstracted. The K show focuses on the abstracts, of course. Roehl has written that she is inspired by the abstract expressionists and creates her paintings “intuitively,” and several of these include passages of earth tones with scribbles that hint at plants and flowers.

Installation view at K Contemporary of Cobbled Landscapes: Karen Roehl.
Courtesy of K Contemporary, photo by Jordan Spencer
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the transformation of the collective taste of the art audience — and the artists. These three shows give me even more food for thought.
Margaret Pettee Olsen: Relay, through November 30, 808 Projects, 808 Santa Fe Drive, 720-440-3099, 808projects.com.
Nina Tichava and Karen Roehl, through November 24 and December 1, K Contemporary, 1412 Wazee Street, 303-590-9800, kcontemporaryart.com.