Best Celebration of the Absurd
Jokes of Nature
Put together by co-curators Donald Fodness and Geoffrey Shamos, Jokes of Nature was a large group show meant to explicate RedLine’s theme last year, “Play It Forward.” The curators chose pieces in which the grotesque plays some kind of role, and they included things that they felt encompassed the diabolical, scatological, pornographic, dreamlike, carnivalesque, uncanny and caricatured. You get the picture: The exhibit was all but a freak show. But to the credit of the curators, they kept the teenage gross-out stuff to a minimum — though it must have been hard to resist that temptation, considering their themes. Although artists from around the world were represented, the show was also chock-full of the work of current or former Colorado artists, such as Stephen Martonis, Gretchen Marie Schaefer, Xi Zhang, Laura Shill, Martha Russo, Amber Cobb and Kristen Hatgi Sink, among many others. Fodness is an artist who works with a funk vocabulary, while Shamos is a recently minted art historian; they made a great pair of opposites, and we’re hopeful they’ll team up again.