When you’re on top of the heap in the world of found-object-assemblage art, it’s quite possible you have actually seen everything. Consider sculptor Donald Lipski: When vacating his studio in an old movie theater in Brooklyn, he filled three tractor-trailers with stuff he’d packratted away since he began picking up…
It should be so easy to hate this man sitting on a couch in a high-priced hotel suite, this man sharing his bottle of Evian. He is, after all, a demon dressed head to toe (or tail?) in slate gray, the Satan of Cinema. Attacking him has long been regular…
Though Recent Works, which opened last weekend at the William Havu Gallery, is billed as a group show, it’s been installed as four distinct presentations, and thus is more like a quartet of solos. This is for the best, because each of the artists has an individual approach, and they…
Installed in the front space at Fresh Art (208 South Broadway, 720-570-2255) is Boys Dreams, featuring a series of new paintings by Denver artist Steven Altman. And, to put it mildly, they are completely unexpected, perhaps even shocking, because instead of the kind of automatist abstractions he’s been exhibiting since…
It’s hard to watch A Streetcar Named Desire as if you’d never seen it before and had harbored no mental image of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, had never heard anyone say, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” had never shuddered with mingled repulsion and fascination as…
In writing The Swan, a play about a swan who turns into a man, Elizabeth Egloff has mined fertile mythic territory. Zeus, of course, had a habit of taking on animal form when he was set on a sexual conquest. He became a swan in order — famously — to…
Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down — based on reporter Mark Bowden’s factual account of a 1993 U.S. Army operation gone dreadfully awry in Somalia — doesn’t just kick your ass. It pummels your entire body; it leaves you trembling. Once the premise and setting are established, this brutal combat adventure…
It would be easy and tempting to hail Kandahar as a masterpiece without even seeing it: It’s a foreign film; it takes on social issues; it’s directed by Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf; it speaks to the causes of our war on terror and first hit U.S. shores right as the…
One walks into Metropolitan State College of Denver’s troubled Center for Visual Arts uneasily these days: The unceremonious booting of longtime director Sally Perisho, a ten-year veteran who’s generally been credited with building the gallery, leaves the premises reeking of indecision. CVA Education Program Coordinator Amy Banker, for one, has…
What provides the glue that holds any multi-arts venue together? At the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture, thematic wizardry seems to do the job. Under the direction of Joanne Marks Kauvar, the Mizel continues to pump out thought-provoking interdisciplinary projects once or twice a year. Previous endeavors explored everything…
The City of Englewood provides a tragic example of planning gone horribly wrong. It’s a sad story that started decades ago. One early planning disaster began in the 1980s, when the heart of what used to be a small town was torn out to make room for a redevelopment scheme…
The Cordell Taylor Gallery (2350 Lawrence Street, 303-296-0927) opened six months ago in a very unlikely place: across the street from several of the city’s largest homeless shelters. This location creates a lively mix of activity on the sidewalk, and you might not want to tarry on your way from…
The relationship between literature and performance is a complex one. Theater can affirm the brilliance of a work of literature or (at least temporarily) destroy it, so that we leave a production of, say, Hamlet or Measure for Measure wondering guiltily if Shakespeare’s reputation hasn’t been…well…just a bit overblown. Fortunately,…
The combatants in Patrick Stettner’s compelling first feature, The Business of Strangers, are a middle-aged software executive (Stockard Channing) wearing a steel-blue suit and an air of professional hauteur; the executive’s mysterious new assistant (Julia Stiles), fresh out of Dartmouth and full of self-righteous aggression; and a cocky “headhunter” (Frederick…
Attended by a rather sexy air of intrigue, the hit French film Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le Pacte des Loups) arrives upon our shores; refreshingly, it’s left up to us to figure out just what the hell it is. Monster movie? Costume drama? Martial-arts extravaganza? To say the least, it’s…
Wyoming quilter Anne Olsen arrived at her avocation by way of boredom: She’d already dabbled in other crafts and grown weary of them. Blessed with a husband who does the cooking, “looks after himself” and frees up a lot of her time, Olsen decided to try quilting and found the…
The great British explorer Ernest Shackleton is very hot these days — in marked contrast to how he and his hardy band felt during their 1914-1916 expedition to Antarctica. The “most glorious failure” of the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition is more gloriously popular than ever, with a recent book and…
Normally, these year-in-TV columns are a breezy, easy write–a plea for good shows buried somewhere in an embittered litany of bad ones. In recent years, it has felt as though the proliferation of channels and choices has given us only more of the wretched and less of the watchable; satellite…
It might seem like the art world is the kind of charmed place that’s always filled with hearts and flowers — or at least pictures of them — and to a great extent, it is. Unfortunately, sometimes the hearts are broken and the flowers are wilted. That’s how it is…
To put it mildly, Denver’s never been much of a sculpture town. Until about five years ago, you could count on two hands the accomplished contemporary sculptors working around here. But then something changed, and suddenly a whole troupe of emerging sculptors appeared. In recent months, this influx has reached…
In the Bedroom. First-time director Todd Field turns a dark tale by the late short-story master Andre Dubus into a precocious film masterpiece about murder, grief and repressed marital rage set in quiet Camden, Maine. Tom Wilkinson and likely Oscar nominee Sissy Spacek star as the highly civilized parents of…
Who would have guessed that 31 years after M*A*S*H, the film that made Robert Altman’s reputation, he would still be turning out movies as good as his latest release, Gosford Park? Full of the director’s usual energy, powered by the sense of controlled chaos that marks all of his ensemble…
