Over the Weekend: Art by Craft and MCA Denver down on Delgany Street

Indian summer? I think it came and went last Friday when balmy temperatures held into the evening for gallery-goers crossing back and forth on Delgany Street during twin openings at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and the Denver Handmade Alliance's Art by Craft show across the street. Outdoors, the Deluxe Little Orange Rocket food truck served those truffled mac and cheese balls and bánh mì sliders we all love and the mid-way moon shone over Gonzalo Lebrija's site-specific sculpture Entre La Vida y La Muerte (the car that perpetually nose-dives into a puddle); as the night grew darker, a junk band made beautiful noise in the MCA courtyard. Here's a taste of what folks saw and heard on a lovely downtown evening. New York artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders discussed her exhibit Light Leaks, her first solo museum show and a fascinating collision of the processes of photography and paintings, all on the same page. She described how each painting actually incorporates a tiled grid of 7 X 7-inch photographic prints on rice paper, which are then painted over with watercolor and colored pencil. On top of that base, she overlays clear acrylic, on top of which she paints in oils. The images are lifted from vintage slides of soccer games and the like, and she overtly emphasizes their photographic flaws. Who knew? Along with Light Leaks, a show by Robert Gober, Slides of a Changing Painting, also opened. We also made a special sidetrip upstairs to visit Boulder artist Rebecca DiDomenico's amazing installation Pellucid, a shimmering walk-through cave constructed from rock salt, mica chips and butterfly wings. Serendipitously, we ran into the artist herself. Art by Craft, on the other hand, gave off a completely different, funky downtown vibe. It was a young DIY crowd that swayed to the freak-folk sounds of Crows, Vultures, Bulls and twiddled knitting needles at the yarn-bombing Ladies Fancywork Society's crochet tagging station. And the crafts on display went back and forth from silly to sublime; it was a quilted cross-section of what spews forth these days from the collective bohemian imagination. The Denver Handmade Alliance and MCA will join forces again from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. October 30, when a one-day Art by Craft Market takes over the museum.