Posted in art, family, my life on September 15, 2018|
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There are times when I look forward to the Friday night gallery opening with expectations of greatness only to be slapped in face disappointment. Artists or galleries with proven track records veer off course with less than stellar presentations. It happens. You take it in stride with hope the next round of openings will knock it out of the park. The start of fall art season here opened with bang and then fell into a whimper. Tonight’s round of openings one again proved there is a plethora of talent in the Queen City of the Plains.
Mack and I started the night at Walker Fine Art in the Golden Triangle. Walker presented another excellently curated group show with seven artist showing works. Our next stop was Goodwin Fine Art just a few blocks away. Goodwin had a double hitter of Jill Hadley Hooper and Mark Villarreal. I loved every piece in this show. Both artists at one point in their careers were members of Pirate Contemporary Art. It’s great to artists move from a co-op to a blue chip gallery.
Our next stop was the Santa Fe Arts District to see a juried show at Core New Art Space. I’m not always a fan of group, or juried shows, but there are some nicely executed works in this presentation.
Our final destination was the 40 West Art District in Lakewood to see what the co-ops were offering. Stops were made at Next, EDGE and Pirate Contemporary Art. Gayla Lemke is showing wonderful clay totems at EDGE. But the star of the co-ops was the Charles Livingston opening at Pirate.
Charles opened Catalyst (1,000,000), a multimedia performance piece that knocked it out of the park. Charles was cutting old bicycle inner tubes sourced from local bike shops. Think of it as the art version of farm to table, but rather bike shop to gallery. Charles sat silently in a black chair dressed in a black t-shirt and black jeans with his hair freshly buzzed. He had been cutting the inner tubes into small pieces since 6 p.m. The cut rubber pieces were piled on the gallery floor contained by black lumber. A pile of inner tubes sat on the floor next to Charles. Charles composed an ethereal soundtrack, which included some Brian Eno, that played in the back ground. Charles counted the number of cuts and tallied them by the hundred. There were also some mixed media pieces consisting of circles drawn on paper which was torn and covered in resin. I can’t explain why, but people were overcome with various emotions. I saw a number of men and women weeping. I felt overwhelmed with a feeling of awe. It was an art happening which I was experiencing firsthand.
It’s a night I will always remember. A night like the time I walked into Pirate many years ago and saw a four-foot wide continuous charcoal drawing by Peter Illig which wrapped around three walls of the gallery. It was stunning, as was Charles’ presentation was tonight.
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The Corporate Slave 