Vicki Myhren Gallery, 2018
Curator
This exhibition features eight artists using social relationships as their medium. Focusing on a variety of approaches, these artists explore our relationships to each other, to public space, cultural memory, and our shared digital landscape. Though the questions they ask us to consider are serious, the manner in which they present them is often humorous and playful.
Exhibiting social practice projects is challenging. Much of the work is conducted outside of the gallery space embedded within a specific community. The art becomes a set of parameters that responds to the social constraints and talents of a particular group. These eight artists all create tangible work and object oriented documentation to accompany their community practice.
This exhibition particularly focuses on artists rethinking our perceptions of public space. Paul Shortt’s project, Reserved for Loitering, investigates the power and privilege of loitering. Stephanie Dinkin’s installation, Black Madonna, confronts race and representation in public monuments. The New Craft Artists in Action (NCAA) brings awareness to overlooked public assets by functionally “knit-bombing” empty hoops to build proactive and inclusive relationships between artists, athletes and neighbors. Frankie Toan and Liat Berdugo explore how the digital landscape functions as a public or private space.
Social Practice artist and printmaker Emmy Bright’s work diagrams “relational aesthetics” and simplifies uncomplicated but overly complicated thoughts. Katie Watson’s work focuses on our intimate bonds and what it takes to stay “afloat”.
Through visiting this exhibition, we hope you will continue to question and consider:
Who has agency over public space? Who forms our collective cultural memory? How can we re-use the spaces we have in new ways? How are we connecting with one another and who are we connecting with?
Artists:
Sameer Farooq & Mirjam Linschooten
Press: Hyperallergic
For the month of October, an unusual collaboration between the DC Public Library Special Collections and the DC arts space Rhizome has transformed Rhizome’s Takoma, DC home into a hub for exploring the history of similarly-minded, multidisciplinary, and independent arts spaces in DC. Featuring archival material — including photographs, audio and video recordings, flyers, and other ephemera — RETRO[per]SPECTIVE focuses on five influential DC venues: Museum of Temporary Art and d.c. space, which both closed many years ago, Union Arts, which shuttered in 2016, and the still standing venues DC Arts Center and Hole in the Sky.
Curated by Ray Barker, Lauren Abman, and Michele Casto
Since it’s founding in 1989, DCAC has been the cultural hub of activism, resistance, and inclusion. Through a unique collaboration with the Special Collections department of the Washington, DC Public Library, this exhibition highlights this history using materials pulled from the dark recesses of the DCAC archives and places them into broader themes.
Avalanche: Institute for New Feeling
Curatorial and Exhibition assistant
Avalanche is an enhanced water drink designed by the artist collective Institute for New Feeling. The newest addition to their ongoing wellness product line, this bottled water will be available for visitors. In addition to the Avalanche water itself, the project consists of a site-specific concert at Denver’s Wastewater campus, an exhibition at the Myhren Gallery, and an online streaming video. Avalanche is produced by Black Cube, a nonprofit nomadic contemporary art museum, in partnership with the University of Denver’s Vicki Myhren Gallery.
Avalanche water is enhanced by a human pipeline that is a playful visualization of water flow through a city and through the body. The performance presents municipal water usage as a literal concert of bodies, a system that is as captivating as it is improbable, arduous, and flawed. This work touches on the enhanced water industry, which is one of the fastest growing beverage industries today. Avalanche’s live chain-reaction filtration process exposes our complicated relationship with water consumption and the absurdities of the bottled water industry.
By conflating the language of bottled water advertising with that of municipal water usage, we hope to push this idea of water “enhancement” to its most extreme degree. Enhanced water is one of the fastest growing beverage industries of the 2000’s. What if water could be enhanced (physically, nutritiously, energetically) by human usage rather than simply contaminated by it?
–Institute For New Feeling
The Vicki Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver School of Art and Art History presents Storm Warning: Artists on Climate Change & the Environment, an exploration into the intricacies of artist perceptions on environmentalism and our changing world. Through activism, curiosity, humor, and beauty, artists take on a range of medium to solicit public responses touching on the immediacy of issues of climate change.
Artists in the exhibition: Katherine Ball, Susan Camp, J. Henry Fair, Brian House, Chris Jordan, Edward Lane McCartney, Michael Menchaca, Mari Omari, Phaedra Pezzullo, Anthony Porcaro, Regan Rosburg, Amy Scofield, Dr. Heidi Steltzer, Gary Sweeney, Steve Wiman.
Vicki Myhren Gallery, 2016
Assistant Curator
An exhibition in collaboration with Maruca Salazar of Denver’s Museo de las Americas, The Wall features contemporary Latino/a artists working in the muralist tradition, as well as contemporary painters, tattoo artists and experimental media pieces. The exhibition showcases the work of 9 regional artists and explores processes of conceiving, making and placing of public mural art. The Wall asks the question: How does mural art express socio-political viewpoints or, alternatively, advertising and commercial enterprises?
In our current political climate, the image of a wall is a contested metaphor of discrimination, fear and xenophobia. The Vicki Myhren Gallery offers a counterpoint- providing a space for artists with direct links to immigration to explore their identity, reacting to the wall as a metaphor, or leaving it behind.
Vicki Myhren Gallery, 2017
Exhibition Design
Dusk to Dusk: Unsettled, Unraveled, Unreal turns a mirror to the world, examining individual isolation, political repression, and collective ennui in the decline of the industrial age, an age in which people are simultaneously singular and collective beings.
Some seek a return to the land, others seek spiritual transcendence, and others share an affection for our new hybrid of increasingly alienated selves. Through painting, photography, sculpture, and video this exhibition explores a contemporary familiarity with collective darkness.
“Dusk to Dusk” was organized by the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University, curated by Richard Rinehart, Director of the Samek Art Gallery, with works generously loaned from THE EKARD COLLECTION. The exhibition is toured by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, Pasadena, California.
Vicki Myhren Gallery 2017
Exhibition Design
Push Play explores the work of artists who borrow from play and games to reveal social, philosophical, and cultural issues. From playfulness, to mathematical strategy, the artists in Push Play have mined the significance of games, reinventing them to create experiences that often involve the viewer and reflect on the nature of participation in art.
Artistic processes tied to game playing have historically attracted the avant-garde, most famously the chess master Marcel Duchamp. His artistic move had his chess partner in mind: you, the viewer. Games were also intrinsic to the work of war-addled Surrealists and Dadaists, the inventors of the exquisite corpse and automatic drawing, in their quest to upend the bourgeois pretensions of art and free the artistic imagination. In the 1960s and 1970s, the countercultural and anti-war Fluxus group and the New Games Foundation questioned capitalism and corporate culture by staging massive public games in city parks. Moving away from the classical chess period of kings, queens, and bishops, the works in this exhibition do not represent medieval figures of power but strategies of decision-making around contemporary issues. Among the arcade of objects in the show is a version of Guitar Hero by Cory Arcangel, hopscotch by Mary Flanagan, and Ryan Gander’s version of blackjack – while the more mystically inclined may gravitate toward Allan McCollum and Matt Mullican’s divining game.
Hirshhorn Museum, 2019
Exhibition Installation Artist
This exhibition transforms the Hirshhorn’s galleries into a communal dining space in which visitors are served curry and invited to share a meal together. The installation includes a large-scale mural, drawn on the walls over the course of the exhibition, which references protests against Thai government policies. Additional historic images speak to protest and the present. Tiravanija’s presentation unites his signature communal food-based work with his ongoing series of drawings derived from protest imagery, creating a unique dialogue within a single installation.
(text drawn from https://hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/rirkrit-tiravanija-whos-afraid-of-red-yellow-and-green/)
