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Volume 3, Issue 13
July 5 - July 18, 2001
ART
EARTH MAGIC
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DELEON WHITE GALLERY
821 Santa Fe Drive, Denver, Colorado
303-455-5525
Through June 30, 2001
Thank goodness for singing commercials. Responding to the siren-call of a muffler
shop, I spotted DeLeon White Gallery at its new Santa Fe Drive location a couple months
ago. This gallery and its sister-shop in Toronto dedicate their spaces to artists working with environmental concerns.
This is done profoundly, but not overtly: no slogans, no wistful baby seals. In
fact, the results are exciting, some of the most visually provocative work
imaginable.
Basia Irland, a New Mexican artist, is represented here by two groupings of
"Sacred Walking Sticks." Irland's sticks take the form of basic and familiar
human implements, but transformed, as if yanked from the bowels of the
earth. One grouping, gathered into a loose bundle, are wrapped in cloth, the
fabric nearly obscured, permeated with red dirt and wax and river mud. In
another grouping, the sticks are masked in different muted colors of fine
sand-- red, green, yellow, brown. Wood still appears in places, verifying the
truth of the materials. What's most noticeable is the shape of each stick in
relation to the others, like an unmatched line of dancers.
Irland's interest is water issues-- that's river mud on some stick-tips-- and she
recently completed a video documentary called A Gathering of Waters dealing
with the Rio Grande, its pollution and convoluted politics.
The large wooden and marble sculptures of Denver-based Norman Epp are
the most breath-taking component of this show. Human-sized and larger, Epp
works with "reclaimed" woods-- stumps, storm-blown, dead. However battered
and abandoned they might have been in the forest, the logs are resurrected
here, carved and polished and glowing and surreal. Several, like "Anna
and Anu's Cauldron" and "Primordial Chalice," (of beech and cherry, respectively)
have become vessel-shaped. These are big, jagged, maw-like, and look
like they were clapped into existence by a lightning strike. The "Primordial
Chalice," a footed piece, looks like it would come if you called it, and if
you're thinking of dancing Disney teapots, switch gears and start the invocations.
Shakespeare's witches would approve.
Not all of Epp's offerings are vessels. His "Spirit Grotto" is a huge upright
log leaning into a corner. Gleaming red-brown cherry wood, this piece is
deceptively simple, a jagged concave form. But that doesn't explain how it
feels. "Grotto" is sized to hold a human, not like a coffin, but perhaps as a
magical entry-way. Stand in here and become ... a cherry tree? Merlin,
trapped? A time-traveller? So many of our legends deal with people being
transformed into trees (Daphne's the best known) or with people who "fall
into" some portion of nature (Dorothy's tornado to Oz, Alice's rabbit hole to
Wonderland). Epp's "Grotto" adeptly taps this sense of earth-magic transportation
(and no, alas, I didn't step in ... yet).
Epp's "Mother Rising" is a radical shift, a magnificent form in dark marble
inspired by travels in Africa. The mood here is entirely different from his
wood works: cool and strong rather than raw and combustible. A fecund
female form emerges along one side, as if growing from the stone ... or is the
stone emerging from her? The sense of interplay between female shape and
the rest of the piece is what energizes this formidable sculpture.
The bulk of the current show focuses on prints by Arnold Shives, a mountain
climber and environmentalist who brings a naive sense of landscape to the
technically tricky medium of monotypes. Images are drawn, rather than
etched or engraved, on a printing plate; when run through the press, the print
is a one-off reversed image. While Shives' pieces have a quiet charm, the
works of Irland and Epp are by far the main attraction. These are pieces that
haunt your imagination and flavor your dreams.
--Renna Shesso
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