Three women. Three galleries. Three contrasting bodies of work.
The artists, each from a different Western state, are featured in engaging exhibitions running nearly concurrently in a trio of local commercial spaces.
The best known is Jeanette Pasin Sloan, whose paintings and drawings can be found in the collections of such prestigious institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
It is not hard to get the idea behind the 21 prototypical examples on view through Jan. 5 at the William Havu Gallery. Each is about reflections — ultra-shiny bowls, buckets, cups and other vessels mirroring the often-boisterous patterns below and behind them.
Manipulating mirrors and reflected images, often a demonstration of virtuosity, is hardly a new idea. It abounds in old-master and impressionist paintings, none more famous than Edouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.”
But in her closed-in, self-contained compositions, the Santa Fe painter accentuates and exaggerates the device, making the dance of reflections the key element. Tension derives from the overtly staged quality of each still-life tableau and Pasin Sloan’s photorealist approach to it.
Reactions to individual selections will depend on taste. Some viewers might lean to the bright colors of the flamboyant “Dots IV,” a 56-by-54- inch oil on linen, but others might find it verges on gaudy.
Those in the latter group will probably prefer a related work, a similar yet slightly more subdued, more ordered version of the same composition — “Dots II,” a 38-by-30 1/2-inch work combining watercolor and gouache.
This dichotomy between the paintings and works on paper recurs, but what remains constant is the artist’s impeccable technique, especially her deft, graceful use of watercolor and gouache.
If Pasin Sloan’s basic approach is well-established, Boulder artist Terry Maker is still something of a moving target. While she is endlessly inventive in her working methods, she is often too quick to try something new before carrying a previous artistic avenue to its fullest expression.
In a 2003 exhibition at the Robischon Gallery, Maker displayed works in which she glued together hundreds of rolled, painted sheets of canvas to create big, hard blocks, which she then cut like logs into a range of forms with a band saw.
It was fascinating technique, but she had not figured out how to fully exploit it. Her work has grown considerably since then, as she continues her “slice” works, albeit with a host of new materials and variations to the basic technique.
There are essentially three bodies of work in a solo exhibition running through Dec. 31 at the Robischon, and they don’t necessarily fit together completely comfortably.
The least successful is a series of works in which Maker is embedding sliced objects, such as jawbreaker candies, in resin. The most eye-catching example is “Drool,” with its saturated colors and giant driplike blobs of paint, but it tries too hard to fit into the trendy, lava-lamp look of much contemporary painting.
In other cases, it is clear that Maker simply hasn’t quite mastered this technique yet. “ABC/DNA” is a kind of jumble, with indecipherable text and a loose double-helix pattern that is submerged in the cloudy resin and nearly lost below the surface.
What works best is a second body of work, where objects, from plastic cups to candy, are molded into opaque and clear resins to form blocks that are sliced into thin sheets to form paintings. A highlight is the “Jawbreaker” series, with its clean, appealing compositions.
Offering a whole other aesthetic is Montana sculptor Phoebe Knapp, whose large-scale, often rough-hewn woodworks handsomely fill a gap in local sculptural offerings. Six selections can be seen at Walker Fine Art through Jan. 5.
Knapp draws on a host of artistic sources, ranging from the 1960s and ’70s wood-block constructions of Carl Andre to the deliberately crude wood pieces of British artist David Nash, whose work is rooted in environmental sculpture.
The Nash connection is particularly evident in “Beasty Boys,” a set of four hooklike forms each about 5 feet tall. These loosely matched pieces were carved from box elder wood and then charred — a favorite Nash technique.
In works such as “Passage” — an offset pair of L-shaped walls, one constructed of wood, the other of limestone blocks — Knapp continues the exploration of form and space that has long occupied sculptors.
The only piece that hits a false note is “Tablet,” which consists of two 12-foot-tall slices from a huge walnut log. They are hinged with huge, cast-iron rings that make the whole seem a bit overblown.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
“Jeanette Pasin Sloan: One-Woman Show”
Art. William Havu Gallery, 1040 Cherokee St. More than 20 paintings and drawings by the nationally known Santa Fe artist. Through Jan. 5. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays.Free. 303-893-2360 or
“Terry Maker: ‘Slice’ New Work”
Art. Robischon Gallery, 1740 Wazee St. Recent multimedia works by the Colorado artist. Through Dec. 31. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Free. 303-298-7788 or
“Natural Order”
Art. Walker Fine Art, 300 W. 11th Ave. Photography by Bonny Lhotka and wood sculpture by Phoebe Knapp. Through Jan. 5. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Free. 303-355-8955 or
