Although the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities always has several art shows on view at any given moment, little it has presented in the last year or so has registered much of an impact on the broader Denver art scene.
Because the center has long been one of the area’s important art spaces, it is reassuring to be able to report that it seems once again to have found its footing with the latest offering in its main lower gallery, “More Big Beautiful Things.”
The exhibition, which continues through March 30, brings together installations by five of Colorado’s most inventive sculptors, several of whom are probably not as well recognized locally as they deserve to be.
This aptly titled offering suits the Arvada Center well because of the unusual expansiveness of its lower gallery. Few if any other area galleries would have been able to accommodate all these large-scale works at once.
While these artists deserve to be shown together because of the shared intelligence and inventiveness of their work, they could hardly be more divergent in their approaches. That disparateness gives the exhibition much of its spark.
The youngest and probably least known of the five is Justin Beard of Denver, a recent graduate of the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. Because he has shown mostly at alternative, fringe spaces around Denver, this exhibition is something of a career milestone for him.
Easily the most conceptual of the five artists, Beard creates what might be called narrative works that operate in his own little theater of the absurd. In “Bike Messenger,” he has fabricated his own quirky black bike, complete with a kind of primitive amplification device.
The bike is on display in front of a screen that shows a short, deliberately grainy video in which Beard rides the bike down an alley and stops to address the viewer with a few nonsensical sentences about a falling rock.
The two-part installation will be maddening to some viewers and completely intriguing to others. Either way, it’s impossible to deny his talent or originality. Don’t be surprised if Beard scores success soon on the national scene.
Less voguish and more mainstream are the solidly conceived and constructed sculptural installations of Linda Foster Leonhard, an industrious Fort Collins artist who has shown in many college and university galleries across the country.
Leonhard has worked with a wide range of materials during her career, and in this latest body of work, she has turned to industrial rubber, cutting, shaping and painting it with powdered pigment, talc and oil pastel.
The most ambitious of her selections is “Fallen,” a three-part installation dealing with nature and death. At the center is a pile of 400 rubber cut-outs shaped and painted to look like autumn leaves.
On one side, an alluring construction of curled rubber strips runs down the wall and spills onto the floor, evoking a waterfall and stream. On the other hang seven wall pieces meant to suggest fallen trees with stark, empty branches.
The dense, man-made quality of industrial rubber hardly seems the best choice of materials to evoke the fragility of nature, but Leonhard somehow pulls it off, creating a largely cohesive, evocative work.
Denver sculptor Virginia Folkestad deals with the essence of tenuousness in “Migration,” in which she uses strips of paper, hooked together with 2,650 T-pins, to create textured chains that drape from the wall to a kind of wooden pavilion in the middle of the room.
That this piece keeps from falling apart seems a miracle of physics, and that dangerous fragility combines with the work’s inherent beauty for a powerful if inherently enigmatic piece.
Rounding out the show are works by Chris Lavery of Boulder and Emmett Culligan of Denver.
“More Big Beautiful Things”
Art exhibit. Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd. An exhibition of large-scale works by five Colorado sculptors. Through March 30. 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays. Free. 720-898-7200 or .
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
