To inaugurate its newly opened art museum, Colorado State University turned to one of the state’s most respected contemporary art collectors — Mark Addison.
He and his wife, Polly, have lent 26 works from their extensive holdings and donated two others for an attention-grabbing debut exhibition that continues through June 13.
On view are examples — most from the 1990s and 2000s — by some of the best-known artists of these two decades, including Mel Chin, Petah Coyne, William Kentridge, Oscar Munoz, Shirin Neshat, Roxy Paine and Carrie Mae Weems.
Though compact, the offering still manages to pack a punch. This is smart, sophisticated work, with a bracing, conceptualist edge.
Addison, a retired Boulder businessman who has served on the boards of the Denver Art Museum and University of Colorado Art Museum, began seriously collecting in the 1970s, focusing at first on original prints.
His collecting interests have branched in myriad directions since, with more emphasis on breadth than depth.
“I started out collecting interesting images,” Addison said, “and then somewhere along the line, I found that there were a lot of ideas behind art, so I also collect interesting ideas.
“And the best of all, obviously, is a great image with interesting ideas, and they can be in any medium, anything at all.”
The works selected by Linny Frickman, director of the University Art Museum, along with Addison, display disparate intellectual and technical approaches. But running through them are common currents, which Frickman tried to encapsulate in the show’s title, “Reflection, Refraction, Reconfiguration.”
“These impulses to refract and reconfigure,” she writes in an introduction to the exhibition, “in order to illuminate our current conditions . . . and to face the outside world and not retreat to inner realms are very much at play in the works of Polly and Mark Addison.”
Though some sculpture is represented, such as Paine’s blobby mass of polyethylene, “SCUMAK (Auto Sculpture Maker)” (1998), the main focus is on video and photography, which, along with installations, dominated the art of the 1990s and 2000s.
Kentridge, who creates animated films that might best be described as kinetic drawings, has become something of a cult figure in the art world. The South African artist is represented with “Five Soho Eckstein Films” (1995), featuring one of his most widely recognized, recurring characters.
Also notable is Munoz’s video, “La Linea del Destino (The Line of Destiny)” (2006), which gives new meaning to palm reading. In this magical work, the artist is reflected in a tiny pool of water cupped in his clasped hands. Like the transitory nature of life, the liquid inevitably drains away.
The bulk of the show centers on photography, highlighting artists who have taken the medium well beyond its original documentary purposes and employed it in unexpected, crafty ways to fulfill their creative agendas.
Several of these works, such as John Coplans’ “Self-Portrait (fingers)” (2000), delve into identity, an exploration that almost inevitably involves issues of gender, race, ethnicity and religion, as seen in images such as Neshat’s “Allegiance with Wakefulness” (1994).
Others, such as Sandy Skog- lund’s “Two Nurses” (1982), confront staged realities, and still others, such as Jeanne Dunning’s “Detail No. 20” (1994), challenge context and perceptions.
If this small but pithy exhibition is any indication, the University Art Museum is off to a good start.
“Reflection, Refraction, Reconfiguration”
Art. Colorado State University, University Art Museum, University Center for the Arts, 1400 Remington St., Fort Collins. An exhibition of 28 works from the Boulder collection of Polly and Mark Addison. Most were created in the 1990s and 2000s. Through June 13. 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Free. 970-491-1989 or .
