is Denver’s most important commercial space for art. Not only does it keep the regional market thriving, it provides locals some of the best exhibits around, which is to say, it has something to offer those who can afford art and those who just like to look.
Take a look, for sure, at the three current shows. They run the gamut, with Ann Hamilton, one of the biggest international names in the front room, and a group show of regional artists in the back.
In the middle, there’s a serious bit of wow from Washington D.C.-based , who has swirled rolls of everyday craft paper into a showstopping installation created specifically for the gallery.
Hamilton is of course the star, and Robischon’s “Selected Works,” is something of a retrospective of her long career. In all, the exhibit samples six different series going back to 1984.
It’s impossible to get a deep dive on Hamilton in one show. She’s best-known for large-scale installations, like her breakthrough from the 1999 Venice Biennale, which featured a full-size room that gently filled with falling fuchsia dust eventually spelling out a poem written in Braille.
More recently, she had Manhattan swaying with which nearly filled the 55,000-square-foot Park Avenue Armory with dozens of interactive swings.
Robischon contains both the time and space of her oeuvre with an upfront focus on Hamilton’s recent “ciliary” series, which features accordion-folded, lithographed paper, fanned out into circles 5 feet in diameter. That’s a fitting start; Hamilton is known for her circles, which hint at the eternal themes often present in her work.
These are captivating and mysterious with nodes of fabric fluffing out in the center. They look like pleated skirts or cross cuts of ancient trees. Think of them as an exploration of materials, a blending of paper and fabrics and ink, somewhere between two-dimensional sculpture and prints.
The pieces are interspersed with selections from Hamilton’s “visite” series, for which she photographed images from 19th- century calling cards using a small surveillance camera attached to her hands, then developed into collages, connecting them with various shades of fabric. Again, the circle appears, this time in a calligraphic “O” applied at the top.
There’s a thread of experimentation that runs through the show, though the cognitive ideas are varied and free-flowing. Those circular fans don’t appear to have much in common with the eight black-and-white stills that hang next to them, plucked from the video portion of her earlier multimedia performance piece titled “voce,” or the 1987 stills of performance pieces Hamilton staged with no audience at all that end the exhibit.
Not all of it makes sense together, but retrospectives often play that way. Fill in the blanks as you will, noting a lifelong expedition of connecting images to paper to video; experience to object.
The work pairs well with Ko, who has her own adventures in paper, though on a more visceral level. She stacks and dyes rolls of the stuff, 4 and 5 inches wide, turning it into various shapes that are mounted to the wall.
The trick here is transformation. Paper isn’t supposed to look like this, brilliantly colored, as if it oozed out of a giant tube, but the artist pulls it off with a pop- art boldness that serves as her signature move.
Ko has taken this idea far. There are excerpts from a series where she uses glue to harden paper into something more akin to carved wood, which she turns into corkscrew shapes.
It all leads to “Force of Nature,” an original work installed in the gallery. It’s a sensual, sensational construction of thousands of layers of 9-inch-wide, rolled paper that swoops up, down and along the wall stretching 11 feet high and 17 feet across. Paper isn’t supposed to look like this either — fluid, romantic, full of motion.
Again, the connections to the regional exhibition are tenuous, but it doesn’t matter. Colorado artists Judy Pfaff, , Linda Fleming and Ted Larsen all give us interesting objects to look at in this grouping.
They bring the experience home, to Denver, to the gallery. They make connections between the international and the local, which is this thing Robischon has been doing for nearly 40 years.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
ANN HAMILTON: “SELECTED WORKS” AND JAE KO: “FORCE OF NATURE” Robischon Gallery presents two solo exhibits plus a group show by Colorado artists,. Through Jan. 3. 1740 Wazee St. Free. 303-298-7788 or robischongallery.com.
