Summer Vacation Redux #29: Denver Art Museum, part 8

Conveniently another floor of the museum was closed for the installation of art, I was getting nervous as the day ran on and there were still three special exhibitions to see!  So into the elevator past the 3rd floor and on to the 4th with the Special Exhibition: "Mi Tierra: Contemporary Artists Explore Place."  The exhibition features site-specific installations by 13 Latino artists that express experiences of contemporary life in the American West. Dynamic artworks were created by Carmen Argote (Los Angeles), Jaime Carrejo (Denver), Gabriel Dawe (Dallas), Claudio Dicochea (San Antonio), Daniela Edburg (San Miguel de Allende), Justin Favela (Las Vegas), Ana Teresa Fernández (San Francisco), Ramiro Gomez (West Hollywood), John Jota Leaños (San Francisco), Dmitri Obergfell (Denver), Ruben Ochoa (Los Angeles), Daisy Quezada (Santa Fe), and Xochi Solis (Austin). 

"Plexus no. 36" 2016 by Gabriel Dawe (Dallas) (1973 -

The very first artist I recognized immediately from an installation of his I had seen last year at the re-opening of the Renwick Gallery of Art here in Washington, DC.  I find his work fascinating and visually challenging as my eye wants simply to see light and not thread.  It blurs the line between the worlds of the corporeal and the ethereal.

"Songs of the Event Horizon" 2017 by Claudio Dicochea (San Antonio) (1971 -

The artist's statement was interesting to me.  "A key part of my project is create contemporary caste, or casta, paintings as a way of trying to understand how inherited status can determine our place in the world.  Whether it's due to gender, race, class, or any other type of social identifiers, the randomness of the family we're born into seems to still be the arena within which we encounter out supposedly free will."

Frankenschwarzenegger?  Hilarious.

Billy Burke tells Fidel Castro that the power to create a Marxist paradise has always been in him! 

Barbara Eden Dreams of Gandhi?

"Uprooted" 2017 by Daniela Edburg (San Miguel de Allende) (1975 - 

This one I really loved.  The artist is using portraits of migrants to explore the concepts of displacement and adaptation.  Each personal holds another element of the landscape symbolizing the connection to it and it's own cycles of displacement and adaptation.  Items like lichen, cheatgrass, a river rock, alpaca fur.  Further the portraits are of migrants from Europe, South and Central America, Asia and Africa. 

"Fridalandia" 2017 by Justin Favela (Las Vegas) (1986 -

Okay, this is actually an homage to Frida Kahla!  It's a Papíer Maché and Piñata filled recreation of the Casa Azul Garden from the 2002 film "Frida".  It's intended to mock the "Mexicanidad-ization" of her life in fulfillment of North American cultural expectations.  And you thought it was just a bunch a crazy tissue paper art on crack!