Surely the most persistent current in painting is the representation of recognizable things, particularly the figure. In one form or another, representational painting has been around for about 15,000 years, ever since the cave paintings in France and Spain were created. Things went along fine after that, with countless landscapes,…
Artists often encounter difficulties when they address politics in their work. Remember those severed ceramic penises that were stolen from a show at the Boulder Public Library last year? Their ostensible theme was violence against women, but those dismembered members didn’t actually say anything about that; they just illustrated the…
Chekhov’s people are unhappy. Their unhappiness never rises to the level of tragedy, but it isn’t pathos, either. These characters are vague and muddled. They can’t think clearly about their own grief; they blame this and then that, latching onto explanatory catchphrases and repeating them. They complain, bicker and snap…
The music is nice, and the two actors play the piano amazingly well, but in all honesty, the Denver Center Theatre Company production of 2 Pianos, 4 Hands feels like pretty thin gruel. In a series of short, comic vignettes, it details the struggles of two youngsters bent on careers…
Maybe all you want out of your pop music is a few minutes of escape, a radio-friendly respite from the heavy humdrum of your workaday existence. Maybe you likes to hang with 50 Cent, who survived a few gunshots (and doesn’t let you forget it) to party another day; or…
Imagine a large, dead Saint Bernard with its bones removed. Then visualize a hefty bellows inserted into it from behind with a gorilla hopping up and down on it, causing the huge dog’s bag-like corpse to twitch spasmodically, wheeze and croak. Voilà — this is today’s Nick Nolte. What’s amazing…
In 1997’s The Apostle, Robert Duvall took on a subject near and dear to his heart: Southern Pentecostal preachers. No one would make the film for him, so he went ahead and directed it himself, garnering much acclaim from media both secular and religious for his warts-and-all portrayal of a…
The powerful brand of political muckraking pioneered in the 1960s by the Greek filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gavras has largely fallen from favor, replaced by the sloppy, self-serving outbursts of oafs like Michael Moore. An opponent of tyranny in any form and under any flag, Costa-Gavras indicted right-wing Greek militarism in his…
Denver artist Carlos Frésquez views the world through kaleidoscope glasses — or, to be more exact, collide-oscope glasses — by layering elements from his own cultural background with a strong pop-cultural sensibility and an awareness of art’s long march through history. It’s Batman meets Picasso on a retablo, with homies…
Thursday, April 10 More than seventy youth jazz ensembles from across the nation gather in Denver this weekend for the second annual Jazz Celebration at Metro State, and they’ll be drawn by more than just our rugged mile-high ambience: The fest’s guest faculty, which includes saxophonist Lee Konitz, trumpeter Bobby…
Need a lizard heat lamp that plugs into your cigarette lighter? How about a rat-repelling gadget to keep rodents off your boat? What about a patented pillowcase with a secret pocket for condoms? These nifty inventions will take center stage at the 25th Annual Rocky Mountain Inventors Conference and Expo,…
While soldiers, journalists and citizens across the Middle East keep their gas masks close at hand for fear of chemical warfare, a two-part symposium held this week, Copenhagen: History, Science and the Arts — Making Connections, will focus on the multitude of dilemmas surrounding the creation of different deadly weapon:…
To market, to market, to buy a fat pig…but who really needs large, smelly livestock living in Denver? What we all do need — or maybe just love to buy — is more kitschy knickknacks, and this Saturday’s downtown Ballpark Market is bound to have loads of them. Kicking off…
Though poet and author Gloria Velásquez was born dirt poor in Loveland and later settled with her family in nearby Johnstown, she left northern Colorado long ago for California, where she earned her doctorate at Stanford and now teaches at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. But Colorado provides the…
Contemporary art seems to be relentlessly rocked by fads. A craze for some novel thing usually starts in the art magazines, and then suddenly it seems like everyone is doing it. Remember when renditions of little archetypal houses were everywhere eight to ten years ago? Where are they now? Even…
The current exhibit in the main space at Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058) has the somewhat poetic and thoroughly pretentious title of Precious Beyond. The show pairs well-known Denver painters Irene Delka McCray and Paul Gillis. McCray’s subjects — aging, sacrifice, suffering, angst and death –…
I first saw Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen in London a few years ago. I remember leaving the theater feeling light-headed and exhilarated by the play of ideas Frayn had started up: ideas about science and human nature, guilt and mutability, and about how, at the most essential level, we know what…
Bovine Metropolis Theater stands where the Changing Scene — whose hallmark was an intense vitality — stood for over three decades, until the turn of the century. The original owners of the Scene were New York dancers Al Brooks and Maxine Munt, who arrived in an almost art-free Denver and…
March 21, 2003–though he never knew the precise date, it was the very day Nile Southern had been waiting for longer than he cared to remember. On that day, Southern went into the Chelsea Mini-Storage facility on Manhattan’s West Side, grabbed the largest dolly he could find–it looked like a…
Where in hell does all this stuff come from? That’s a question constantly posed by readers, movie-goers and half-soused nightclub audiences. What are the sources of an artist’s art? What weird compulsion enables a performer to stand naked before the prying eye of a camera, an empty canvas or a…
When you see a glamorous movie star like Kate Beckinsale tying her hair back and wearing glasses, it’s surefire shorthand that she’s an uptight soul. But just in case you aren’t familiar with the usual signals, writer-director Lisa Cholodenko gives a couple of even more obvious ones in her second…
You can be sure of one thing: None of the Hollywood glitterati who, on the advice of their agents, obscured their cleavages and kept their politics under their hats at this year’s supposedly war-dampened Academy Awards orgy have seen two minutes’ worth of the short films that were nominated for…
