Studio Shots: Wazee Union

How do you get kickstarted when you’re a young artist, right out of art school with nothing lining your pockets but a smudge of paint and a fierce desire to put your talent on the map? For some lucky emerging artists in Denver, it all starts with a good studio…

How to get my job: iPhone developer

Matt Johnson is the owner of Mindful Software, LLC, an iOS developer that just released the app Group Trivia, a trivia game that hopes to bridge the gap between online and local play while providing a perfect way to waste a few minutes at a time. With iOS becoming such…

See the late Edward Marecak’s works at Z Art Department

In the ’90s, people started getting interested in historic Colorado modernism, and I’ve always thought it had something to do with the retrospective mood created by the coming turn of the millennium. Edward Marecak, who died in 1993, became one of the first local modernists to have his reputation resurrected…

Indoor dog park offers dogs warmth, personality disorders

The reason human beings are so messed up, theorized the seminal psychologist Sigmund Freud, is that our consciousness is essentially split into two parts continually at war with one another: the ego, which drives us to conform to the orderly and unnatural existence we impose on ourselves through society, and…

Three psychic solstice inquiries yeild vague, disparate results

This holiday season has taught me two things: one, that people are heliotropic as daisies, and two, that they love to celebrate it. Essentially every winter holiday relates somehow to the planet’s descent into darkness and to the eventual return of light. Most of the time, this is a metaphor…

Studio Shots: Ravi Zupa

Ravi Zupa is an unschooled artist. Yet he’s bright and searching and far from uneducated, and he surely channels an old soul; Ravi credits his mother, an art teacher, with providing him with artist tools and the freedom to do with them as he pleased while he was growing up…

Gratuitous Randomness: Picture unrelated

Today is Wednesday — which, as everybody knows, is the day we bring you the best of our weird internets world in a compendium of random images loosely related to whatever topic we happen to come up with — but here’s where it gets crazy: Today, we bring you “Pic…

Stupid ad of the week: Sky TV’s maniacal mower lady

While most television commercials pander to humanity’s desire for love, affection and acceptance, some ads go straight for our most primal instinct — that is, to employ a lawn mower for transportation to wonderful far-off climes in search of our ‘happy place,’ while carelessly wreaking havoc on our fellow man,…

There’s plenty to see besides King Tut at the Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum blockbuster Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs is scheduled to run through the first week of the new year, and although the museum no longer estimates attendance during a show’s run, it’s clear that Tut has been popular. Additional buzz has been generated by…

Light up at the 13 Lumens Candle Art Show

Eric Matelski is all about making art accessible to others, especially work by local and emerging artists, and the 13 Lumens Candle Art Show, which opens tonight with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Art Salon, isn’t the first time he’s taken this approach: reproduced art printed…

Dendiggityopolis: Westword parents make their kids draw superheroes

Superman provides the basic template: publicly mild-mannered and lame, but secretly able to jump tall buildings and dominate everything. The potential for variations on that superhero theme is basically endless — and particularly so coming from kids, whose superheroes, unencumbered by the conventions of the genre, don’t really have to…

Sexy Data, Smokey the Bear, and Mental Orgasms at Ignite Boulder 13

Running out of ideas to geek on? Fear not. The 13th installment of Ignite Boulder showcased the unique perspectives of fourteen local geeks who want nothing more than for you to hear their ideas. Equipped with twenty slides, presenters were allotted five minutes to deliver their views on topics ranging…

Absurdist Interview: Artist Xi Zhang

Originally from China, Xi Zhang moved to Colorado seven years ago. He is an up-and-coming artist whose recent work confronts and explores identity and communication in our modern information age and globalized world. With many painting styles already under his belt, Zhang’s philosophical powers come to bear on a series…

How to get my job: ballet dancer

We’re still knee deep in holiday flavor over here, so this week we decided to catch up with a ballet dancer to help us better understand how one would go about dancing around on a stage as a profession. We talked to Kevin Gaël Thomas, who is originally from France…

They raping everybody out here! 20 best viral videos of 2010

People are hilarious, and can be incredibly stupid. Thanks to the internetz, we now can watch this hilarity and stupidity unfold in myriad ways throughout the year. We’ve got rappers of all shapes and sizes, people getting hurt and basically being the complete morons we’ve come to expect from our…

Gratuitous Randomness: Sad monkeys + Morrissey lyrics

One way to think of monkeys is as extremely ugly children — at least, that’s how we like to think of monkeys, because if you think of them that way, then everything they do is hilarious, even when they’re sad. So because Wednesday is by most estimates the most depressing…