Museum for Still a coup for city
By Kyle MacMillan
Denver Post Fine Arts Critic
Article Published: Sunday, December 26, 2004

Most Imaginative Name of an Artwork: "Sushi Wooshi"

The surrealist bent of underappreciated Denver artist Christine Marie Davis extends to her wonderfully quirky titles. This creative rhyme serves as the name of a sculpture in "Anamoly," a continuing exhibition at the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art.

Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com .

Don't overlook the provocative "Anomaly" up north

By Kyle MacMillan
Denver Post Fine Arts Critic
Article Published: Friday, December 10, 2004

Denver might be the state's cultural hub, but it's not the only Colorado city with a museum of contemporary art. Fort Collins has had one for more than 20 years. Since 1990, the institution has occupied accommodating quarters in a refurbished post office building along College Avenue in the city's historic downtown.

If the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art does not have the resources to mount shows of the same scope as its Denver counterpart, it regularly pulls off high-quality, provocative shows worthy of far larger facilities. The latest example is "Anomaly," a fascinating, wonderfully integrated show running through Jan. 8. It brings together works in a range of media by four artists who, in distinctive ways, take conventionality and slightly twist it to sometimes whimsical, sometimes unsettling effect. What is so surprising and fulfilling is how well these pieces fit together, despite the different backgrounds, creative agendas and technical approaches of these artists from across the country.

Linking the four is their love for the odd, the offbeat or, to borrow from the show's apt title, the anomalous. The most widely known of them in Colorado is Tsehai Johnson, who has become something of a star on the Denver art scene in the past five years. She creates sensuous, vaguely biomorphic porcelain pieces that take their inspiration from household objects such as brushes. Fresh and inventive, they retain a hint of functionality, but their fanciful nature is made clear by their stylized, gently subverted forms.

These works would be interesting enough individually, but Johnson always presents them in groups - mounting them on walls or suspending them from a row of hooks. This converts them into sculptural installations and gives them an added conceptual edge. Among her newest creations is a group of 10 small teapots. They have the traditional elements and basic form of such objects, yet each has a slightly quirky quality. And the protruding, crooked necks of the hanging pots give them at least the hint of a phallic character.

It is surprising that the show's other Denver artist, Christine Marie Davis, is not better known locally given the imaginativeness of her work. But she is not represented by a commercial gallery and has shown mostly in smaller, less-visible exhibitions. Davis is a kind of contemporary surrealist. Like devotees of that movement in the last century, she delights in unexpected incongruities, which in some cases can make the viewer feel a bit squeamish.

A prime example is the cleverly titled "Sushi Wooshi" (2004), in which she has created her own twisted take on the cuisine, laying simulated slices of raw fish across bits of the recycled rabbit fur. In "Stretched" (2004), Davis has gracefully lined parts of a wooden shoe tree with fur, creating what would seem to be an ideal complement to surrealist Meret Oppenheim's famed fur teacup and spoon.

Perhaps her most successful effort is "Natural Instincts" (2004), a kind of medicine cabinet with its two shelves lined with wax objects cast in the shape of pill bottles and similar containers. Floating in the wax, with its backlit glow, are everything from poppy seeds to false eyelashes. If all that is not weird enough, Davis has covered the work's electrical cord in fur, making it look like an animal's tail.

In a completely different vein are paintings by Margo Selski of St. Paul, Minn., who fractures the ordered world of Flemish old-master paintings with her contemporary, almost macabre reworking of its conventions. Rounding out the show are dreamy, color pinhole images of folkloric sites in Iceland by Hrönn Axelsdóttir, a native of that country who resides in Jackson Heights, N.Y.

Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com .