Architecture of Form
Architecture of Form
Core New Art Space
6851 W. Colfax Avenue, Lakewood, CO 80214
April 22-May 8, 2022
Curated by Jude Barton
Admission: Free
Review by Jillian Blackwell
This spring, Core New Art Space presents the exhibition Architecture of Form for its third year running. It’s a love letter to geometry for geometry’s sake. A viewer may rest their eyes on balanced arrangements of squares and rectangles, angular compositions in pleasing palettes, and repeating patterns and shapes. The exhibit statement boldly declares, “Geometry intrinsically rejects contemporary transient socio-political and cultural involvement as well as the interpretive bias of the viewer.”
A view of the Architecture of Form exhibition curated by Jude Barton at Core New Art Space in Lakewood. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
This exhibition links itself in a straight line to geometric abstraction art movements of the past such as Bauhaus, De Stijl, and Constructivism. The question then becomes: which of these works is a pleasing recreation of geometric abstraction and which works carry the concept further, presenting the viewer with something unseen before? The pieces run the whole gamut.
Nicholas Figel, Metroform, plywood, stretch fabric, and human body. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
Nicholas Figel’s Metroform combines sculpture and performance. A simplified metropolitan model in gray scale sits low to the ground. Suspended above this geometric city and just above the head of the viewer hangs a performer—a woman whose limbs are painted bright orange, with a tube of gray fabric around her middle that is ridged like the folds of an accordion. She stays focused on the small city below her, arms and legs moving slowly and gracefully, as she makes intimate but indecipherable gestures toward the city.
The artwork harkens back to Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis. The performer in Metroform alludes to the main character, Maria, who acts as a voice for the workers, and perhaps also to Maria’s robot doppelganger. It is unclear what sentiment Figel means to convey in his reference to Metropolis, whether good or bad, or if he means to implicate our current metropolitan society. The mere spectacle of the performer is alluring, a cause for wonder, capturing a hint of the idealization of the city in Metropolis.
Craig Robb, Beyond The Delight of More, 2022, wood, 14.5 x 13 x 3 inches. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
As with Figel’s unusual installation piece, the artists who explore materials and methods most successfully push the bounds of geometric abstraction. In his many wall pieces, Craig Robb employs weathered chunks of wood cut into the shape of a house, arranging the chunks in patterns dictated by their geometry. In Beyond The Delight of More, the wood pieces nestle into each other, creating a zigzagging honeycomb pattern. The tidy arrangement of the pieces allows the varying wood grains, textures, and colors to shine.
Denise Demby, Parallel Parallelograms, tack-fused glass. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
Denise Demby works with glass in many different forms throughout the exhibition. In a show of simplicity at its finest, in her sculpture Parallel Parallelograms Demby stacks many layers of clear glass parallelograms in a column. The sides of the column, a compilation of edges of cut glass, allow the colors and light of the surroundings to pass through prismatically.
Chuck McCoy, Regenerated Other, inkjet on CnC (Computer numerical Control)-routed PVC panel. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
Chuck McCoy breaks from the traditional rectangle of painting by using CnC-routed PVC panels cut into Tetris-like shapes. The panels have an abstract, inkjet-printed image on their surface, the forms of which line up perfectly though the panels overlap each other and hang askew. Regenerated Other shows this method to its greatest effect. Three cut panels overlap each other, while their surfaces are overlaid with a printed image of rectangular blocks of color and a vaporous swirl blue like an old Windows computer screensaver. The arrangement of the cut panels is playful, while the alignment of the image is satisfying like clicking a jigsaw puzzle piece into place.
Craig Rouse, NAR Comp #1, acrylic on panel, 18 x 24 inches. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
Tim McKay, Preparing to Grieve, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 32 x 32 inches. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
Many of the other artists excel compositionally, creating a variety of aesthetically pleasing works. In his painting NAR: Comp #1, Craig Rouse shifts primary and secondary colors slightly to tones of tangerine, sage green, and fuchsia. Slanting quadrilateral shapes converge near the center of the painting, allowing the eye to skip around from one hue to the next. Tim McKay paints in candy tones, as in his work Preparing to Grieve. Though much of the surface is filled with vibrant vertical stripes of color, a few horizontal bars of black settle into the bottom right corner, interrupting the composition as grief interrupts regular life.
Jude Barton, Construction Zone #3, acrylic and ink, 20 x 16 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Jude Barton, the show’s curator and originator, distills geometric forms down to white lines on a matte black background. In her Construction Zone series, she creates compositional cairns, balancing triangles, circles, and rectangles on the verge of collapse. Barton’s joy in the arrangement of shapes is apparent. Barton collected the 14 local artists for Architecture of Form, finding the tie that binds them all together: an investigation of geometric abstraction through many interesting media. [1] She hopes to continue presenting the work of the collective into the future. This exhibition runs from beautiful and balanced paintings to intriguing and off-the-wall performance. As invoked by the artists, Theo Van Doesburg or Kazimir Malevich would feel right at home.
Jillian Blackwell is a Denver-based artist and art educator. She holds a BA in Fine Arts with a Concentration in Ceramics from the University of Pennsylvania.
[1] The 14 artists included in the 2022 Architecture of Form exhibition are Jude Barton (curator), Richard Chamberlain, Denise Demby, Nicholas Figel, Leo Franco, John Kjos, Chuck McCoy, Tim McKay, Richard Neff, Roger Rapp, Craig Robb, Craig Rouse, Jean Smith, and J. Bruce Wilcox.
