The Walls Between Us
The Walls Between Us: The Artnauts
Center for Visual Art, Metropolitan State University of Denver
965 Santa Fe Drive, Denver, CO 8020
August 14-October 17, 2020
Admission: Free
Review by Danielle Cunningham
Center for Visual Art’s newest exhibition The Walls Between Us depicts not only the literal and metaphoric walls in our contemporary world, but also the experiences that happen in the space between those walls. Featuring work by The Artnauts, an international social justice-oriented collective, the exhibition includes nearly 40 artworks ranging from traditional drawings and paintings to edgy installations and sculptures. Many works express the artists’ relationships with walls and boundaries, establishing an empathetic environment that is aesthetically diverse yet conceptually similar.
Two views of Sammy Lee’s Mamabot, 2020, Hanji paper, digital archival prints, picture frames, silk flowers, toys, brushes, and acrylic varnish. Images by DARIA.
One of the first works visitors encounter is Sammy Lee’s Mamabot—a larger-than-life-sized black figure made from handmade Korean Hanji paper, children’s toys, and framed photographs of the artist’s family. With this work, Lee responds to her intersecting roles as an artist and mother, and captures her struggle to live up to her own impossibly high standards. Like much of Lee’s work, paper dominates here manipulated through a series of actions Lee calls “laundry-like” in her statement. The transformed paper stretches over framed images of Lee’s family, covering the frames except for small vignettes, emphasizing the tension between home and career. Mamabot and Lee’s personal experience suggest that in today’s world of hybrid identities, the most meaningful dialogue about boundaries may happen while navigating a middle ground.
Dr. George Rivera, Sonoran Signs, 2019, digital art and installation. Image by DARIA.
Contrasting with Lee’s work about implied boundaries, Dr. George Rivera, co-founder of The Artnauts, has created Sonoran Signs—a multimedia installation referencing the literal and geopolitical border between the United States and Mexico. Focused on the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona—a veritable graveyard crossed by Mexican migrants—Rivera places battered, empty water jugs in front of digital images of the border wall, white crosses, and a red, menacing atmosphere. Rivera’s installation also features a water-filled bag high above the gallery floor, accentuating the unreachability of water and acting as a metaphor for freedom. A shadowy vulture sits atop the digital border wall, representing the desert as a space that not only exists between the U.S. and Mexico, but also between life and death.
A still from Dr. Beth Krensky’s Make Me a Sanctuary, 2018, video. Image by DARIA.
Like Rivera, Dr. Beth Krensky uses a desert landscape in her performative film Make Me a Sanctuary—a work that connects meditative walking to spirituality. Inserting her own body into a desolate environment and establishing it as a seemingly religious tool, Krensky presents the body as an intercessor between physical and spiritual spaces. The work also frames the body between spacious shots of the ground and the blue sky, implying that human life is neither fully of the earth nor heavenly, but somewhere in the middle.
Two works by Jorge Ed PerezGa. On the left: Make It Blue. Make It Pink., 2020, oil on canvas. On the right: Color the Mexican, 2020, oil on canvas. Image by DARIA.
An installation view and detail view of Rachael Delaney’s Hielo, 2020, quilted mylar and thread. Image by DARIA.
Several artists in the exhibition display their unique experiences with intersecting identities, such as gender and race in Jorge Ed PerezGa’s Color the Mexican and Make It Blue. Make It Pink. Others focus on social justice topics, particularly immigration. In Hielo, for instance, Rachael Delaney created quilts from the same material given to people in detainment camps.
Although the exhibition statement describes The Artnauts’ work as articulating the ways in which borders and boundaries divide us, the exhibition accomplishes the opposite. Rather than highlighting walls or other symbols of exclusion, the works evoke feelings of optimism, triumph over adversity, and care for humanity across borders. Most importantly, by pointing out that walls in their various forms are merely an illusion of division, The Artnauts teach viewers how to effectively destroy walls, leaving shared experiences in their place.
Danielle Cunningham is a mentally ill artist, scholar, and independent curator living in Denver, CO. Influenced by mysticism and science fiction/fantasy imagery, she creates art that re-contextualizes science fiction tropes and subverts mainstream ideas of gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. Her practice lies in DIY/punk and Marxist feminist methodologies, because of which she typically pursues collaborations. As a member of Hexus, an intersectional, (dis)abled feminist collective, Danielle has curated exhibitions and created performances and installations using Magick to make visible and de-stigmatize mental illness. Since 2018, Danielle has studied Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Denver, where she was awarded a Graduate Teaching Assistantship at Vicki Myhren Gallery. She is currently making work for an exhibition with painter Julio Alejandro exploring the relationship between capitalism and racism in American professional athletics.
