Voelz Chandler: Newly hung fall exhibitions exude sense of timelessness

Published September 8, 2006 at midnight

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Some work - whether brand new or hailing from decades ago - fits well in the category of "timeless."

And that is certainly true at + Gallery, with new paintings by Jenny Morgan and Colin Livingston, as well as at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, which again decided to kick off its fall season with work by the master of many mediums, Herbert Bayer.

At +, owner Ivar Zeile has mixed styles all the way around, by hanging new portraiture by Morgan, Pop-infused graphics with an ironic subtext by Livingston, and color-saturated photo-based work by Jeff Strahl.

Zeile teamed Morgan - who has met with extraordinary success with her unusually cropped nude self-portraits where cloth helps tell the story - with Livingston, who relies on bold (and, yes, humorous) imagery to convey a message about art and commercialism because both are highly visible graduates from the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.

There, though, any similarity ends.

In her new series, "Romantic Comedies," Morgan, who made news by being accepted into the Smithsonian Institution's Outwin Boochever 2006 Portrait Competition, has infused these paintings with deeper content: the end of a relationship, which brought with it nothing remotely resembling laughter.

Her paintings - including one in which she used a model besides herself, a first - act out a breakup in subtle references to body language, space and position. They are the most thoughtful and well-conceived work yet from this 2003 graduate who is heading to New York for graduate studies.

Meanwhile, Livingston, who graduated from RMCAD in 2001, takes aim at the objectification of art in a menu-style exhibition that allows - seriously - a potential patron to commission a work by selecting a palette of colors, a pattern, a logo and a slogan.

It's a giant mix-and-match type of art-making, where the components of a piece are reduced to a menu, a focused and in-your-face comment on how art can be bought and sold in the same way one purchases a sofa or a car.

Livingston illustrates the concept with six large-scale "samples," and a giant grid showing the possibilities. Taken together, these works light up the gallery with their beautiful craftsmanship and intelligent design.

• A Bayer world is a better world: Last year, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design opened the year with "A Visual Voice: The Language of Herbert Bayer," work drawn from private collectors and the Bayer family.

Fast forward 12 months, and the school's Philip J. Steele Gallery is honing in on a more specific side of Bayer while drawing from the same resources (plus some new collecting talent). In "Herbert Bayer: Earth and Air," gallery and visiting artist director Lisa Spivak has again included several different mediums - from photographs of earth works to tapestries to paintings to photomontages that are as familiar as your own home.

The almost 70 pieces (a few featured last year) were chosen to demonstrate two links: to Bayer's references to the earth-bound environment, including some fine paintings and reliefs referred to as "dunstlcher paintings," a term that refers to implements hung on barns he saw as a youth; and nods to aerial subjects such as the wind, celestial geometry and airborne creatures.

In short, "Earth and Air" is a must-see exhibition, a reminder that this protean artist's venture into numerous mediums and subjects is as vivid and important today as it was decades ago.

"Herbert Bayer: Earth and Air" opens with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. today, and will include a talk by the school's co-director of post-professional education, Katherine McCoy, at 10 a.m. Tuesday. Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design is at 1600 Pierce St., Lakewood; information: 303-753-6046, or www.rmcad.edu.

Graphic designer McCoy has created a poster to sell to raise money to cast a Bayer sculpture for the school; the maquette, though, which was on view last fall, took a beating from winter weather and is no longer on display.

And if you crave more Bayer, the unpreviewed show "Bauhaus Master: Six Decades of Herbert Bayer Posters From the Bayer Family Collection," is on view through Oct. 13 in the Hatton Gallery at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

IN THE NEWS: If you are driving along Speer Boulevard, heading north into downtown, you might have noticed something new atop the building that houses Zeitgeist Modern Furniture Classics: a black and white sculpture that rotates at the pleasure of the wind. Giddy-Up, a powder-coated aluminum piece that measures about 9 feet by 17 feet, is the work of sculptor Robert Delaney, and was commissioned by Zeitgeist owner Randy Roberts. It's a fine addition to the city's streetscape - and skyline. . . . The Colorado Council on the Arts has hired a new Art in Public Places director with a long background in that field. Jil Rosentrater began the $62,000 job last week, and will administer a suddenly huge (as in $2 million) number of commissions, mainly fueled by development at Fitzsimons. Rosentrater comes to the job from serving as executive director of ArtReach Inc. and director of cultural affairs for the city of Greeley. There, she wrote the ordinance for - and managed - the city's Percent for Art program. . . . And to catch the Aug. 30 presentation of architect Daniel Libeskind's proposals for Civic Center, tune in to KDVR-Channel 8 at 8 p.m. Saturday, 11 a.m. Sept. 15 or 8:30 a.m. Sept. 29 (it also is available as a streaming video through the Denver 8 Online archives feature on www.denvergov.org).

Mary Voelz Chandler is the art and architecture critic. Chandlerm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2677

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