Why I Love This Art – Patti Hallock's The West is Here

Why I Love This Art features museum employees, volunteers, and interns talking about art they love from the exhibitions at MCA Denver. Here Event and Rental Manager Erin Algiere writes about Patti Hallock's exhibition The West is Here, on view through Sunday, March 3, 2013. 

I would like to admit that I frequently find myself in Patti Hallock's gallery when I am supposed to be at my desk plugging away at accounting spreadsheets. And I realize that I could have gone anywhere else in the building to get away from those spreadsheets, yet chose to be among Patti Hallock’s desert views.

Drawing Drawing

At the Patti Hallock/William Lamson/Ladies Fancywork Society opening last month, we hosted a self-portrait contest (a "drawing drawing"), and the winner we selected is above. As promised, the winner received a critique by museum curator Nora Burnett Abrams (as well as a dual/family membership to the museum).

Photos from the opening weekend of the William Lamson, Patti Hallock, and Ladies Fancywork Society exhibitions

Artist William Lamson

Erica Baum is folding paper (and so are you).

MCA Denver invited artist Derek Beaulieu to guest blog during the duration of the exhibition Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, in which excerpts from Beaulieu's 124-painting sequence the Newspaper are featured. Beaulieu is the author of 9 books of poetry and conceptual fiction. He teaches at the Alberta College of Art + Design and can be found online at:  www.derekbeaulieu.wordpress.com. This is the final of four blogs for MCA Denver.

Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art contributor Erica Baum poeticizes our minor gestures. Baum transforms a reading act—the motion of dog-earing a book’s page—into a writerly one.

Why Postscript Matters

Why has MCA Denver curated an exhibition on conceptual writing, and why now? Part of the relevance of Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art stems from our present situation in the digital age. We are flooded everyday with the digital, which, as Artforum argued several months back, "is, at base, a linguistic model. Convert any .jpg file to .txt and you will find its ingredients: a garbled recipe of numbers and letters, meaningless to the average viewer." If the digital is indeed "at base, a linguistic model," then this deluge of the digital indicates a linguistic shift. We are experiencing a linguistic shift about how we process information, and that linguistic shift also has visual consequences; everyday we access information via different technologies, and we process that information via different visual formats. .jpg files neatly summarize these visual consequences, as well as an apparatus like the Kindle might. 

Remembering Jake Adam York

In December of 2012, our community lost one of its most beloved contributors, Jake Adam York.

Eric Zboya's Poetic Star Stuff

MCA Denver invited artist Derek Beaulieu to guest blog during the duration of the exhibition Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, in which excerpts from Beaulieu's 124-painting sequence the Newspaper are featured. Beaulieu is the author of 9 books of poetry and conceptual fiction. He teaches at the Alberta College of Art + Design and can be found online at:  www.derekbeaulieu.wordpress.com. This is the third of four blogs for MCA Denver.

If poetry could close it eyes and dream what shape would those dreams take? Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art’s contributor Eric Zboya explores poetry of delicate multi-dimensional dreamscapes—unearthly shapes hovering between dreams and wakefulness. When we close our eyes, unanchored floating shapes skitter and crawl across the blackness like alien mitochondria in a petri dish.