Brief sketches of what's happening in the Denver art scene.
By Michael Paglia
There's a great new gallery called weilworks (3611 Chestnut Place, 303-308-9345) that just opened this past spring. It's located across the street from Ironton, in the industrial neighborhood north of downtown. Unlike most of the businesses around here -- including Ironton -- weilworks is housed in its own custom-designed structure, which was commissioned by owner Tracy Weil and designed by Denver architect David Lynn Wise. The very cool building looks like a neo-modern barn and features a cluster of separate volumes in different finishes that culminate in a three-story observation tower.
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The current solo at weilworks, Unstitched:
A Voyeur's Idiom, features the work of
Jimmy Sellars and is heavily laden with timely
political content. Sellars creates photo-based pieces
that depict G.I. Joe dolls in couples, as in
"Unstitched Diaries" (pictured). "It's a new space,
so I wanted to push the envelope and be a little
confrontational," Weil says. "But the pieces are not
only political, they're also beautiful; people can
come in and see that for themselves."
Weil is right: Sellars's works are both
confrontational and beautiful, which is a very
difficult combination to pull off. Because they are
GI Joes, the topic of gays in the military is
suggested, as is same-sex marriage, since they're
pictured in couples. Sellars says he wanted to
address his own life in this work because when he was
a child, he played with GI Joes and transferred his
own thoughts and feelings onto the toy soldiers. He
points out an interesting contradiction about them in
his artist's statement: The dolls are macho and
neutered at the same time.
The Sellers pieces are installed in the main space on
the ground floor and in the stairway of the
observation tower. On a landing at the second floor
are four tiny installations by guest artist Kelan
Smith, part of a mini-exhibit called
Women
of Hitchcock. Smith dressed vintage
Barbie dolls in costumes from Hitchcock movies and
then stood them in front of painted backdrops
evocative of the particular film that's being
referenced.
The weilworks gallery is only open on weekends, so
there are just a couple of days left to catch these
two interesting shows before they come down this
Sunday, July 11.