Upcoming Exhibitions

LAURA LETINSKY
Still Life Photographs 1997–2012

May 25 to September 8, 2013
Artist Talk: Friday, May 24, 7 pm
Opening Reception: Friday, May 24, 8 pm

Organized and circulated by the Denver Art Museum photography department, in collaboration with the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.

For more than fifteen years, Canadian-born artist, Laura Letinsky, has explored the possibilities of still life photography. The generally subdued colors of her work lend it an air of lightness and tranquility that is often at odds with the moldering produce and mass-produced remnants of daily life she orchestrates in her photographs. On close inspection, playful manipulations of balance, space, and scale reveal both her curiosity about human perception and her rigorous search for meaningful form.

While Letinsky’s earlier photographs evoke feelings of melancholy—often awakening a sense of absence or an awareness of time that has just passed—her recent work has focused on elaborate paper constructions that produce complex spatial and perceptual puzzles when photographed. Intrigued by the shifting relationship between ideas and their corresponding representations in visual art, she uses the time-honored genre of still life both to explore the way we see and to challenge our understanding of what we observe.

This major touring retrospective of Letinsky’s work has its first Canadian venue at Rodman Hall Art Centre. It will also tour to Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa and School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

MARY ANNE BARKHOUSE
Regency

June 21 to September 8, 2013
Artist Talk: Friday, June 21, 7 pm
Opening Reception: Friday, June 21, 8 pm

Curated by Stuart Reid

Running concurrently with her outdoor sculpture installation called Settlement, Mary Anne Barkhouse responds to the ornately appointed parlours of historic Rodman Hall with a new exhibition called Regency. The definition of a “regent” is someone who stands in the place of the monarch. This is a potent concept in 2013, as Aboriginal people organize and demand discussion around treaty rights in the international Idle No More movement. Barkhouse calls many aspects of colonial privilege into question with new works that set the stage for a Victorian Tea in the galleries of Rodman Hall. Barkhouse eschews Victorian convention and invites the animals of the boreal forest to sup and take up a place at the table. Working with cast bronze, glass and ceramic figures, Barkhouse creates life-size replicas of flora and fauna that transform the traditional tea party into a respected conference of animal witnesses.