Macky Auditorium Concert Hall

BMoCA at Macky – Kerry Cannon: Alchemy

BMoCA at MACKY, an exciting collaboration between Boulder Museum of Contemporary Artand The Andrew J. Macky Gallery, is located in the foyer of the Macky Auditorium Concert Hall at the University of Colorado Boulder. This series of exhibitions is curated by BMoCA as an extension to its rotating exhibition schedule.The fourth edition of BMoCA at MACKY presents works by Kerry Cannon, and will be on view at the Macky Gallery from January 11 to March 24.

Admission to the gallery is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and to ticketed patrons during Macky Auditorium performances and events.

Alchemy

Taking pleasure in the humorous nuances and intimate details of the human condition, Kerry Cannon tells the story of Alchemy in a series of bronze sculptures that progresses from scene to scene like a three-dimensional comic strip based on a Shakespearean tragedy. The story follows the alchemist’s quest to unlock the secret of the Philospher’s Stone in order to turn base metals into gold. To do this, the right balance and combinations of elements had to be achieved in laborious experiments, while the stars and the unpredictable moon had to be in just the right position.

Kerry Cannon was born in 1958 and lived in Texas and Colorado before moving to Australia in 1995. Now he divides his time between Warialda in New South Wales and Arizona in the United States. He holds a BS from Colorado State University (1981) and an MBA from University of Colorado at Denver (1987), and attended Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design, Denver (1994). Cannon exhibits regularly in Australia and the US.

BMoCA at Macky: The Eye Awake

BMoCA at MACKY, an exciting collaboration between Boulder Museum of Contemporary Artand The Andrew J. Macky Gallery, is located in the foyer of the Macky Auditorium Concert Hall at the University of Colorado Boulder. This series of exhibitions is curated by BMoCA as an extension to its rotating exhibition schedule.The third edition of BMoCA at MACKY presents works by Ian Fisher and Matthew Harris, and guest curated by Cortney Lane Stell, director of the Phillip J. Steel Gallery. This will be on view at the Macky Gallery from November 8, 2012 to January 2, 2013.

Admission to the gallery is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and to ticketed patrons during Macky Auditorium performances and events.

THE EYE AWAKE

The Eye Awake features new works by Ian Fisher and Matthew Harris, two artists who both currently live and work in Colorado. The title and frame of the exhibition, The Eye Awake, focuses on Fisher and Harris’ similar practices of culling inspiration from the visible world they are immersed in, whether it comes from cloud formations or globs of paint. Though these two artists have similar approaches to viewing and incorporating the world around them, Fisher and Harris contrast in the visceral task of making sense of this world through their mediums and subject matter. Matthew Harris’ material-landscape photographs and Ian Fisher’s cloud paintings shown side by side illuminate one of contemporary art’s enduring partnerships between physicality and idealism.

Harris’ photographs result from detailed documentation of his experimental studio practice. Comfortable working with any material in reach, he often uses items such as packing Styrofoam or butter, among other things, for their intrinsic aesthetic qualities. Pairing Harris’ articulated molecular territories with Fisher’s paintings of billowing summer clouds highlights the discrepancy and paradoxical complementarity of grand landscape in partnership with banal detail, at the intersection of which resides a desire to understand the world though human experience. Fisher’s large-scale cloud paintings resonate with the idealism often found in spiritual art while maintaining attention to the human drive to find relational connections to the natural world.

Exhibited next to each other, Fisher and Harris’ works make visible a grasping at understanding the aesthetic world around us, underscored by the variety of places aesthetic objects can be found. In the correspondences and contrasts between the sacred and the profane, the mundane and the iconic, the artists draw out a sense of the complexity of our visual world by observing the sublime and ridiculous details of the material world around us.

— Cortney Lane Stell, Guest Curator

BMoCA at Macky: River School

We are excited to continue the BMoCA at MACKY project, an exciting collaboration between Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and The Andrew J. Macky Gallery, located in the foyer of the Macky Auditorium Concert Hall at the University of Colorado Boulder. This series of exhibitions is curated by BMoCA as an extension to its rotating exhibition schedule.

The second edition of BMoCA at MACKY presents paintings of Denver artist Beau Carey. This will be on view at The Macky Gallery from August 30 to October 28, 2012.

Admission to the gallery is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 10am to 5pm and to ticketed patrons during Macky Auditorium performances and events.

BEAU CAREY: RIVER SCHOOL

Beau Carey’s paintings reflect the artist’s contemplative stance on place and its cultural implications. Vast surroundings, environments, and situations are conveyed in his landscape-based works through formalized compositions that focus on fundamental elements, sometimes reduced to the point of vertical or horizontal bands of color as reference to environmental components.

With Carey’s move from New Mexico to Colorado in 2010, the paintings have undergone a distinct shift from the restrained renderings of expansive spaces that extend far into the horizon, to more vivid depictions of waterfalls and dramatic impressions of the Rocky Mountains. Carey attributes this not only to the change in his immediate environment, but to the historical references he found himself unable to disregard when interpreting scenes he was too familiar with through the work of such pioneering painters of the American West as Albert Bierstadt or Frederic Remington.

Beau Carey was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1980 and moved to Denver, Colorado in 2010. He received his BFA (2006) and MFA (2010) from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. He is currently a resident artist at RedLine Denver. Carey has exhibited extensively throughout New Mexico, including the 2012 exhibition Monday Afternoon at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, juried by Lucy Lippard and Joel-Peter Witkin.

BMoCA at Macky: “No Longer In My Hands” by Terry Campbell

BMoCA at Macky
April 6–May 27, 2012

We are excited to announce our new project, BMoCA AT MACKY, a new collaboration between Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and The Andrew J. Macky Gallery, located in the foyer of the Macky Auditorium Concert Hall at the University of Colorado Boulder. This series of exhibitions is curated by BMoCA as an extension to its rotating exhibition schedule. Exhibitions take place at The Macky Gallery on the CU campus.

The first edition of BMoCA AT MACKY presents the large-scale figurative paintings of Denver artist Terry Campbell. This exhibition is curated by BMoCA and will be on view at The Macky Gallery from April 6 to May 27, 2012.

Admission to the gallery is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 10am to 5pm and to ticketed patrons during Macky Auditorium performances and events.

TERRY CAMPBELL: NO LONGER IN MY HANDS

Terry Campbell tells of personal experiences and impressions through large-scale figurative paintings. Executed in natural muted hues on vast canvases, their presence induces a sense of somber unease. Although often depicting his friends or relatives, the artist regards these works as self-portraits, documenting his own emotions and memories of specific situations.

The characters are set to navigate austere interiors and barren landscapes of an undefined yet specific time and place, tinted with nostalgia. Here, every aspect takes on symbolic meaning – from the people’s pensive expressions and stationary postures, to the dress or costume they are wearing, their position towards objects and each other, and even the implied place the observer assumes in relation to them. But as the meaning of these details is never fully revealed, viewers are drawn to conceive and insert their own narratives.

Terry Campbell was born in 1982. He lives in Denver and teaches art at Colorow Elementary School in Littleton, Colorado. He holds a Bachelor of Art Education and a Bachelor of Fine Art from Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, Denver (2005). Campbell is a member of Pirate Contemporary Art, Denver and a Resident Artist at RedLine Denver, where he exhibits regularly. In 2007 he curated the exhibition He Did What? of works by Harry C. Walters at Rhinoceropolis, Denver.

Now at the Macky Gallery: Jim Sidinger

The Eastern Plains of Colorado are definitely not empty of interest and devoid of beauty, as those who only photograph in the mountains might have you believe. This show of a few of my Eastern Colorado images is my attempt to offer you proof.

True, you have to invest a bit more to see that beauty. It doesn’t smack you in the face like the view of a snow covered 14’er and it doesn’t shout in your ear with the din of a tumbling mountain stream. Instead, it softly touches your heart and mind with the sparseness of its open spaces and it whispers in your ear with a prairie wind. Also, you have to invest something of yourself to appreciate this special place for what it is and what it can do for your soul. If you haven’t tried already, perhaps that investment will start here in a few minutes spent with these 25 images.

I started photographing on the plains in the late 1990s as a kind of ‘personal project’. Like most, I had been seduced by the mountain landscape. One day, out of curiosity, I decided to look east, instead of west, and have felt rewarded for that choice ever since.

Originally, my goal was to photograph in every county east of Denver and I have succeeded – over years and thousands of miles of county roads (most often named after numbers and letters of the alphabet). Now I go back, over and over again, to find those special places that I’ve I missed the first times through. Lately I have crossed the border, both literally & figuratively, as I have expanded the project to “the Great Plains” and have begun making images in Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and Kansas.

In my career, I have photographed many other subjects and I will continue to do so. I believe, however, my passion will always remain there – on the Plains.

I consider myself an interpretive landscape photographer. I use a traditional camera with black & white film. (Yes, you can still buy it!). In my chemical darkroom, I develop my negatives and personally hand print each image on silver gelatin paper, processed to archival standards. My previous camera was a medium format Mamiya RB67 (some of these older images are here) but I now use a large format Ebony SV45Ti 4×5. I have always favored wide lenses.