My eldest daughter Elly took me to a super cool art gallery in downtown Denver called The Dikeou Collection. There’s no signage for the space, which is on the 5th floor of an old, nondescript office building. According to Wikipedia, “Much of the work in the Dikeou Collection, no matter what medium, aims to reflect major forces in each artists’ oeuvre and reflects the very conditions that exist between artist, viewer, context, critic, and collector.” I visited the Denver Art Museum and the Clyfford Still Museum, and I will write about both in the next post, but the art from the Dikeou Collection is the stuff that sticks its craw in my brain and keeps me thinking and wondering and smiling.
It’s a free gallery, and Elly and I were the first to arrive the day we visited, so we got to watch the big pink bunnies blow up! It was awesome! They get a daily inflate and deflate. Created by Momoyo Torimitsu, these are titled “Somehow I Don’t Feel Comfortable.” There are two matching bunnies in the first room you enter, and here I am with one of them.
Below, I’m in front of a Luis Macias print, one of a set of prints titled “A Fine Monday Morning.” Note the phrase. I love that there’s a Rachel reason!
- From Dikeou: “The scenes are from inside Bette Midler’s luxurious Fifth Avenue apartment, for which Macias was one of its interior decorators and fabricators. These seemingly banal shots of lamp fixtures and staircases are interrupted by cartoonish speech bubbles filled with phrases that make no sense like, “dirt in the T-shirt Molly is the real brainabuse.” Frustration is the underlying cause of this gibberish, which stems from a broken intercom system that cannot be repaired or replaced – a situation that irks both the designer and the patron. A story such as this, about the dramas of decorating one’s home, would bore your face off if it was told over brunch by your mother-in-law, but Macias turns it into an artful symbolist tale of intrigue that leaves the viewer wanting to know more.”
Here’s Elly inside of “Otter” by Lucky DeBellevue.
And here I am inside of Agathe Snow’s “Sludgie the Whale.”
You can view all the pieces online here. Some have curator and/or artist statements, which I find very helpful. Normally, I don’t want to be told what an artist is trying to express. I often don’t even want a title to attach to a piece, because I prefer to come up with my own story or view. But the art in The Dikeou Collection was just so wacky that I found it difficult to understand until I read about how and why each artist created their work.
And finally, here’s a piece of street art I found in the alley behind my daughters’ Denver apartment. This made me so, so happy!
I added a feather to this mixed media piece while I was visiting Denver. So now I’m part of the Denver art scene, right? 🙂
P.S. This week, this blog celebrates it’s 2 year anniversary! Woot!!
Rachel Imsland, Artist 