Breakthroughs: A Celebration of RedLine at 15 at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art showcases the forward leaps of eighteen artist alumni from RedLine Contemporary Art Center’s residency program.
Breakthroughs: A Celebration of RedLine at 15
February 24—May 28, 2023
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver
The Denver Museum of Contemporary Art’s current exhibition, Breakthroughs: A Celebration of RedLine at 15, showcases work from RedLine Contemporary Art Center residency alums, who assert their rightful place among acclaimed regional artists. The non-profit art center, opened in 2008 by Laura Merage and the David and Laura Merage Foundation, houses, at most, eighteen emerging Colorado artists for a two-year residency. The anniversary show at MCA features eighteen former RedLine residents, who share their most recent artistic innovations.
Starting on the museum’s ground floor, the vibrant colors of Suchitra Mattai, longtime Denver artist Tony Ortega, and Daisy Patton’s works coax closer looks at their weavings of personal, historical, and mythological symbologies. Mattai literally weaves Caribbean Carnival and South Asian designs on top of a European-style tapestry. Mattai and Ortega’s respective artwork also articulate identities touched by immigration and cultural hybridity. Sharing a vividness with Ortega and Mattai, Patton’s blown-up paintings of found family photographs “re-contextualize” the past with the present, to quote Patton.
Other artists, including Eileen Roscina, Juntae Teejay Hwang, and Rebecca Vaughan, grapple with the confounding mixture of joy, melancholy, and anxiety in starting a new family, finding a lost family, or attending family events. Such stress humorously appears in Hwang’s ceramic figures of family members dripping with hardened beads of perspiration while attending a wedding. Vaughan displays a different vulnerability, employing scraps of fabric cut into bird silhouettes to portray her search for her biological family. These textile remnants come from a 19th-century London institution where parents who left their children in its care received a cloth token to reclaim their kin.
Throughout the exhibition, Ana María Hernando’s “tulle paintings” surprise the viewer. Choosing to play with the architecture of the building, Hernando places her pieces under windows, at the end of long corridors, and around corners. Clinging to the walls like barnacles covered in sex-on-the-beach-colored tutus, Hernando’s frilly enhancements lend a feminine flare to an otherwise masculine edifice.
Several other pieces in the show underscore the artists’ desires to overcome the constraints of verbal language by exploring alternative ways to speak with the environment around them. For instance, Gretchen Marie Schaefer poses in photographs and a video with a realistic-looking papier-mâché rock on her back. Schaefer thus emblematizes the burden of possessing a body codified as female under a pervasive male gaze. Constructing boulders from periodicals, she underscores the tension between assumption and truth, including assumptions about the heaviness of boulders and the infallibility of the news.
On the same floor, Jeff Page questions the belief that what is normative is preferred by talking back to harmful ideologies privileging certain sexualities. Punished in the past for “sounding gay,” Page uses cliche sayings from queer culture (including “Yas, Queen!” made mainstream in RuPaul’s Drag Race) to reclaim his voice. He soothes his trauma, coincidentally manifesting as thyroid cancer, with a campy wellness tutorial entitled “Throat Chaqra Therapy” (framed by gemstones and pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, pills).
Ashley Eliza Williams’ oil paintings of rocks, animals, and landscapes stray from Schaefer and Page’s engagement with social discourses on gender and sexuality. Instead, Williams “empathically” reaches out to the non-human. Experimenting with the language of “data” and scientific methodologies, Williams accesses the “Umwelt,” or the German word for the natural world’s experience of itself.
Contributing to this permeating theme of communication, Ben Coleman and Trey Duvall show interest in archaic technology, absurdity, and sound. Coleman forces us to surveil artificial intelligence conversations through tin cans attached to wires. Suggesting sound in his silent room of silver ladders, Duvall’s static choreography of everyday objects recalls the dumb, once-heard noise of their crashing as performed on the exhibition’s opening night.
Amber Cobb, collage artist Mario Zoots, and Tya Anthony consider language or communication alongside abstraction, asking more formal questions without erasing their backstories. As a Black woman bolstering marginalized voices, Anthony digresses from and critiques the canonical European roots of abstract art. Although Anthony’s works look like expressions of an older contemporary movement, seemingly influenced by Pierre Soulages and Richard Serra’s paintings, she is at the forefront of a renewed interest in Black abstract painters.
The remaining artists in the exhibition, Sammy Seung-Min Lee, Marsha Mack, and Alicia Ordal, create fantasy environments as expressions of longing for home—a place of solace, ample space, security, and acceptance. Arising from their respective experiences of being an immigrant (Lee), biracial (half-Vietnamese Mack), or unwelcomed in her rapidly gentrifying city (Ordal), these artists manufacture their own dystopic or utopic responses. Indeed, while Lee’s arrangement of black suitcases on top of mirror vinyl flooring emphasizes relentless transience, Mack and Ordal envision colorful alternatives to their present realities with Mack’s lush, girly jungle paradise and Ordal’s Z-shaped sanctuary composed of upcycled carpet padding resembling unyielding granite.
Certainly, Denver grows more inhospitable for artists who cannot afford to live and work here. Despite these hostile aspects, all of the exhibition’s featured artists break through their roadblocks, showing how they cope by offering profound critiques of their current social-political surroundings. Moreover, the MCA showcases RedLine as an unparalleled patron of regional arts, providing the more-than-ample space emerging artists need to flourish and find a well-deserved home right where they are.
