PORTALS
Melana Bontrager, Ana Zanic, Sharon Strasburg, Melanie Grein, Aaron Morgan Brown, Caprice Pierucci
Walker Fine Art, Denver
May 17 - July 13, 2024
Art is a connecting link: it is bound to this reality, yet can transport us to new realms of experience and new ways of thinking. Art can quiet the mind, pull us into an intriguing narrative, elicit a sensory experience, or give us reprieve while finding emotional buoyancy. Suspending and perhaps even escaping time, these six artists featured in PORTALS offer a gateway to limitless exploration of time, place, and consciousness through painting, sculpture, watercolor, and printmaking. Walker Fine Art in Denver, Colorado, invites you to step inside a story, time travel, find solace, and fall into an immersive landscape, escaping the laws and regulations that govern our day to day lives.
In an orchestra of colors, MELANA BONTRAGER explores the tension and relationship between humans and history in her new series. Much like history, Bontrager includes layers of existence in her work. Man-made marks, ever-changing terrain, and fractions of new horizons, Bontrager offers us a lens into a landscape unbound by time, but rich with evidence of both the past and future.
SHARON STRASBURG’s sensuously colored and textured landscapes provide harmonious yet complex arrangements where eye and mind can roam in peaceful reverie - a place to meditate, to imagine, to dream. The luminosity and saturation of the colors, rhythm and movement in the juxtaposition of shapes suggest the natural world. Connections to a remembered place are left to the inventiveness of the viewer.
MELANIE GREIN offers an alternative approach to landscape through space, line, color, and texture. Focused primarily on buoyancy, each piece of Grein’s new series sets forth a distinct upward force that resists and transcends the descending weight of worry that surrounds us at times. Seeking to highlight the meeting point between land and sky, sky and water, and what that marriage produces ; her end result offers us moments of solace.
AARON MORGAN BROWN’s new series invites his viewers inside alternate interior universes sewn together from his daily observations, memories, impressions of the world at large, cultural ephemera, and his imagination. His paintings act as prismatic lens through which Brown re-views reality and transcribes subconscious directives. This new series illuminates intersections of the seen and unseen.
Through the quiet tension between the richness of colors and the delicacy of the medium of watercolor, ANA ZANIC seeks to expose the fragility and grace of nature’s realms - reefs - in her new series. Scattered moments of human existence trickle in through her intricate mark making and blend with textures of the natural world to create a harmonious pair.
Inspired by small moments in nature, earth erosion, cave formations, wind on desert sand, and fascinated by the concept of eternity and time, CAPRICE PIERUCCI’s work invites the viewer to look at the larger picture. Through the undulating rhythms in her organic sculptures, Pierucci seeks a sensorial experience for her viewers, to find those small moments of beauty and take time to reflect on the expansion of time behind its creation.
WALKER FINE ART
300 W. 11th Avenue #A, Denver, Colorado 80204
