Curator and Artist Esther Hz Discusses Her Art and Soil In Her Studio In Denver’s City Park Neighborhood
Esther Hz in her studio in Denver. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Read my latest article for Southwest Contemporary about Esther Hz’s art practice, including her past as a farmer and recent biodynamic farm-inspired zoetropes for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition agriCULTURE(on view until October 1st).
“Celestial Beings” on display in the agriCULTURE show at BMoCA.
Here’s an excerpt:
Hz has always considered herself a practicing artist, but, as a former farmer, she found little time for art-making. Additionally, having attended a permaculture school in Eugene, Oregon, before urban farming at Produce Denver and then managing the urban Blue Bear Farm at the Colorado Convention Center, Hz remains passionate about agricultural work as an act of self and communal service—providing self-sufficiency and the opportunity to deeply nourish the masses. And, as Hz informed me, it all starts with good soil, the micro-biomes that line our digestive tracts, betraying where we source our food (which, under capitalism, is not necessarily where we live).
Hz and BMoCA’s curator, Jane Burke.
Tones of spirituality, comedy, and healing emerge as powerfully legible focuses in Hz’s oeuvre. Occasionally working in the non-profit sector, including with girls and women from the foster care system, Hz has invited others to play with her in her studio, listening to their histories and visually replicating their stories into art pieces that might offer pathways to self-repair.
“Genesis”
In her 2018 sculpture Genesis, Hz cast a young woman’s face in plaster, creating a visage in which oyster mushroom mycelium overtakes half of the head cast. Hz met this person, dealing with dying and deceased parents and substance abuse, through her non-profit work. Both Hz and this woman agreed that a mushroom mask justly represented her experiences.
“Many Eyes”
Read the full article here. Check out more of my writing on Substack here. And visit my blog here.
Read my latest article for Southwest Contemporary about Lauren Zwicky and Michael Stone’s half salon, half community art-film-music venue, Scorpio Palace. You’ll also learn a little about the history of Denver’s DIY scene.
Here’s an excerpt:
When local film artist Kim Shively alerted Lauren Zwicky that the lease was up for the beloved DIY warehouse art party space Rhinoceropolis, Zwicky and her partner, Michael Stone, spotted a unique opportunity. Sharing sensibilities for electronic music-minded entrepreneurship—Zwicky is a longtime Denver-based DJ and licensed cosmetologist, and Stone is a graphic designer and audio/visual artist and consultant—they opened Scorpio Palace in December 2021.
Before an eloquent friend deemed Zwicky the “death doula” of Rhino, Zwicky witnessed Rhino’s birth, landing her first DJ gig there thirteen years ago. At that time, intermittently spanning the 2000s and 2010s, Rhino was a place to celebrate art and music in a pre-gentrified, pre-RiNo Denver. (The neighborhood branders responsible for coining RiNo, the River North Arts District, claim creative coincidence in closeness to the name of its Rhino predecessor.)
. . .
Yet, Zwicky and Stone know that their days are numbered in this neighborhood as they nodded to the construction cranes surrounding another new high-rise visible from their front window. While they don’t find their vision and efforts futile, they acknowledge that Scorpio Palace’s long-term survival might not be in RiNo/Rhino.
Nevertheless, Scorpio Palace provides a positive community-art space and promotes good, mystical vibes since Zwicky and Stone know, as Zwicky puts it, “the bad magic [of] reviving a corpse.” So don’t come to Scorpio Palace expecting to find the Rhino reincarnate. But do come with expectations for some much-needed communal healing among local artistic visionaries after a collective rough start to the first few decades of the new millennium.
Denver Month of Video will showcase a variety of video art and exhibitions with overlapping themes of Indigenous land and culture, social and environmental justice, and the contemporaneous “aliveness” of performance art. With the help of their vast network of video artist friends and various artist-run spaces and galleries throughout Denver, viewers can find MOV screenings and events in both “top tier” locations (such as the Denver Art Museum) and DIY warehouses, such as Glob. Other venues include Galapago Space, 17th Street “Storefront,” Denver Digerati, and the Daniels and Fisher’s Clock Tower.
Jenna Maurice for Traverse exhibition at Union Hall curated by Esther Hz
MOV’s itinerary kicks off this weekend with a showcase of Colorado-based video artists at the Denver Art Museum on July 1, 2023 with subsequent one-night screenings occurring every Saturday at various locations. Many other screenings and live performances will take place throughout July, including alumni work from Signal Culture, a global media-artist residency program that recently relocated from Upstate New York to Colorado.
New Red Order, “Crimes Against Reality” Exhibition at RedLine curated by Jenna Maurice and Adán De La Garza
“We hope that MOV will provide different access points to video-based work and a home for that work to be seen regularly in Denver,” say Maurice and De La Garza about Denver Month of Video, which may become a biannual event that recommences in 2025. By that time, Denver will certainly be hungry for more simultaneous introductions to video artists and the local art spaces that display their work.
Nicola Fornoni for an exhibition at Understudy Gallery curated by Quinn Dukes
If you mine the Internet for information about the interdisciplinary artist Alex Branch, you’ll learn that she grew up on an island off the coast of Washington, collecting Earth-worn objects washed to shore, pondering the odysseys they mutely contain. As we sat in her studio in the Evans School (in landlocked, water-scarce Denver), I brought up my knowledge of her poetic biography and geographical migrations. From Seattle to Chicago and New York, and artist residencies in Greece, Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, and New Mexico, Branch set an anchor near family in Denver two years ago, finding herself among a supportive art community.
As I considered Branch’s works-in-progress in her studio, I shared her curiosity about the metaphors enveloped in everyday objects, like messages inside ocean-dispatched bottles. Branch gestured to her water bottle on her desk, telling me that even newly manufactured gadgets hold secret narratives about their production. Contemplating the independent, non-ontological lives objects lead, we admired their fusion of organic and synthetic materials, the animal and mechanical labor involved in their development, and their unpredictable transformations with exposure to various physical and social environments.
[. . .]
By the end of my studio visit with Branch, I felt like Alice in Wonderland, shrunk to fit inside my own glass bottle and swept away by the torrent of a meandering conversation. Traversing through themes of the natural, synthetic, and surreal aspects of our reality (shared with a multitude of entities we cannot fully control or communicate with) Branch ignited my wonder about a conscious world independent of us.
Junk Drawer, as founders Justin Najjar-Keith, Jeff Page, and Aleks Rodriguez often repeat, is more than a party. It’s a party as art, art as a party. It’s an act of social dynamic-shifting community service. It’s an education on the BIPOC roots of the techno music dance scene. It gives people an outlet when they, like Rodriguez, “need some faggotry [and] to twirl.” And it’s beyond gender in the profound intimacies it generates.
[. . .]
While saying my goodbyes to the Junk Drawer masterminds, Rodriguez offered a final slogan: “Come correct,” which I misheard as, “Come corrupt.”
“Yes!” Rodriguez adapted my distortion: “Come corrupted by heteronormative society.”
“We used to have a neon sign that said, ‘Come As You Are,’” Page observed.
“Oh? What happened to it?”
“We left it out in the rain, and I think a cat peed on it,” Najjar-Keith informed me.
Ending the night with laughter, I reflected on the perfection of the disappearing sign, one no longer needed to advertise acceptance and inclusion where such expectations reign.
Viewing Breakthroughs: A Celebration of RedLine at 15 with Artist, Alicia Ordal
Alicia Ordal stood in Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art gift shop, waiting for me in white and mauve checkered pants. She coincidentally fit in with the merchandise, which caters to a young audience with 1990s nostalgia (regardless of how conscious they were during the 90s). The MCA’s marketing and special programs target teens and align well with the currentness of its content. Indeed, searching for one’s place in the world becomes a lifelong endeavor that contemporary artists document through innovations in visual language.
The MCA’s current exhibition, Breakthroughs: A Celebration of RedLine at 15, showcases work from RedLine residency alums who assert their rightful place in Colorado’s contemporary art scene. I asked Ordal, one of the eighteen featured artists, to guide me through the exhibition. Ordal received a two-year residency when Laura Merage and The David & Laura Merage Foundation launched the nonprofit art center in 2008. In the historically black Five Points neighborhood, RedLine boasts an ample gallery space surrounded by open artist studios. Although Ordal currently rents a studio at TANK, created by former RedLine artists to provide their cohorts with affordable studios, her previously-occupied studio at RedLine hosts other emerging regional artists.
Artists including Sammy Seung-Min Lee, Marsha Mack, Suchitra Mattai, and Tony Ortega demonstrate how personal, historical, and mythological symbologies articulate identities touched by immigration and cultural hybridity. Others, including Daisy Patton, Eileen Roscina, Juntae Teejay Hwang, and Rebecca Vaughan, grapple with the confounding mixture of joy and anxiety that arise from family events and, to use Patton’s critical phrasing, “re-contextualize” the past with the present.
Right, Suchitra Mattai, “Held Still (in silent echo),” 2021
Many 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. These artists include Gretchen Marie Schaefer, Jeff Page, and Ashley Eliza Williams.
Gretchen Marie Schaefer, courtesy of Schaefer’s websiteJeff Page, “Meditation Guide for 2020,” courtesy of Page’s websiteAshley Eliza Williams, “Umwelt (communication attempt),” 2023Detail of Williams’ “Umwelt”
In addition to this permeating theme of communication, Ben Coleman and Trey Duvall demonstrate an interest in everyday objects, absurdity, and sound. The remaining artists, Amber Cobb, Mario Zoots, and Tya Anthony, consider language or communication alongside abstraction, asking more formal questions without erasing their backstories.
We purposefully viewed Ordal’s piece last, first coming into view from the ground-floor balcony, looking down into the basement. “Originally, I wanted to play with the architecture of this building, which I love,” Ordal looked around her to admire the sleekly modern space created by Adjaye Associates in 2007. “But then I decided to create just one piece and put it in the basement.”
Consequently, Ordal’s change of heart made room for Ana María Hernando’s “tulle paintings” to interact with the space.
Left, one of Hernando’s “tulle paintings.”
“Let’s get a picture of you,” I directed Ordal, like a proud mom, next to her piece. “It’s OK,” I said, addressing the young gallery attendant, “She made this piece. So, she can touch it.”
“I figured from the conversation,” the attendant responded, turning her eyes to Ordal. “I really love the material you used. I didn’t realize at first that it was carpet padding. Did you mean to use it to look like marble?”
Ordal’s sculpture, a Z-shaped octagon entitled “Birdsmouth,” looked, to my eye, as if made from granite slabs. Ordal recounted how she first saw the material when a maintenance person left it in the hallway of her apartment building. “He left it there for a couple of weeks,” Ordal stated. “But the day I finally came to take it, he showed up for it.”
The man returned to give Ordal the leftover material, and she went to the home improvement store for more. As exemplified in her use of this padding, Ordal conscientiously chooses materials. Often these materials are upcycled products, such as toilet paper rolls, upholstery foam, and rope.
When I asked her about the piece’s title, she informed me that “birdsmouth” is a woodworking joint, which she originally planned to incorporate. “I had to give the MCA a title before I made the piece,” Ordal explained. “I’m OK with the title referencing something that’s not even there, though.” Ordal’s birdsmouth-less sculpture, therefore, responds to “the [ubiquitous] boxy Denver loft” by referencing a not-even-there habitat in the city.
For several years now, Ordal has occupied a rare fixed-rent basement apartment in the Denver Highlands neighborhood. (Note how both Ordal and her sculpture inhabit the basement of a building.) Indeed, this historically Latino and low-income neighborhood exemplifies recent, widespread gentrification in Denver.
Once a diverse, residential area, the Highlands now teems with expensive loft buildings, high-end restaurants, and an assortment of gyms, spas, and boutiques that cater to a growing number of white, upper-middle-class young professionals. Many early 20th-century Victorian and mid-century modern homes in the neighborhood have been demolished and rebuilt as monstrous mixed-material hybrids of glass, wood, metal, and stone.
Echoing the architecture around Ordal, “Birdsmouth” incorporates three plastic “windows” in the top left corner of the octagon, covered by a construction-cone-orange tree branch. A wooden ladder leans against the bottom right quadrant. Caught in a dark, polluted cloud that shades the underbelly of the piece, the ladder proposes that we climb out of the muck to access Ordal’s dwelling. Moreover, the name “Birdsmouth” suggests an elevated nest. Drawing from and refuting the world around her, these elements underscore Ordal’s desire to inhabit an imagined space still rooted in the reality of a city she calls home.
In other words, Ordal’s visual reverie holds on to utopic, inclusive futurity by providing an alternative to dystopic, segregating present-day developments. Earlier that day, Ordal showed me a blueprint for the facade of a different dream home generated on her computer. This home also repudiates the uninteresting square loft with its polygon shape. Composed of red brick on one side and yellow brick on the other, the house features a large porthole window tinted purple, a dark green door decorated with a vertical column of transparent glass bricks, and an outdoor rooftop patio. Designing structures satisfying her standards, Ordal passively resists immersion in a world of haphazard design that she lacks the authority to alter.
“Birdsmouth” relates to a handful of other works in the exhibit that manufacture fantasy environments as expressions of existential displacement. Moreover, these constructions express desires to belong somewhere and a find home. For instance, Sammy Seung-Min Lee’s installation utilizes suitcases to invoke the estrangement that immigrants feel after establishing themselves in another country. Underneath these suitcases, Lee laid a block of reflective silver vinyl. The parameters of this mirror flooring comply with Colorado state law, which defines 100 square feet as the minimum amount of space suitable for an “adequate shelter.” Although Lee’s work draws from her own experience as an immigrant from South Korea, her installation also brings to mind Denver’s pervasive homeless population.
In contrast to Lee’s gloomy installation, Marsha Mack translates her vibrant private paradise through a “visual vocabulary of personal symbols.” Such symbols include Pocky boxes, a Japanese candy, alluding to her nostalgia for visiting Asian supermarkets as a half-Vietnamese child. Backdrops of lush jungle waterfalls hang behind her ceramic sculptures of delicate, feminine hands in balletic mudras, fruit rendered as jewelry, a pair of black swans in a clamshell. . . pieces that would be at home on a vanity set in a girly bedroom. Indeed, Mack takes up an entire room in the museum, adding to the work’s voyeuristic pleasure by granting us exclusive access to someone else’s Eden.
In this continuum, “Birdsmouth” lies between Lee’s dreary display of transience and alienation and Mack’s baroque fantasy. Moreover, while Ordal’s longing for home (a place of solace, ample space, security, and acceptance) does not arise from experiences of being biracial or an immigrant, her attention to it highlights its universal elusiveness. Denver, too, seems to grow more inhospitable for artists who cannot afford to live and work here, for immigrants who feel exoticized, for women who feel unsafe, for people of color brutalized by the police, for families torn apart by gun violence . . . For one reason or another, this city pushes everyone out.
These ideas doggedly pursued us as we left the MCA for RedLine in a hotspot of homeless encampments. Its current exhibition, a retrospective on Denver-based photographer Mark Sink, opened on April 1st, 2023. Coming to a wall of “wetplates,” photographs made by pouring collodion on a glass or tin plate before adding silver nitrate, we recognized our friends from the Denver art scene. “Here’s you!” I exclaimed in front of Ordal’s picture. “And here’s you again!” How fitting that Ordal appears simultaneously in RedLine and the RedLine show at the MCA, among her friends, where she belongs, in more-than-adequate spaces that support artists in a tough city. She may not feel entirely at home in Denver, but here is proof that she is welcomed and appreciated.
Breakthroughs: A Celebration of RedLine at 15 opened on February 24, 2023, and is on display until May 28, 2023. Curated by Miranda Lash and Leilani Lynch, the exhibiting artists include Tya Anthony, Amber Cobb, Ben Coleman, Trey Duvall, Ana María Hernando, Juntae Teejay Hwang, Sammy Seung-Min Lee, Marsha Mack, Suchitra Mattai, Alicia Ordal, Tony Ortega, Jeff Page, Daisy Patton, Eileen Roscina, Gretchen Marie Schaefer, Rebecca Vaughan, Ashley Eliza Williams, and Mario Zoots.
