At Smith Gallery: A group surprise

With its historic storefront on LoDo's busy Wazee Street, the David B. Smith Gallery has a more prominent location than most of Denver's upscale dealers. Yet it remains something of a secret pleasure within the city's art scene.

The gallery doesn't focus on Colorado artists and, after five years of selling its wares across the country, it is still developing a local clientele. But its walls are covered with some of the most exciting work you'll see around here. Especially right now.


The current group exhibition, up through Sept. 1, offers a good survey of Smith's broad palate as well as his knack for seizing the moment.

The most immediate example of that comes in Yuken Teruya's three-dimensional pieces made from McDonald's take-out bags. In a showy bit of reimagining, Teruya has cut out bits of the sack and made tiny red-and-gold leafed trees of them. You have to peer inside the bags, which also tout McDonald's sponsorship of the Olympics, to see the down-sized flora.

Sounds crafty, except the title hints at more: "Notice-Forest: What Victory Tastes Like." It's a compact, double-take on American culture's mix of world-class athletes and cheesy little burgers. It's eerily of the moment.



Unframed, and in one case, showing a section of unpainted canvas, Jacobsen's landscapes here are unaffected and casual, a nice contrast to the self-important elegance landscape painters tend to force into their work. They're not irreverent as much as they are simply natural. Someone should buy all five.

In the middle of those two extremes are a few more extremes. There is one piece from the L.A.-based Clayton Brothers, a mixed-media mesh of street art and 20th century kitsch titled "Every Other Day." The brothers pack a lot into their paintings and collages, giant pieces of fruit fly around humans with exaggerated eyes and multicolored ears, backgrounds are in constant motion.

The work is youthful and fun to be around and fits well with Jonathan Viner's "L'chaim Dandelion," depicting three trendy chicks in halter dresses and sunglasses, toasting something or other, and Mark Dean Veca's "Howdy Ho, Jesus!," which gives "South Park's" Mr. Hanky character the fine-art treatment, more than that piece of wit deserves.

These one-shots all fit into the "it is what it is" category. They're great to contemplate, though five or six from each artist would offer a richer take on where they want us to go as viewers.

That, of course, is the beauty and doom of any group show. Love the stop-and-go ride, hate the whiplash. Painters grab our attention however they can, sometimes by being singular sensations, other times because they appear more credible than the competition. That's the case withRyan McLennan's"The Body," a sinewy take on a felled tree that also happens to be an impressive act of painting.

