Blurred Lines

Conscious and unconscious: interpretations of reality at the Arvada Center’s Summer Exhibition

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Tower of Babel,” an oil painting by Denverbased artist CT Nelson, looks like a nightmare brought to life. A tower of dizzying height reaches into a dark sky and appears to whirl at a frenzied pace from a machine, an image Nelson says was inspired by a World War I era jet engine. From the painting’s perspective, which looks up from the tower’s base, broken pieces of metal explode out around the building, and a single file line of menacing and faceless people march out of an entryway. When asked, Nelson declines to explain the meaning behind his work. He would prefer you make your own assessment of the painting — a dystopian depiction of biblical grotesquery that evokes the works of M.C. Escher and Pieter Bruegel the Elder in name, and George Orwell in style.

What he is willing to impart about the work is that in place of a succinct explanation, he hopes audiences will instead experience their own individual emotional response.

“What I found, with art, was most important was not explaining what I feel, but what you feel and what you get out of it,” he says. “It sounds like a cop out, but it isn’t, because I’m going to be gone in 300 years and people are going to be coming up to [my art], hopefully, and get some sort of emotion that I was putting into it as I was doing it. Sometimes when you explain a piece, it loses its mystery a little bit.”

Nelson’s piece is currently on display in the Arvada Center’s Conscious and Unconscious: Subjects of the Real and Surreal. The exhibition is split into three parts throughout much of the center’s space, with each part working along a different theme including surrealism, still life and depictions of humans. Within these sections, visitors can expect to see mediums ranging from oil on canvas to ceramics, all depicting reality through lenses both real and surreal.

All of the exhibition’s works connect through depictions of conscious reality that curator Kristin Bueb says reflect humanity.

“There are a lot of works that speak to a lot of things going on in the world,” Bueb says.

She explains that originally the exhibition was going to be focused solely on surrealism. But as the Arvada Center began to collect works for the sprawling exhibition, which spans more than 10,000 square feet, the decision was made to also include works in the style of surrealism’s “opposite” — realism. Through the addition of a contrasting style, Bueb says the theme throughout the exhibition continued to take shape through how artists depict the world around them.

“It all comes down to interpretations of reality and what those artists consider reality to be,” Bueb says. “We all do live in reality even if we may not want to.”

Connecting the exhibition’s varying mediums and styles is that consistent depiction of the reality we all live within. Artists like Nelson choose to interpret reality through warped imagery with no obvious grounding in real images. Others at the exhibition express reality through the familiar, and connect with the viewing audience through a shared knowledge of subject matter.

“When we started looking for surrealism we were looking for works that dealt with the unconscious. So the opposite of that conscious, reality, it encompasses everything that could be expressed,” Bueb says. “A lot of these works you could consider them expressions of the conscious and the unconscious in some ways. And I’m sure a lot of these artists would say their works investigate the hovering between the two. And maybe the conscious is just a recognition of the realistic portrayal, but the unconscious is the meaning behind the work.”

Mixed among images of both the real and surreal in the exhibition’s focus on still life are works by Anna Kaye, a Colorado artist who finds inspiration from nature. Kaye grew up in Detroit, and says from an early age she was always fascinated by the nature beyond her urban surroundings. Kaye’s pieces at the exhibition are thematically centered on fire — what she sees as a duality of fire’s presence in nature as a perceived destructive force and what, in reality, is a force necessary for the health and growth of forests.

“Your instincts say this is bad, this needs to be extinguished,” Kaye says. “But when you look into the science behind it, fires are necessary for the health of our forests.”

She explains that because forest fires were suppressed by national parks for years, forests have become crowded and overgrown with plant life. This crowding is among the causes of out-of-control wildfires, a topic that comes close to home for Coloradoans after multiple destructive blazes in recent years. Juxtaposed with these destructive blazes, Kaye emphasizes that forest fires are also a force of creation, as they clear out areas for new plants to take root and grow.

In her mixed media work “Fever,” Kaye filmed the burning of a twig she found at the site of a fire, and then projects that film over a hyperreal charcoal drawing she made of the twig.

When filming the twig, she says she only had three chances to film the twig burning before the result of the fire essentially disintegrated the twig. For Kaye, it was a breath of fresh air to rely on fire’s unpredictability, whereas subjects within her work are usually rigid in style and form. In this case, the art is not just influenced by reality but literally created by the unpredictable nature of the fire that Kaye filmed.

“It was fun. You know my compositions can be pretty controlled, especially with those smaller fragments of charcoal pieces, they’re very composed,” Kaye says. “So this was an element of the composition that I allowed reality to take hold of. And whatever happened with the wind and the environment and that individual flame chemically processing the wood was what happened.”

Another artist in the exhibit, Tom Mazzullo, also works with chemical processes in his work. But while Kaye’s chemical process with “Fever” was done in seconds, Mazzullo’s work with silverpoint doesn’t complete its process for over a decade.

Silverpoint is a drawing technique that predates charcoal drawing and was popular with artists of the Renaissance. Artists etch images with metal-point styluses into prepared paper that is coated with gesso paint. The resulting images made when the paint is scraped away by the stylus are gray. Depending on the metal used to draw the image, the image will oxidize over time and change to more rustic colors as the metal chemically reacts to prolonged air exposure. Mazzullo says he works mainly with silver as his stylus point, but has also used copper and gold.

Although the chemical process in silverpoint means a piece won’t really be done for decades, for Mazzullo there’s an anticipation of seeing his work undergo transformation over time.

“The interesting thing to me is which drawings are still good after all that time,” Mazzullo says. “You look at your old artwork and you say, ‘Oh wow, what was I doing?’ or you look back after ten or 20 years and say, ‘Oh wow, that was a really good one, and now it’s got this luster.’” 

The subject matter in two of Mazzullo’s pieces on display at the Arvada Center, “Lunchbox Apples” and “Slice,” is apples. In “Lunchbox Apples,” two apples sit side by side, with a piece of string wrapped around each of them and connecting the two. In “Slice,” Mazzullo has cut the top off of an apple but left the stem, creating a smooth surface from which the stem grows out of. He says that although he doesn’t golf much, the image reminded him of a golf hole, which also influenced the title of “Slice,” a golf term.

“They’re very quiet works,” Bueb says of Mazzullo’s pieces in the exhibition. “He talks about how his work is quiet and meditative, and they portray that.”

For Mazzullo, the apple as a subject creates an intricacy in drawing as well as a symbolism and connection with audiences familiar with an apple’s appearance. Mazzullo says he has always been drawn to the challenge of depicting the form of apples.

“For some reason I’m attracted to these round surfaces because rendering the spherical nature of something is like this old thing we used to do as kids. You’d be shading a sphere and trying to make it look realistic, so that’s still with me after all this time,” Mazzullo says. “Apples have this skin that has a beautiful surface quality, not completely shiny like a mirror but also not flat like a tennis ball.”

The apple also appealed to Mazzullo as a subject for the familiarity of the fruit as a subject in art.

“When you draw something that is recognizable you have an instant relationship with who is looking at it. If I drew some bizarre fruit from Asia you wouldn’t quite know if I drew it right. But an apple is so familiar you look at it and say, ‘I know what this is, look at how beautiful this is,’” Mazzullo says.

For surrealist Nelson, with a content-heavy painting like “Tower of Babel,” his goal in creating art, he says, is not necessarily to put forth a succinct message or interpretation. His focus seems to lie more in creating an emotional response, both from the viewer and from himself.

“I want to be just as surprised in the end as someone would looking at it for the first time. …” he says. “I want the experience to come through, hopefully with the majority of my pieces, where you just get lost in it.”

While Mazzullo’s work involves subject matter that is more accessible to an audience than Nelson’s surreal depictions, both cases allow audiences to make their own interpretations. Nelson’s work invites viewers to ask questions about the scene that his image depicts, and Mazzullo’s works encourage the audience to consider what setting they view his subjects within.

“They pull people in and get people looking at it and thinking about it,” Bueb says. “With the viewer’s role in the conscious and unconscious, they’re having to look at it and create a story behind it.”

ON THE BILL: Conscious and Unconscious:Subjects of the Real and Surreal, Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd., Arvada, 720-898-7200.