BMoCA exhibit doubles as art, home decorating stimulus

By: Quentin Young

A rare kind of exhibition is currently on view in downtown Boulder.

The thrill of creativity itself, as opposed to art, is a main point of the show, and it might make you want to run home and redecorate.

The exhibit is an enveloping retrospective of work by Denver artist Susan Wick at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Covering 50 years of Wick's omni-faceted artistic activity, the show gives the sense of an artist whose irrepressible creativity touches everything in sight.

In the main gallery, visitors get an idea of what Wick's Denver home and studio look and feel like.

It's arranged to resemble actual living spaces, with Wick-enhanced couches, lamps and floor coverings arrayed home-sweet-home-style, as well as pictures hanging on the walls. There are tables, room screens, chandeliers and suitcases upgraded by Wick's hand, and you come away believing that nothing store-bought ever lasted too long in Wick's possession before she customized it. The gallery is like a furniture showroom set up by a hyperactive right brain.

"In her work, a bag becomes a canvas, an antique doll a sculpture, yarn a portrait and lace the background for a drawing," the museum says of Wick, and the exhibit bears this out.

It puts you in the presence of a mind that perceives art in everything and everything as art. Her creative pace is hard for a viewer to keep up with.

"I like to sleep in different beds. I like to move around," Wick says in a short film, which plays on a loop in an upstairs gallery at BMoCA. Later in the film, she says, "I usually work on several things at once ... Just to have variety in your life."

Artwork by Wick is also on view at Fine Art Associates, a gallery at 1949 Pearl St., Boulder. FAA and BMoCA's back galleries give a more conventional treatment to Wick's art — paintings hang in orderly fashion on the wall.

Here, one can slow down and contemplate not just her energy but her vision.

The BMoCA paintings betray her relative lack of a formal art education — "Wick instead studies life and people," says the museum. This has worked in her favor.

Most of the paintings are portraits, or portrait-ish, in which she came up with fearless graphic techniques to dig into a subject's subconscious (or that of the viewer — Wick's art has a way of pulling as it pushes). Unabashed color gives the pictures purchase on your eyes, and unexpected contextual clues draw you into their mysteries: Who is that small man skulking across that woman's abdomen? Why did Wick draw a soaring bird across that woman's face?

Birds show up frequently in these pictures, and Wick invokes other leitmotifs in her work, such as cacti and painted faces. Gender is often at play.

"The characters in her art are sometimes between human and animal and frequently androgynous," the museum says.

She asserts a right to apply her vision on everything she sees, whether it's a lamp or a person.

Wick lives in an old brick home in an industrial but evolving neighborhood near the train tracks just north of downtown Denver. The short film about Wick that screens as part of the BMoCA exhibit gives something of a tour of the home, and it reveals her domestic environment to have been judiciously reflected in BMoCA's downstairs gallery.

There's art everywhere — or, rather, everything in her home that's not "art" seems to have been art-ified.

She makes conventional interior decorating seem stultifyingly boring, even oppressive. But this self-taught master of creativity offers encouragement to viewers regarding their own homes when she says, "You can make it yours."

If you go

What: "Susan Wick: Wild Women Never Get the Blues"

When: Through Jan. 3

Where: Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 1750 13th St., Boulder

Tickets: $1

Info: bmoca.org

What: Fall Group Show: Susan Wick and Chris Campbell

When: Through the end of 2015

Where: Fine Art Associates, 1949 Pearl St., Boulder

Tickets: Free

Info: faaboulder.com

Source: www.dailycamera.com