Catherine Chauvin – Faculty Triennial 2012

Catherine Chauvin is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Denver, where she teaches printmaking and drawing.  In recent years, her work has dealt with the Earth’s landscape – what people do to sculpt landscapes, their failure to return the landscape to its original state, and their lack of control in the battles nature wages against itself.  Chauvin comments that “Obviously, [she’s] not a scientist, but an artist who hopes to use a visual forum to address concerns in a visual way.”  Her pieces use meticulously drawn, repetitive shapes expressed in print...

Sarah Gjertson – Faculty Triennial 2012

  Above: Sarah Gjertson, “Relics” Sarah Gjertson, Associate Professor in Studio Art in the School of Art and Art History, teaches studio art courses, as well as advanced seminars. A versatile artist, Gjertson works in a variety of  mediums, including film, sculpture, installation and works on paper. Through these many ways of expression,  she seeks to create a sense of nostaligia for her audience by using materials that many people might have emotional associations with in order to elicit a response. Gjertson often uses actual objects, rather than substitutes or representations. She writes: “Our memories and personal experiences are often...

Deborah Howard – Faculty Triennial 2012

Deborah Howard is an Associate Professor of Drawing in addition to her position as the Head of the Painting Department at the University of Denver. Howard has made pieces covering a variety of subject matter, including series about the Dead Sea Scrolls, child Holocaust survivors and shoes. Despite the apparent visual variety displayed by her works, Howard finds that human presence is always a part of her work. In her selection for the triennial, Howard will display four shoe installations. She sees shoes as “both personal and universal” – shoes can communicate a lot about a person specifically as well...

Roddy MacInnes: Faculty Triennial 2012

Roddy began using the camera on his i-phone to take pictures while working on a photography project in North Dakota. The project started when, many years ago, he picked up two old family albums belonging to a woman named Nina Weiste at an antiques mall in Wheatridge, CO. After years of looking at the places and faces in the old photographs from 1917, Roddy  began to feel a connection to what he saw and decided to travel to North Dakota looking for ways to further develop a response project to Nina and her pictures. “Cell Phone Landscapes #s 1, 2...

Mindy Bray – Faculty Triennial 2012

Mindy Bray is an adjunct in that School of Art and Art History at the University of Denver, currently teaching 2D Foundations. As a visual artist, Bray creates visual fields engineered to challenge the way the brain tries to categorize information. The reason for causing the viewer to enter a state of mental struggle stems from the idea that she wants to “leave the mind in a state of suspension between recognition and non-recognition,” says Bray. To assemble these works, the process mirrors that of the brain as it decodes the visual significance of the images. By forming a system...

New York Diary

New York Diary

Senior Gallery Assistant and Grad student extraordinaire Anna Estes reflects on the fall Curatorial Practicum trip to NYC… This October, the Curatorial Practicum class at DU, taught by Dan Jacobs, took a field trip to New York City. It was an art-tastic weekend, full of studio visits, galleries tours, and museums. For many of the students, it was also their first trip to the city; as for those of us who had been before, the trip was a new way to experience New York. It was exciting to meet artists, see their studios, and also see some of the greatest...