Artists Sarah McKenzie, Mark Dean Veca have the un-time of their lives (original) (raw)

There are moments in our lives that aren’t meant to matter. The time we spend waiting for a bus, or recovering from an illness. The seasons we deplete building a house we have yet to occupy.

It’s all necessary, but transitional, unavoidable, even annoying. We may remember these pauses, but we have little reason to recall them.

Sarah McKenzie’s paintings dwell in this sort of time, or un-time. She stops the clock on things that are going away before they disappear.

Her “Interior 1,” now on display at David B. Smith Gallery, freezes a home-remodeling project midway through. Rooms are framed, power cords installed, but the drywall is yet to go up. A few days from now, the construction job will cease to exist, replaced by something more like real estate.

Similarly, she renders ” Gates Factory Window #5,” depicting a grid of windows in the decaying former rubber plant in Denver. The building, a city landmark, is slated for demolition and sits idly waiting for the wrecking ball. Soon, it, too, will be gone.

McKenzie, who lives in Boulder, tends to work big, using oil and acrylics combined. The painting “Frieze,” which captures a tent set up to display work at the Frieze Art Fair in London last year (another temporary space) is 5 feet by 5 feet. The Gates piece is a considerable 10 feet long.

Across those broad canvases, she displays keen technical and perceptive skills. She paints with precision, rendering line and form and also light, as if she were taking a photograph. The works, meaningless in content, absent of humans, have a tangible soul to them. They are oddly beautiful.

And they do what a photograph can’t. Sure, photos have their power, especially the work of someone like contemporary museum hero Andreas Gursky, who packs a visual punch into his own large-scale pictures of buildings.

But paintings take time, they must be fussed over, executed by hand rather than snapped with a shutter. The very effort it takes to paint a landscape or portrait brings a level of honor to a subject that lifts it up for a deep consideration. Photos record. Paintings commemorate.

McKenzie’s scenes have their abstract moments and times where the geometric patterns she pulls out of bricks or windows morph into something from math class. Her deliberate framing of certain scenes — for example, in “Park,” she gives us just a few empty spots in a short-term parking garage at Denver International Airport — mix 20th-century reductivist thinking with a postmodern self-consciousness.

But for the most part they are straightforward, journalistic, handed over without opinion.

They simply are, and in that way, they simply say this moment happened. Maybe it’s important because it got you somewhere or showed you something, or maybe it just wasted your valuable time and made you bitter. Either way, un-time emerges as the foundation upon which all time is built.

How fitting that her paintings depict architecture. Which always seems so permanent, until it’s brought down by a wind storm or fire or a new development scheme, or its own crumbling.

In the moment

Nothing lasts forever, and that makes the permanent equal to the things that were temporary in the first place. McKenzie’s objects, large, hand-made, well-edited, bring all that together.

Mark Dean Veca’s “Le Poppy Den,” installed in a smaller, 10-foot by 14-foot room at Smith, is a separate exhibit but a swell complement to McKenzie’s show. It too, questions what it means be to be temporary.

Veca has painted directly on all four walls, in acrylic, a swirling pattern of black botanical(ish) lines, set on a red background whose shade can be described only as agitating. This is an immersive piece: You enter the room, maybe sit on one of the black beanbag chairs on the floor, and take it all in.

It is, as the drug in its title suggests, trippy, and a lot of fun. Veca alternately attempts to please us and disrupt our day and he succeeds at both. It hurts, but you want more of it.

The piece isn’t really for sale. So what’s it doing in a commercial gallery like Smith?

Thrilling us. Respecting the value of the moment. Giving us something that feels like a memory even as we look at it in the flesh.

The piece, a serious effort, will be painted over when the exhibit ends. Like McKenzie’s scenes, it will be gone — maybe forgotten, maybe not.

Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi

SARAH MCKENZIE AND MARK DEAN VECA. David B. Smith Gallery presents two exhibits concurrently. Through April 12. 1543 Wazee St. Free. 303-893-4234 or d avidbsmithgallery.com.

Originally Published: April 3, 2014 at 12:00 PM MST