Penny Saturday at MCA

That’s right, admission is only 1 penny on the first Saturday of the month at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Grab some pennies, call your pals and go see some art!

More about MCA: http://mcadenver.org

On view:

Brian Bress: Make Your Own Friends surveys the last ten years of the artist’s practice, bringing together video, sculpture, and works on paper for the first time. The works on view highlight the artist’s unique process that migrates from two dimensions to three and back again. Bress’s imaginative characters are born as doodles or collages, take shape as sculptural costumes, and come to life on video, as they are performed in front of elaborately composed backdrops. Connecting the past with the present, Bress’s “friends” imaginatively breach disciplinary distinctions amongst painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, and video.

Arne Svenson: The Neighbors After receiving a bird watching, telephoto lens from a friend, Arne Svenson set up a tripod to capture what unfolded within a brand new, glass-and-steel high-rise building across the street from his Tribeca studio. Capturing the lives of his neighbors (their habits, activities, tastes) over the course of a year, Svenson also used the geometry of the buildings’ windows as his frame, creating various tableaux of domestic life unfolding. Presenting over 20 photographs from this series, The Neighbors, this exhibition explores in depth the central issues raised by these enigmatic works: voyeurism, the increasingly imperceptible boundaries between privacy and the public, and the ubiquity of the camera in our surveillance-obsessed world. Documentation of a court case brought against the artist (which he successfully appealed, twice) will enrich this discussion, as the works point up a tension between the luxury of looking out and the vulnerability of being looked upon.

Laura Shill: Phantom Touch For her first solo museum exhibition, Denver-based Laura Shill will create a new installation that features reclaimed materials in richly mannered, densely layered environments and which plays with the space as a site of disclosure and concealment. It will also include many of her Absent Lovers series in which the artist appropriates images from covers of Harlequin romance novels to create hauntingly beautiful cyanotypes. These works often reveal a violent, sinister, and sexualized dynamic latent in the clichéd depictions of lovers from these stories.

Critical Focus: Lanny DeVuono Lanny DeVuono has been exploring outer space for the past year. Her ambition to illustrate extraterrestrial terrain, as she imagines it, led to the large-scale drawings on canvas on view in Critical Focus: Lanny DeVuono. The works that comprise Here and Elsewhere, the artist’s most recent series of conceptual landscapes, synthesize DeVuono’s curiosity about, and critique of, space travel, the influence of American Western landscapes on her practice, and her continuing dedication to materials. The images are at once familiar and foreign, surreal and, in some cases, almost entirely abstract. Runs through June 5.