Suzanne Jackson’s painting “High Alpine Tarns” is featured in Aspen Chapel Gallery’s Small Wonders exhibit. Jackson is one of 34 artists from the Roaring Fork Valley, including Rifle, contributing art to the show. A portion of the proceeds from the show benefit the all-volunteer run nonprofit, Holiday Baskets. The opening for the show is tonight from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Two art exhibits will open in Aspen tonight. The 17th annual Small Wonders showat Aspen Chapel Gallery is hyperlocal, featuring original and affordable art by local artists.
The second exhibit, at the Aspen Art Museum, features work from artists from Germany, China, Switzerland and the U.S. According to Daniel Merritt, director of curatorial affairs at the museum, the art in the show “dives into themes of corporeality, nature, transformation and the psyche.”
Thirty-four artists from the Roaring Fork Valley, including Rifle, will be contributing art to the Small Wonders show.
“This is the 255th art exhibit in the Aspen Chapel Gallery’s 39 years,” said Tom Ward, co-director of the Aspen Chapel. “The show is in partnership with the all volunteer run nonprofit, Holiday Baskets. They provide gifts and food cards to 300 families and 1300 individuals from Aspen to Glenwood Springs.”
Every artist in Small Wonders hangs eight pieces of their work. The art can’t be larger than 12 inches by 12 inches and all the work is priced at $250 or less. Buyers purchase the art right off the wall. The artist then replaces the sold work with a new piece of art.
All the art in Small Wonders is original and hangable. There are a few ceramicists in the show but it’s an art show first and foremost.
“Local artists really don’t have a lot of places to show their work in the valley,” Ward said. “We pride ourselves in providing a venue for all the talented artists who live and work here. This show is a great way to support your local friends, to help Holiday Baskets, and to maybe get a piece of art to give or keep for yourself.”
Ward said the Small Wonders opening, which happens tonight from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., historically has been a popular local event. They serve food and have beer, wine and non-alcolholic beverages.
“It’s very much a community event,” Ward said.
The Aspen Art Museum show begins today as well. The show features four artists but it is being presented in two stages, with two shows debuting Wednesday — Heji Shin’s “America: Part One,”and Shuang Li’s “I’m Not,” — and two more shows added Dec. 12 — Ugo Rondinone’s “The Rainbow Body,”and Megan Marrin’s “Austerity.”
Ugo Rondinone’s show “The Rainbow Body” is one of four exhibits being featured this winter at the Aspen Art Museum. The other artists are Heji Shin’s “America: Part One,”Shuang Li’s “I’m Not,” and Megan Marrin’s “Austerity.” The show opens tonight.
“America: Part One” presents new photographs by Heji Shin, a Korean-born artist based between New York City and the Catskill Mountains. Over the past decade, she has been influential through her photos of crowning babies, screeching roosters, infamous pop stars and jocular pigs. The photos in the Aspen exhibit features photographs of rockets in mid-air contrasted with waves crashing on rocky shorelines.
In the summer of 2024, Shin embedded herself in and around Cape Canaveral, Florida and photographed rocket launches. The exhibit consists of 10 photographs of rockets accelerating into the sky.
Within an adjacent gallery are photographs of waves taken on the eve of a hurricane. A parallel is drawn between the force of nature and the propulsive energy generated by man. According to a release, “These are elemental images in which air and fire, sea and earth command attention. Gravity, too, presides over Shin’s scenes of surges and escape.”
“I’m Not” is the first institutional solo exhibition by Chinese artist Shuang Li, featuring sculpture and video installations. The artist has several pieces in the exhibit that examine various themes including China’s boom and bust economy of the early 2000s and her experience as a refugee from her own country as she was denied entry into China for three years. Other pieces revolve around her being a fan of the band My Chemical Romance, an experience that offered her a community and a sense of belonging, while simultaneously helping her learn to speak English.
For the video “I’m Not,” Li rewrote the lyrics to the My Chemical Romance song “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” in Mandarin Chinese and English. She then had the song performed by an a cappella group. In the resulting music video, a troupe dressed as an army choir conducted by a young girl recites Li’s version of the band’s song.
Swiss born artist Ugo Rondinone’s exhibit “The Rainbow Body” will open on Dec. 12. This is the artist’s first major institutional show in the Western United States in a career that spans over three decades.
For Rondinone’s exhibit, the museum’s second floor gallery will be filled with sixteen fluorescent, rainbow colored life-size wax cast sculptures of dancers that are sitting waiting for their moment on stage.
“The rainbow is a bridge between everyone and everything,” Rondinone said in a release. “Nature is not something apart from us, but intrinsic.”
The exhibition’s title refers to a spiritual rite in Tibetan Buddhism in which the body is transformed into five-colored radiant lights upon death. This conversion is attained only by devoted practitioners and marks the highest form of realization. The sculptures are a link between the natural world and the spiritual realm.
Also on Dec. 12, American artist Megan Marrin’s show “Austerity” will come to life at the museum. It is the first institutional solo exhibition by the painter who is based in New York City’s East Village. The exhibit consists of five paintings based on the furniture created by artist Jean-Michel Frank, a French interior designer whose work was characterized by simplicity and elegance.
According to a release, “Frank is credited with signaling a break from the dense, saturated living spaces of the Victorian era, and instead embracing a “passion for absence” that that became celebrated amongst the aesthetes of the interwar period in Europe and, upon his rediscovery in the 1970s, influenced subsequent generations of tastemakers and designers including Jacques Grange and the late Jed Johnson.”
Four of Marrin’s paintings present scenes from a Frank-designed bathroom, bedroom, and a careful study of a wardrobe. The exhibition’s fifth painting amplifies a detail of an etching by Alberto Giacometti, created for the cover of a René Crevel novel, which Frank framed in mica and burnt wood.
“There’s something immediate about these works,” Merritt said.“They are all quite powerful. Ugo Rondinone exhibits power through color and form. With Heji Shin, it’s power through rockets and waves. With Shuang Li it’s power through music and then Megan Marrin’s hyperrealistic paintings of interiors have their own unique mystique to them. They are all striking works by cutting edge experimental artists. The work really highlights the intensity that these artists are working with everyday and I want that energy to be transmitted to the people coming to the museum and I’m very interested in the connections that people will make between the exhibits.”
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