Rocky Mountain News
By Mary Voelz Chandler, July 2, 2004 Rocky Mountain News

When a ceramics educators conference met in Denver a few years ago, area galleries responded by scheduling an impressive array of shows devoted to clay, employed both in vessels and sculpture.
Now area galleries and arts centers are filled with exhibitions devoted to fiber, in conjunction with this weekend's Convergence 2004 Denver meeting of the Handweavers Guild of America.

With a difference. Plenty of shows are devoted to more traditional definitions of the word "fiber," in terms of silk, wool or cotton used in tapestries, weavings, and handwork.
But anyone making the pilgrimage to check out the dozens of conference-inspired displays will discover two additional factors: the use of fiber-related material (from cardboard to stuffed animals) in making art, and the application of techniques associated with fiber (weaving, knotting) on unorthodox materials.

There is no better place to start than Sandy Carson Gallery, where work on view lives up to the vaguely Biblical-sounding title "Woven in Wondrous Ways." Gallery director William Biety and owner Sandy Carson selected their own artists for this exhibition, and the familiarity with the work has paid off in surprising ways.

The effect of weaving runs through pieces by Anna Skibska, John Garrett and Rusty Scruby - the key word being "effect." Skibska created a trio of suspended Cocoons by fusing hundreds of slim pieces of glass, as if they were massive baskets. These sculptural works hang in the gallery window like apparitions, while behind the wall is a series of her small glass works - a cube, a globe, a vertebra-like disc, a bowl - that stand out for deftly applied color and precise workmanship.
In the side areas of the gallery, Biety has installed pieces by John Garrett that have the personality of traditional wall-work but that involve intertwined metal rings, or mangled bed springs that dangle like wayward pasta, or tiny squares of plastic grids. Garrett's most ambitious piece - Poly Web - involves braiding, curling and tying lengths of black swamp-cooler tubing into an installation of loops and tendrils.

Finally, Rusty Scruby cuts hundreds of photographs into squares and creates three-dimensional montages that appear to use weaving as a connection. In works that exploit the use of a figure as a compositional device, such as Mom on the Beach, he adds a sense of disorientation, like looking through a prism that fractures the boundary between reality and illusion.

"Woven" adds its strong voice to a host of shows that will engage a broad range of sensibilities for weeks.

Woven in Wondrous Ways
• What: Work by Ann Skibska, John Garrett and Rusty Scruby
• Where and when: Sandy Carson Gallery, 760 Santa Fe Drive; through July 31
• Information: 303-573-8585

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