Do You Know Laura Carpenter? 100,000 People at D.I.A. Do.

Don’t worry - getting your work an audience of 100,000 people a day is simple. To accumulate this volume of viewers, you can either broadcast on the Times Square Jumbotron, which sounds costly, or you can get Denver International Airport to hang your work in one of its terminals.  Laura Carpenter, an artist with Translations Gallery since April of 2010, is taking the latter approach, participating in DIA’s Shows Promise, exhibited on level 6 of the Jeppesen Terminal East.  True, the airport is not a typical exhibition space for fine art, but it has proven surprisingly adept at housing the work of well known artists around Denver, allowing a massive audience to view the artwork each day as they mosey through the airport terminal (or sprint depending on how late they are for their flights and how long the TSA screening lasted).

Carpenter, a Colorado-based artist who is also a Masters of Fine Arts student at Colorado State University, is getting a huge amount of exposure from the Shows Promise exhibit.  The show emphasizes Colorado’s landscapes and history while providing artists seeking higher education with an audience of international viewers who get to see the work hassel-free as they travel across the terminal on one of those moving sidewalks.

Path

oil on canvas

2010

Carpenter’s work moves effortlessly between concrete objects and abstract images.  Her pieces are surprising and unexpected; partially realized representations of woods and houses are rendered in vivid colors that seem oddly at home in the work despite the noticeable contradiction of Carpenter’s bright blues and bold yellows with the muted

greens and browns typically imagined to be the base colors of the Colorado landscape.

Inside/Outside

oil on panel

2010

These works are a seamless combination of natural and imagined elements, combining traditional Colorado scenery with Carpenter's dreamlike execution, making her work fascinating to view.  Her work will next be featured in Translations Gallery’s upcoming Contemporary Western Art show, which begins January 6, 2011 and runs through February 12.

Shows Promise will be up in DIA until February 2011.