Hollis Walker

It seems to me that imagery plays the preeminent role in how we remember our lives and how we tell our stories, to ourselves and others. While the younger generation’s primary image memories will no doubt be moving images, for those of us who are older, an inquiry about our past often calls up not a mental movie but a still photograph.

What of those who have no family photo albums, no films to crank up the old projector for? The orphaned and adopted, victims of household fires, floods and tornadoes — how do they know their histories without pictures of their childhoods and families?

Chinese-American artist Hung Liu’s paintings of the last 20 years have served in part a...

How many times have you returned from a trip and excitedly downloaded your camera images, only to find that gorgeous mountain view ruined by power lines, plastic bags or “Posted: No Trespassing” signs? We are so inured to the detritus of humanity that often our brains don’t even register these details; we edit them out, unconsciously preserving our delusions about the inviolacy of the natural world. And now, thanks to Photoshop, we can simply clone away those blights and further perpetuate those fantasies.

Donald Woodman is not letting us get away with it. His exhibit at Zane Bennett is a disturbing collection of large black-and-white and color photographs documenting the Ame...

Colette Hosmer believes our lost connection to the sources of our food and our lack of understanding and appreciation for it are making us sick, literally and spiritually. In “Hungry Ghost,” she continues her 30-year inquiry into food as a metaphor for the lost reverence of our culture, pushing the boundaries of scale, materials and abstraction further than in her previous work.

The “hungry ghost” is an archetypal character of greed and desire common to the mythologies of many cultures. At certain times of the year, the hungry ghost appears in search of food. In most such stories, although the devout leave food offerings, the ghost, for one reason or another, is never sated...

The current exhibit at Chiaroscuro features three contemporary women artists who are kin by more than blood. But for starters, Nora Naranjo-Morse is the mother of Eliza Naranjo-Morse and great-aunt of Rose B. Simpson. The latter also is the daughter of artists: Her mother is renowned sculptor Roxanne Swentzell, whose whimsical figurative clay sculptures have become iconic to contemporary American Indian art; and her father is Patrick Simpson, a contemporary wood and metal artist. Nora, Eliza and Rose all have familial connections at Santa Clara Pueblo, where the Naranjo name has been synonymous with extraordinary pottery for many generations. All three women use clay in their work, but in...

Dan Namingha has been working with the same subject matter for most of his career as an artist. He explores the beauty of the Hopi Reservation, where he grew up, and the iconography and beliefs of the Hopi people in several media. In the current exhibition are acrylic-on-canvas paintings and bronze sculptures, though over the course of his career he has worked in many other mediums.

In this particular exhibition, Namingha demonstrates a wide interpretive range, from semirepresentational to completely nonobjective. I was drawn immediately to the simplest images in this exhibit — five 20-inch-by-20-inch landscape studies consisting of half-inch brushstrokes in black that hint at th...