Installations are the fireworks of the art world. They appear, burn bright (or fizzle), then are gone – packed away to travel to another site, where they can be transformed into a new experience, or to sit in storage.

Among the most adept artists in this arena is Susan Meyer, who has developed a reputation for installation art that manages to impress both in variety of materials and depth of content. That is apparent in her most recent work, an environment that turns the back gallery of (+) Zeile/Judish into an amusement park ride named after a bar that fed the underground music scene.

Malfunction Junction, on view through April 3, is Meyer’s own miniature rollercoaster, a meticulously crafted conveyance that swoops and loops in a human scale. Lights blink in sequence, a blazing rush near eye level on the mini-tracks and cross-bars.

At one end, where a crash is in process, Meyer has installed a wall of more lights, red and orange, that combine the feel of an old pinball machine display board and the carny backdrop where you knew you were getting fleeced as you angled for a trinket. The lights cast the spell.

A sound track activated by motion sensors completes the experience of a piece that is about random acts, the fake fear inspired by a three minute ride, the chaos that awaits around every corner and, not surprisingly, to be more down-to-earth, the impact careful workmanship can have on a viewer.

Meyer’s recent work has seemed to build to Malfunction Junction: In Private Road, at Ironton Studios and Gallery in 2002, she experimented with light and music in a depiction of the mini-dwellings of an Appalachian hollow. 1500 Degrees, at Artyard the year before, was an installation of cast glass created from fiber molds that focused on both the delicacy and malleability of the material. And in a 2000 show of installations with the artists Virginia Folkestad and Gail Wagner, Meyer plumbed nostalgia and romance, via coal slag and feathers, in Escape: A Love Song for Harry and Bess. Pirate a Contemporary Art Oasis was an oasis of class for that three-week period.

In conjunction with Meyer’s installation, Ivar Zeile and Ron Judish have filled the front space with pop-tinged work by Seattle-based artist Stefan Knorr. The work in Silent Sounds – offset lithography on which Knorr has applied various types of pigment – offers takes on culture and nature, an encounter that smooths the path to the not-so-silent installation hidden from the entry.

In a way, it proves the anteroom to Meyer’s installation, a destination that proves serious intent as well as visual acuity. After all, how often do viewer’s encounter an artist’s statement with footnotes?

Malfunction Junction
What: An installation by Susan Meyer, with “Silent Sounds,” new mixed-media work by Stefan Knorr
Where and when: (+) Zeile Judish, 2350 Lawrence St.
Information: 303-296-0927

Mary Voelz Chandler is the art and architecture critic for the Rocky Mountain News.

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