Sunday in RiNo: A mirrored fun house, unicorn sightings and hot metal

By Susan Froyd Mon., May 14 2012 at 12:12 PM

Categories: Art, Arts and Culture

Burnin' hot metal at Ironton Studios.

It was quieter in RiNo yesterday than you'd expect, considering there was a studio tour and a RiNo hunt going on for the last day of Create Denver. But it was nonetheless a perfect day to explore, and whether or not you discovered one of the 100 numbered ceramic rhinos left out for tourists to find (we didn't, but neither did we try too hard), the rewards were satisfying.

Our Mother's Day jaunt started at the home of artists Chris Perez and Viviane Le Courtois, where Perez's wet-plate collodion photographic portraits and Le Courtois's many experiments in natural growth and decay line the walls and shelves. Le Courtois, we learned, was at her portable studio in Sustainability Park, making disposable clay pinch pots for her ongoing exhibit at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, which you can still see through June 14.

We dropped by Laundry on Lawrence, the latest in a series of community studio enclaves managed by the Space Creators, to chat with Patrick Mueller of Control Group Productions about the building's black box theater, work | space, which Mueller shares as a home base with Brian Freeland and the LIDA Project.

Mona Lucero says "Cheese!" in a laser-storm at Hinterland.

And then it was on to the Dry Ice Factory and especially Hinterland, where Sarah Richter's mirrored installation Infinite Refraction offers disorienting fun-house eye-play to all who dare wander through.

Sarah Richter: "Infinite Refractions."

Hinterland's Sabin Aell kindly turned the lights off for us, so we could experience it as a kind of fractured disco ball, pelted with green laser dots. Catch that show on First Friday in June, or by appointment.