Lucy Maki is a well-established visual artist who’s spent the last three decades living and working in Albuquerque. Her distinctive abstract work hangs in galleries, private collections and museums all over. Maki’s sophisticated three-dimensional canvases—part painting and part sculpture—explore what she terms in her artist statement “a play between real and illusive space.” The artist’s latest offering, ASLANT, unveils at Exhibit/208 (208 Broadway SE) on Saturday, March 1. To tell the truth, many of the pieces in her show could be hung on the walls of your doctor’s office … if your physician were Dr. Caligari. Just like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the 1920 masterpiece of silent cinema entirely lacking in right angles, Maki’s pieces eschew simplistic symmetries. Stretcher bars, which normally set the boundaries of a painting’s area, are here exploded into a precarious profusion of angles around which squares and rectangles, lines and circles, space and negative space all teeter.Come out early and catch ASLANT beginning in March, or attend the First Friday opening on March 7 from 5 to 8pm. Exhibit/208 is open Thursday through Saturday, 10am to 4pm, or by contacting Kim Arthun at 450-6884 or artoon@swcp.com.
Culture Shock: On The Same Page On The Same Page
Novels along the north wall
courtesy of Page One Books
I finally got to visit Page One Books in their new digs at the Mountain Run Shopping Center at 5850 Eubank NE (just south of where Eubank and Juan Tabo come together). I live on the opposite side of town, but regular pilgrimages will be worth the trek—their new store feels spacious and bright, there’s a ton of parking, and seriously, the employees couldn’t have been nicer. I really, really mean that—not one more drop of niceness could have been wrung from the interaction I had with Miles at the book-buying counter, nor when an enthusiastic bookseller named Kat accosted me to persuasively sing the praises of sci-fi author Elizabeth Moon. And when Emma cashed me out for the $9 worth of books I had sold, she didn’t try to make me feel bad for not buying anything this go-round, but instead thanked me for “being part of the process.” It was the kind of Sunday afternoon bookstore experience that makes a girl glad to be literate.Page One closed the doors on their longstanding location at Montgomery and Juan Tabo just a few weeks ago, but they’re already buzzing around the wide aisles of their new place like bees in an orderly hive. Events start back up soon with an open mic on Tuesday, March 11. The historian behind Wicked Women of New Mexico, Donna Blake Birchell, speaks on Sunday, March 16, and author Dennis Herrick is in-store on Saturday, March 22. (Alibi reviewer Suzanne Buck praised Herrick’s history-confronting Winter of the Metal People; see her review at alibi.com/link/15365.) It’s great to see a Burque institution moving forward and reinventing itself with aplomb. And in response to already-popular demand, they just extended their hours—9am to 7pm Monday-Thursday, 9am to 8pm Friday and Saturday, and 10am to 6pm on Sunday. Scoot over to the Heights and bask in the home-sweet-homeness of it all.
