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by Michael Paglia

There are a lot of great exhibition spaces around town, but I’m always struck by how good shows look at Ice Cube Gallery, even though it’s the humblest of venues: a co-op. In a typical arrangement, the handsome space with the big windows and high ceilings is currently divided roughly in half, with one member’s solo on one side, and another’s on the other.

To our left is Marius Lehene: Sum Over Histories, which combines drawings with three-dimensional creations — he calls them “tridimensional” — on the walls or, in one case, hanging from the ceiling. Lehene’s statement suggests that these pieces are derived from sights he sees along the roads while driving and his interest in drawing them. (Let’s hope he parks before he pulls out the sketch pad.) Using thin strips of bamboo held together with glue, Lehene makes elaborate linear constructions — they look something like insanely complicated buildings — and unifies them with white acrylic paint.

The tremendous subtlety of the light-colored Lehenes provide a perfect counterpoint to the mostly bold shades that predominate in Luminous Flux: Ray Tomasso, which fills the other side of the space and extends into the niche gallery at the back. In recent years, Tomasso, a master of cast papermaking, has been working on large-format abstractions that represent a cross between paintings and wall-relief sculptures. He takes full advantage of the pulp’s ability to pick up subtle details in the molds, and he orchestrates rough-cut geometric forms to create his bold and simple compositions, as seen in “The Yard Through the Rear Window” (pictured).

An interesting fact about Tomasso’s process is that when the pieces emerge from the molds, they are uncolored, so the shades that make up the completed pieces are not dyed pulps, as is traditional in papermaking, but are painted on with acrylics. Tomasso has been on a trajectory of sorts for the past few years, and he just keeps getting better and better, as proved by the newest work here, “Marks Left by Memory.”

The Lehene and Tomasso shows at Ice Cube (3320 Walnut Street, 303-292-1822, www.icecubegallery.com) close on May 19.

“Marriage,” by Julie Puma

Julie Puma had a month to put together her new show, Let’s Get it Straight, and she diverted from painting, her usual medium, into snapshot aesthetic photography. The biggest challenge for Puma wasn’t the medium, however. Rather, it was spotlighting her own personal life.Let’s Get it Straight” offers a look into the ordinary lives of people in three unorthodox relationships — two homosexual partners, one transgender woman’s marriage and Puma’s own polyamorous relationship. She acknowledges the difficultly of mixing voyeuristic photography with personal photography in her show, and notes that she struggled with the idea that her relationship would be on display.

“I used to be really scared about people finding out about my relationship,” she says. “But, if we’re going to take a stand about marriage, then it’s about the right for everyone to have a family the way they want to have a family. I went back and forth on whether to call the piece about me “Julie, Charlie, and John,” or “Untitled.” I chickened out at the last minute. That was kind of wussy.”

She may have shied away from putting herself in the title of her piece, but Puma does not shy away from talking about the reason she thinks different types of relationship deserve the consideration she’s trying to emphasize in her show.

“Courtney and her Family,” by Julie Puma

“I think we need to redefine what it means to be married,” she says. “I see more and more couples, or families, who either split-up or cheat and lie. But for some reason, when people are honest about their relationships and still have wonderful family values, all the things Americans want out of a family, the general public has a hard time moving away from how we originally define marriage.”Puma says she wants to focus on the “banal” part of each family’s life in her images and move away from the objectification of the sexuality usually associated with alternative relationships. One series depicts a day painting the house, another at dinner and her own portrait series illustrates an everyday morning.

“I didn’t want to be overt,” she explains. “I really wanted to normalize it and I wanted to show families doing everyday kinds of things.”

“Untitled,” by Julie Puma

With the exception of the two photographs of a marriage, the rest of Puma’s pieces present a multi-shot strip of four or five photos. The technique, called “snapshot aesthetic,” is something Puma’s been working on since her graduate program, when she was influenced by artist Nan Goldin. The snapshot aesthetic, says Puma, is meant to capture the private moments of life.”There’s always that pressure, if you do photography, that you should do video,” says Puma. “But I love still photography, because you capture that little moment and then it’s gone. And that allows you to think about the expansiveness of that moment, where film gives, or hands you that expansiveness.”

In the future, Puma plans to keep working on snapshot aesthetic photography, and expand her concept for this show.

“I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that I should focus on one area,” she says. “I’m a voyeur here, but its personal here, and I agree. So I think I will spend the year and flush out, probably the polyamory perspective, because I seem to do better work when it’s personal.”

For more information, visit Puma’s web page, or Ice Cube’s web page. Let’s Get it Straight shows currently at Ice Cube Gallery (3320 Walnut Street), through April 21.

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One of the star turns in the Overthrown portion of Marvelous Mud was the outrageous installation “Apoptosis,” which was later reconfigured and deconstructed for Oxytocin: Katie Caron and Martha Russo at Ice Cube. Using ceramic blobs that were internally lighted and connected by wires, Katie Caron and Martha Russo made forms out of clusters of smaller shapes; the tangle of wires linked these different clustered forms together. The piece was meant to refer to the nurturing hormone oxytocin, which is associated with childbirth. This multi-part work played off Pendent Tendencies: Jerry Morris, a two-part ceramic installation by Morris, an art newcomer who created suspension pieces that defined environments — one about politics, the other religion. These displays were a fitting postscript to the “ceramaganza” displayed earlier at the Denver Art Museum.

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Regina Benson, who lives in the foothills above Golden, was among those evacuated in the face of an approaching wildfire last summer, and seeing the bright oranges glowing in the darkness of night inspired a new body of work. The centerpiece of Regina Benson: On Fire was “Passage,” a curving pair of walls hung from the ceiling, made from cloth that has been dyed in the orange-to-black range of the natural tones associated with fire. Using an elaborate method she invented, Benson discharged the dyes over and over until she achieved her desired effects on the ready-made synthetic cloth panels, the edges of which had been burned to seal them. Walking through “Passage” was meant to convey to the viewer what it must be like to be in the middle of a fire — and even if the experience could only approximate that horror, it was nonetheless compelling and visually rich.