If ancient Incan weavers had computers, what would their textiles
have looked like?

Probably a lot like Lucia Grossberger Morales’ mixed-media paintings
at Contreras Gallery.

Her “Tocapus” paintings are brightly colored geometrics, in
traditional Incan mixes of squares and rectangles, with paint liberally
brushed on top of digital patterns. And the patterns were created on a
computer with software and then printed out on paper.

Grossberger is a Bolivian native who was brought to the U.S. as a
small child in the 1950s. In her 20s she discovered that computers
could be an art tool—she calls herself Cyber Chica and boasts of
being the first Latina digital artist. After working in the computer
industry in Silicon Valley for decades, she’s transplanted herself to
Tucson’s dry desert.

Now, devoting herself entirely to art, she’s mining an Andean vein.
Her exuberant exhibition Andean Circuit at Contreras has a
nicely punning title: It’s both her journey through traditional
Bolivian motifs and crafts and a nod to all that circuitry in her
computers that helps power her art.

Some of her pieces are pure digital prints, composed on the
computer. One zoological series pictures animals embedded in patterned
backgrounds and encased in printed frames. Drawn in an antique
indigenous style that conveys the front and back of the animal at the
same time (shades of Picasso), the whimsical menagerie includes angular
cats, bats and antelopes.

“Gato Morado” (purple cat) is a 12-by-12 digital print manipulated
by Photoshop. Patterns of dots and stitches and circles frame an
awkward cat whose face is forward, but whose body and legs are
sideways.

A charming pink bat stands on its hind legs, immersed in a sea of
dots and lines in “Murcielago Bifurcado” (divided bat). Colored blue,
purple and teal, the textured patterns—including tiny lines that
look like stitches—make the paper appear to be cloth.

Other pieces are digital collages, with computer-printed papers cut
and layered atop each other. One of these high-tech collages, “El
Cicio,” has an image of an ancient statue of a woman giving birth,
glued over the face of a skull.

But the “Tocapus” paintings are the most interesting works in this
solo show. Mimicking Incan textiles, they’re loaded with colorful
squares, rectangles and diamonds arranged in patterns that also suggest
North American patchwork quilts.

The Incas lived in pre-Conquest days in a narrow arc stretching all
the way from Ecuador to southern Chile and Argentina. In an artist’s
note, Grossberger explains that for the Andean peoples tocapus were “repetitive squares or rectangles … units of meaning (that) can
be isolated, almost like a word in a language. Though the meanings …
have not been deciphered, they are structured around Andean concepts of
space and time.”

Grossberger doesn’t attempt to translate the symbols, but she’s
arranged them into appealing compositions. The biggest one, “Tocapus 4
x 4,” is a grid of 16 canvases, each just 12 inches square, lined up in
four rows of four. Each tiny canvas has been broken down further, into
checkerboards or diamonds, in color combos from dark sienna and
turquoise to gold and red.

“Tocapus 2 x 2” is made up of just four of the little canvases.
Grossberger has painted stripes in diagonals spread across the four
canvases, creating a glowing diamond in the center.

In all the tocapus works, strips of printed computer paper, printed
with minuscule geometric designs, are swabbed with thick strokes of
paint. The teensy diamonds and lines occasionally show through the
paint. Enamored of computers as she is, Grossberger still has a
commendable urge to muck up and paint over—by hand—the
orderly digitized world.

Around the corner and down the street on Fourth Avenue,
Utilize also injects high-tech into comfortable old forms, in
this case literally. If Grossberger brings indigenous art into the
digital age, the artists of Utilize abandon the furniture of the
past and turn toward ultra-modern contemporary furniture heavy on the
metal: a couch in steel and leather, a sideboard table in aluminum,
glass, leather and wood.

Curated by Simon Donovan, the chameleon artist who does public art
and now performance art, the furniture is light years away from what
most of us have in our houses. The forms are sharp-edged, the shapes
startling.

Micah Dray’s “Table K” looks like a musical note. Colored a
brilliant bright blue (it also comes in maroon), it’s a curving coffee
table in aluminum. Its two flat levels—places to put your teacup
or books—stand on legs that are nothing more than sheets of thin
aluminum.

Dray’s other multi-layer tables, “Table E” in black, and “Table S”
in black brown, are equally inventive: jigsaw-cut puzzle pieces brought
to giant life.

Donovan collaborated with Ben Olmstead on a dining table called “The
Golden Mean.” More conventionally shaped than Dray’s tables, it’s made
of steel, wood, acrylic and wax. But it’s got its wild side. For the
tabletop, wooden slabs have been pieced together like a mosaic, with
strips of metal in between, and then “painted” in colorful wax dots.
The effect is not as weird as it sounds. The colors the two craftsmen
selected are sedate and wood-like: orange-brown and ocher.

Olmstead’s “Coffee Table With Chilida” is one of the stranger works.
A 5-foot long wrap of steel, it has two flat slabs, one for the
tabletop, one for the base, billowing out at the ends. Twists of
silvery stainless steel writhe out of holes cut into the top and
bottom. It’s more art than functioning furniture.

His “Donostia’s Reponse” is a harsh couch in steel and leather. The
“arms” are sharp flats of steel. (Make sure you don’t crash into their
keen-edged corners, as I did. Ouch.) The back is a severe tilt of
steel. But it’s not as uncomfortable as it looks. Brown leather across
the seat and the back soften the steel, and the slanty back actually
supports your spine, though a small pillow would help.

A few of the artisans deliberately went for beauty. Adan
Bañuelos’ chair in steel and laminated plywood is a fine-looking
sculptural composition (it’s on a pedestal so I couldn’t try it out for
comfort). Donovan’s “Lumos” is a charming row of four electrical
lights, shining through colored glass, alternating between spattered
green and spattered orange.

Like the Art + Design show still up at Etherton,
Utilize pairs its furniture with fine art. The offerings include
the always excellent line drawings of Tim Mosman, and art glass with
attitude by Michael Joplin.

This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.