About 800 people showed up Saturday for opening night at Cirq, the art space that used to be Sol Arts.
Owners Ernest Doty and David Hammond resurrected the space with their life savings and high hopes.
"Me and some friends were always finding ourselves going out of town, traveling, looking for something to do, something different than Albuquerque was offering, and I really liked the galleries and the art and the boutiques I would see out in L.A. or San Francisco or Oakland," Doty said. "I kept seeing all these people my own age that were doing something that really nobody was doing here, with the exception of the Stove. They were trying something new, something different."
Cirq, at 712 Central Ave. S.E., has a boutique with clothes, art and custom-made elbow pads and kneepads for break dancers. The adjoining room is a long-walled gallery space.
The opening featured paintings by local artists Albert Rosales, Thomas Haag, Robert Christopher, Ernest Doty and Eric McCollon. There were also DJs and performances by Say Wut!?, Zoology and Cultura Fuerte. The venue doesn't serve alcohol.
Doty printed his designs onto shirts to sell in the boutique, and Rosales painted the backs of denim jackets. Haag sold three of his four pieces that night, which is cause for celebration considering the state of our economy, he said. City workers painting over impromptu wall art inspire his work. He titled them with full sentences like, "The Shamen Came for the Prophet's Birthday and Played Energy Games."
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"Somebody does some graffiti on the wall, and they buff it out, but the color they buff it out with is never an exact match to the original color, so there's always this really great monochromatic, fade-out buff shape," Haag said, referring to his own pieces. "This is just interior house paint, so the colors are all kind of a pastel palette. I get it all free from the chemical waste place."
Doty's square stencil paintings combine clean-lined characters, ravens, black and white patterns and rainbows. Doty is no stranger to DIY ethics and self-motivation.
"My whole art career endeavors have been kind of weird," he said. "When I turned about 15, I guess, I'd been doing graffiti a little bit but just messing around. I saw a huge production; it was like the crew battle production. I remember one side was this guy with a yo-yo, and it was so big and, 'Whoa, they did that with spray paint? There aren't even any drips.'"
Then he found alcohol, which ruined his life for a few years, he said.
"I stopped drawing, and I stopped painting, and I stopped creating," he said. "That went on until about 6 1/2 years ago, and then I started doodling again, and I was like, 'Man, I miss this.'"
He stopped building cabinets with his father and wrapped all his work in Bubble Wrap to shop around to galleries in Albuquerque and then hitchhiked to Santa Fe and Taos, where he finally landed a show and sold two pieces.
"I'm using a lot of optical illusions in the backgrounds for the birds," he said. "I'm learning from my work again, and I'm doing something more with it."
Cirq's foremost focus is visual art, he said, but he's open to performance possibilities like music, fashion and juggling if it lends a relevant dimension to the artwork.
"We want to expose artists that we think are doing something important," Doty said. "If we're going to do a specific type of music for openings the first Fridays, we're going to do hip-hop. And then third Fridays, I think we're going to do techno, and we're only going to do it on third Fridays and so on."
He hopes to keep a steady following of artists who continually contribute their new works to the gallery. Each month, Doty plans to reserve the walls of the boutique for a new artist.
"We're taking portfolios and viewing people's art, and we're hoping to get as many artists to come in here and submit," he said. "We want to pick the very best of those people and show them. There's a lot of real, hard, raw, wonderful talent coming out of Albuquerque, and we want to showcase that. We want to scream to the rest of the United States, 'Look what's going on here. We may be a little city, but we're producing.'"
