Every new major structure is governmentally-required to dedicate a certain small percentage of its space to art for the masses. That's not art. That's a font. A Double Take On Type, running at the Arvada Center until March 25, disagrees.
Fonts are artistic, and typesetting is an art as old as the printing press itself.
This display in the upstairs gallery appears bare at first, nothing more than a few poems tacked up on the walls, but a closer examination of the art of type reveals the hidden talent of typeset artists. Tom Parson gets the greatest amount of space up front, with his handset pressing of several poems, pamphlets, and posters. Parson's artist statement reveals an insecurity, an almost paranoid attitude toward the impossibility of perfection. He comes across as a man both frightened by and obsessed with detail. The only typo on this piece is his drop cap, an overly flowery and intrusive A that introduces a supposedly necessary piece of imperfection into this garden.