Drew Austin

JULY 26, 2024 – SEPTEMBER 21, 2024

Featuring work by: Brenda Biondo (Manitou Springs, CO), Jarod Charzewski (Charleston, SC), James Tapscott (Victoria, AUS), and Christopher Warren (Durango, CO)

Dairy Arts Center, Boulder, CO

In the era of Anthropocene, every action caries the weight of environmental consequence.  When the world teeters on the brink of critical mass, artists retreat to their studios, igniting the creative spirit.  The quartet featured in Drip | Run | Freeze | Crack | Melt confronts this reality head-on, embracing beauty and play as potent tools for conservation, education, and social change. The exhibition deftly maneuvers between works; from a machine that visualizes watershed data, to physical representations of local water systems, arresting depictions of shadows asking to be closely examined and even mesmerizing hues extracted from ancient ice under microscopic scrutiny. Through art, potentially, we can reframe the narrative and cast a hopeful glow on the profound emotional upheavals our planet, and those who inhabit it, grapple with in this current moment.

Are You OK?

A Trans Survival Project by Jesse Freidin

February – May 2024

North East Exterior Wall of Dairy Arts Center, Boulder, CO

“My current project ‘Are You OK?’ documents the faces and stories of trans and non-binary youth living in the United States who are ready to stand up to political annihilation. Flanked by their supportive families, a diverse group of outspoken and deeply loved youth presents their strength and joy to the world in a revolt against the country’s attempt to erase them.

As a queer man of trans experience, and someone raised in a family of two Holocaust survivors, this work has become a contemporary archive of the disappearance of my community and a cathartic way to say that I am (and we are) still here. It is a social and ethnographic study, leaning on repetition for scientific effect. Participating in the creation of this work is dangerous– we meet in hiding behind buildings with extreme discretion in states that want us dead – yet the process of acknowledging each other offers a kind of healing within the frame. I have anonymized the parents to infer that the only way to have a living trans child is to support them.

Before each portrait, I do a short meditation exercise with each participant where we close our eyes, breathe into our most empowered selves, and show up together for a moment of self-actualization. In the past two years, I have photographed and interviewed over 130 trans and non-binary youth in over half the states in the country and will continue this series into 2024/25. Audio recordings are included in exhibitions, and on the website.”

Read the Boulder Weekly review here

SCAPES

January 12 – February 17, 2024

Featuring work by:  Richard Eisen, David Hollander, Molly Kaderka, and Pam Rogers

A scape in botanical terms is a long flowerless stem that extends from the bulb or rhizome of plants often buried right below the earth. Common scapes are the greens from onions or garlic, often utilized with the same eagerness of the mature vegetable itself. The term scape can also be used to designate the antennae of an insect or the shaft of a singular bird feather. It is the thing that extends, locates, delineates the object, or acts as a surprise among the norm. 

It’s also a term that brings to mind the land, implying an apostrophe on the title of the exhibition. 

The landscape, the Earth, the planet that we live on, and the things that encompass that space. 

The artists in this exhibition land somewhere within both lines of thought: exploring the world we live on, the lands we have seen and have yet to see, as well as the organisms and artifacts that exist within the universal scape that we as humans dwell within.

Methodologies include but are not limited to: 

the skewing of real/hyper-real/digital, creating colored pigment from the world around us, wrapping-binding-harnessing-distilling, floating ink on water and allowing an image to appear on paper, creating new works from broken works, collaged portals, colored binder yet to be fired, streeeeeeeeeetching a material and hoping gravity doesn’t function properly, defying gravity when it does, eliminating the horizon, process over product, depicting unseen worlds and objects, letting vision dictate creation, noticing the curvature of the planet under our feet, and the guidance of water

November 17th – December 30th, 2023

What is a portrait and how is it defined? 

Portrait Gallery, a large-scale group exhibition that was sourced from a public call for portrait based works, is created around this very question. 

Inspired directly by portrait galleries in prominent art institutions around the world, this salon-style hang is meant to engulf the viewer in a sea of portraiture. Perhaps a single gaze will catch your eye or maybe an abstracted work will bring you in; regardless of where you find yourself in the gallery, a connection is waiting to be established between viewer and subject. 

Featured Artists:

Tyler Alpern, Tya Alisa Anthony, Yazz Atmore, Ana Balzan, Sharon Bond Brown, Frances Joy Bradbury, Madison Brunetti, Kiah Butcher, Vera Coberley, Karen Conduff, Kevin Daly, Diane Deyo, Karen A. Dombrowski-Sobel, Mya Drost-Parra, Jensina Endresen, Lakin Fain, Justin Ferland, Kate Fitzpatrick, Suzanne Frazier, Rebecca Gabriel, Kate Geman, Anne Gifford, Zachary Heil, Sophie Hill, Brenda Jones, Mike Keene, Whitman Lindstrom, Veronica Love, Allyson McDuffie, Dez Merworth, Shantell Montoya, Raymond Moreno, Cipriano Ortega, Tony Ortega, Anna Poisson, Julie Puma, Maxwell Roath, Micah Roberts, Elayna Roy, Amanda Sandlin, Wyatt Scott, Brady Smith, River Smith, Maddie Stansell, Randall Steinke, Tracy Stuckey, Elizabeth Suriani, Kaitlyn Tucek, Lisa Corine von Koch

Read the Daily Camera review here

Conceptualized and featuring work by Artist Kaitlyn Tucek, in collaboration with Chef Morgan Bolling

Co-Produced with Dairy Arts Center, supported by K Contemporary. Huge thanks to Radical Waves Foundation for their support.

Hosted at a Private Residence, Boulder, CO, Sept. 9th, 2023

Watch the film, directed and produced by Doug Olsen

Images by Beauty Astria

For one night only, step into a fantastical world that challenges your everyday perceptions and celebrates all things femme. Honoring the traditionally considered feminine aesthetic, The Dinner Party, will be a multi-sensory and, sometimes, interactive experience, that includes visual art, installation, performance, and a uniquely exploratory dinner; you'll be amazed by what you see, hear, taste, and feel. Guests will be required to dress in their finest flora and fauna-inspired attire, as a means to help the participant abandon their reality and submit to the immersive structure.

In addition to the visual experience, guests will be presented with extraordinary fare by chef and grill master, Morgan Bolling. Delivered in both small, carefully curated bites and big punch pieces, each plate has been conceptualized to pair with each visual element to delight and surprise the senses. Morgan, the executive editor for Cook’s Country TV show, will be working with only female-owned vendors, farmers and purveyors when preparing for The Dinner Party. Each guest will receive the finest of meat and produce while simultaneously supporting and celebrating the women who have provided us with beautiful food.

Dairy Arts Center

May 12 - July 6, 2023

Listen to curator Drew Austin and exhibiting artist Carey Candrian on KGNU, OutSources

Read the Westword Review here about Just Us, documentary screening

Boulder Daily Camera features Prismatic

Light and shadow work in tandem to illuminate and define the world around us, and yet, when we look closer we can observe that light contains infinitely more than meets the eye. Much like our personhood, something that is so easily split into categories actually bursts forth with infinite potential.

This is the impetus for Prismatic, an exhibition celebrating the queer community across the Front Range for Pride month, most often celebrated in June. This exhibition was curated along a simple idea that allowed breadth for personal interpretation: color and space.

Often confined to queer art showcases, gay rights exhibitions, queer material or sexuality-themed shows, The Dairy intentionally called artists who identify within the LGBTQIA+ community to display the layers of richness within their own personal practices’ with the only qualification being color. Some artists choose to dive deep within their sexuality and unearth injustices present within our current political climate, while other artists choose to meditate on the land, exploring materials and creatures that connect with the human experience.

Using the layout of the gallery spaces as a formal template, Prismatic is divided into two sections: Black & White or Color Spectrum. The MacMillan Family Lobby, Polly Addison Gallery, and Hand-Rudy Gallery contain works curated with a lack of color. Artists invited to participate in this section of the exhibition focus on identity/sexuality, commercial consumption, and the natural world primarily.

Moving into the formal McMahon Gallery, white light is split apart, the brilliance of light is fully observed, and the color spectrum becomes evident and individual. Selecting works from a public open call with the seven gallery walls in mind, each wall creates one section of a larger rainbow spectrum and encompasses a broad range of material and content from artists across Colorado and beyond.

Participating Artists:

Tyler Alpern, Finley Baker, Shaunie Berry, Scottie Burgess, Carey Candrian, San Canessa, Dagny Chika, Sarah Darlene, JUHB, Jesse Egner, Levi Fischer, Kate Geman, Nathan Hall, Hudson Hatfield, Sophie Hill, Grace Hoag, Kora Hope, Padyn Humble, Talia Johns, Alli Lemon, Cherish Marquez, Robert Martin, Dez Merworth, Nems, Zachariah Rampulla, Alexander Richard Wilson, Tracy Stegall, Joel Swanson, Louis Trujillo, Chloe Wilwerding

Dairy Arts Center

February 3rd – April 1st, 2023

Co-Curated by Hyperlink Collective

The internet has become a hotbed for communication, collaboration, and connection in ways that no one could have imagined. With the rise of social media, artists and creators around the world are able to disseminate imagery and gain exposure to other artists and institutions in the blink of an eye. While this has greatly increased a sense of global participation, the internet and social media often hinders one’s ability to make the same meaningful connections that are cultivated when co-existing in proximity.

Hyperlink, formed in 2014, is a nebulous artist collective dedicated to alternative artistic experiences, practices, opportunities, and expanding community. With Fan Mail 2.0, Hyperlink aims to straddle the boundary between virtual connection and physical action by asking each of its members to select an artist they are interested in, inspired by, and a fan of and then inviting them to show their work in the context of our community.

Purposely, Fan Mail 2.0, doesn’t privilege the buddy-system but seeks a new paradigm. We ask each other how we, as artists, may create new connections and present artworks we desire to share and voices that we long to hear. Through collaboration with distant communities, we can form lasting relationships that continue to influence the creative practices of those involved and those who come to view it. We envision that through thoughtful conversations and shared efforts, the divisions created by time, space, and geography collapse.

Featured Artists: Holly Berg, Kathryn Cameron, Roger Allan Cleaves, Marina Eckler, Philippe Hyojung Kim, Christopher Lin, London Matthews, Aida Lizalde, Ricardo iamuuri Robinson, and Claire Simpson

Presented by The Dairy Arts Center in collaboration with East Window

Exhibition part of Month of Photography March, 2023

Browse the entire exhibition via Dairy Arts

Read OutFrontMag’s Feature Here

Exhibition Juried by Charlo and Harry James Hanson and supported by The Community Foundation of Boulder County

Joy is frequently understood as the fulfillment of desires which are considered essential to one’s own flourishing. Joy involves an existential and personally salient experience that is significant enough to produce a powerful emotional response. Joy serves critical evolutionary functions such as its role in forming bonds between infants and parents, and in intimate romantic relationships. The experience of joy is a fundamental response to human possibility.

Why then, do we so readily dismiss joy as the “emotion of luxury”? And why do our respective experiences of joy often feel inappropriate in a world that both suffers without it and needs it so significantly?

Perhaps joy’s credibility has been eroded in Western cultures, particularly in America, because we’ve been inundated by myths that joy is an ultimate destination arrived at by following a few simple programs (cooking, signing, working, not working, motherhood, or sex — referencing just some of the popular book titles of the past few decades). “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” continue to be the most important value-directed goals by which many guide their lives. Not achieving these goals or failing to appear even inauthentically happy much of the time can give cause for concern. With pressures to maximize happiness and minimize sadness we fear that our attainment of happiness and potentially joy is continually out of reach. This creates a culture addicted to happiness and its pursuit, wherein only the privileged have unlimited access to it.

JOYSOME looks beyond superficial prescriptions for the perfect life and welcomes all of our divergent experiences and interpretations of what joy is to us. JOYSOME reflects upon the subjective worlds of this emotion, upon its unique timings and subsets, and upon joy’s crucial functions in human existence.

JOYSOME consists of fifty images selected from hundreds of responses to a call for work on the theme of joy. Submitted by artists and non-artists alike, the works in this exhibit span a range of disciplines and affective registers associated with joy— Ecstasy, Transcendence, Sadness, The Fear of Joy, Anger, Mania, Euphoria, Toxic Positivity, The American Dream, The Pursuit of Happiness, Masochism, Selflessness, Success, Sacrifice, Divination, Cuteness, The Sublime, Altruism, and Peace. The selected images are printed on flags and exhibited between Dairy Arts Center and East Window.

– Todd Edward Herman

Participating Artists: Tyler Alpern, Cyndy Beardsley, Nancy Bratton, Tracy Burke, Marie Bush, Gloria Campbell, Jaina Cipriano, Karen Cooper Paintings, Jeannie DeMarinis, Cagla Demirbas, Leah Diament, Sheri Earnhart, Jennifer Evans, Lares Feliciano, Matthew Finley, Charis Fleshner, Suzanne Frazier, Gregg Gibson, Jamie Gordon, Emerson Green, Kevin Hoth, Jennifer Jackowitz, Katie Kindle, Jeanne Kipke, Beth Krensky, Photo Credit: Josh Blumental, Chanyu Kuo, Matt Lancaster, Jade Lascelles, Dave Levingston, James Long, Stuart T. Loughridge, InsideTheRobot, DaNice D Marshall, Jessica St.John Marshall, Janice McCullagh, Andi Newberry, Lennette Newell, Khanjan Purohit, Lou Patrou, Anil Purohit, Bryn Robertson, Heather Schulte, Anne Marie Shopp, T.M. Spring, Vera Sprunt, Bobby Storts, Trevor Traynor, Carlos D. Valcarcel, Sherry Wiggins and Luis Filipe Branco, Wehaverealize

Participating Locations: The Gallery @ Bus Stop Apartments, Mercury Framing, East Window, Edward Jones (Karen Lester), Salt of the Earth, Swoon Art House, Boulder Medical Center, bsw Wealth Partners, Museum of Boulder, Whittier Elementary School, Boulder Chamber, Dairy Arts Center

December 2nd, 2022 - January 28th, 2023

Dairy Arts Center, Boulder, CO

Read DARIA’s Exhibition Review Here

A vessel takes on many different definitions and exists within a range of disciplines; from science and the blood to vessels that sail the wide open seas, all the way to ancient vessels that were used for water transportation or storage. The ways in which vessels are understood are also quite abstract and far-reaching. Artists have expanded what their thoughts around traditional vessels are, transcending categorization to include things like time, narrative, illness, humor, stereotype, and self-identification.

This exhibition explores the ever-expanding boundaries that are contained within and make up the idea of a vessel. What truly is a vessel, and how can we singularly contain its definition? The answer: we can’t. The vessel is at one time one thing and at the same time something completely different. A work of art can be a functional object and an idea can be an incubator. What is being contained and the container in which it is settled can morph, merge, or disappear completely. Creators are using the vessel as a means to understand something, to contain something, or to put something into a specific place and explore within that space.

Participating artists:

Tyler Alpern, Virginia Diaz Saiki, thnhdnh, Personal Geographies (Becky Wareing Steele and Shannon Geis), Jane Glotzer, Andrea Gordon, Dylan Griffith, Brenda Jones, Hannah Leathers, Marsha Mack, Peter Manion, Evan Mann, Layl McDill, Andra Stanton, Lindsay Stripling, Robert Sunderman, Lucas Thomas, Chase Travaille

The Dairy Arts Center, Boulder, CO

September 23rd - November 19th, 2022

Co-Curated by JayCee Beyale

Participating Artists: JayCee Beyale, Theresa Clowes, Kendall Rose Kippley, Zeke Peña, Nicole Salimbene, and Anna Tsouhlarakis

“Water doesn’t discriminate, but people do. How do we make this a human need rather than a demographic need?” -JayCee Beyale

Our bodies are living organisms and often our best indicators when something is wrong. Our bodies will make us sick, will begin breaking down muscle or bone, and even go into complete shock to make a point that we can’t ignore. Similarly, the planet that we all call home has begun to do the same, and at a frightening pace. Earth has been telling us to slow down, to stop, and to reconsider our actions of “progress” by sending heavy rains, damaging hail, raging winds, and extreme flooding our way. Tornados are no longer contained to a season and whole towns can be wiped out in just minutes from out-of-control fires. The planet is using all of the resources that it has to communicate with us, and yet we just won’t listen. But how can we possibly look at the planet as a home for us all to collectively defend if political discourse overshadows human needs?

This is where the collision of artists and scientists comes in. As more water sources and water supplies become commodified, it is exponentially more important for artists and scientists to team up across cultures and disciplines to make defending our vital resources a priority before they are depleted. If we can look outside the lens of money, politics, and power, there is a chance for a new view of this resource to come to life.

Artists often hold an intrinsic connection to their environment, sensing things before the general public and feeling deep upsets within the community before they are pinpointed by the masses. This intuition pushes artists ahead of the curve and allows them to begin visually integrating data, emotional responses, and calls to action into their work. Abstract thought processes create space to ponder future developments in the world of water and start to think about a world without it. Paired with climate research and personal anecdotes, the power of storytelling becomes a force that can be used to deconstruct the notion of water’s immortality that we hold in this country.

This exhibition brings together artists invested in protecting and educating others about the importance of water to the collective human species. El Paso-born artist Zeke Peña presents an expanded version of his 12-color serigraph The River, exploring the past, present, and future of the Rio Grande River that separates the border of the United States and Mexico. Kendall Rose Kippley brings in text to her large-scale abstract landscapes, challenging viewers with the phrase Don’t Let Me Go among a field of ice. Muralist and co-curator JayCee Beyale will explore Navajo creation stories through color symbolism, iconography, and lands connected to the cardinal directions. In the Hand-Rudy Gallery, educator Theresa Clowes will show a series of new color studies, created by visiting 25 locations along the Colorado River and studying the water, paired with a hand-felted map of the same river. Maryland-based artist Nicole Salimbene will create a solemn space to contemplate your connection to collected waters and Anna Tsouhlarakis will round out the exhibition with a new multi-media installation, telling the story of the Native woman’s gift of water. If we can begin to listen to our planet and see the significance of water as a finite, depleting resource perhaps we can defend it before it is gone.

This project funded in part by a grant from the Boulder Arts Commission, an agency of the Boulder City Council.

The Dairy Arts Center, Boulder, CO

March 4th - April 9th, 2022

Featuring the work of Emily McIlroy, Alli Lemon, Paula Gasparini-Santos, and Sarah Darlene Palmeri

Presentiment showcases the work of four artists all separately and collectively using their practice as a means to process the internal turmoil that teems within the human experience. A balance of intuition, connection to personal emotional terrain, and the desire to traverse an unknown landscape permeates the work on view throughout the exhibition. From large-scale explorations of grief that manifest in gorgeous Wildernesses to small-scale interactions between pattern and material, all artists on view tap into their inner selves as a way to create a connection to the outer.

The works on view create a dialogue with the viewer as well: luring them in with lush color palettes, rich text, and raw material, while simultaneously engaging and reciprocating the energy that radiates from the human body, allowing the work to almost vibrate in relation to the viewer. The imbued spirit of the artist sings through the works as the viewer can see evidence of fighting through deep thought processes and arriving at a visual conclusion, or perhaps another question. The images and objects presented invite you to sit longer, to engage further within yourself, and to leave the gallery with a hopeful lift of spirit.

Images by Elliot Whitehead and Drew Austin

Tour the Virtual Exhibition

Read Brandi Stanley’s written response “A Bright, White Light”

Co-curated by Mark Amerika

The Dairy Arts Center, Boulder, CO

Jan 17th - Feb 23rd, 2020

Brutal Realities exposes how contemporary artists confront their shifting nature of reality in digitally mediated culture. This manifests through various artistic mediums but focuses on artists working in the field of new media art. Presented primarily through video, sound, animation, photography, performance, and digital manipulation, the exhibition features artists who have shown their work nationally and internationally, all of whom have developed their work while living in Colorado.

Each artist in the exhibition brings their unique style of manipulating data to form a different approach toward the precarious cultural and political situation we find ourselves in. Some of the artists choose to use humor and post-internet parody to send a direct message, while others use abstraction, movement, and color to evoke an emotion or line of inquiry. Throughout the exhibition, viewers get critical insights into a world mediated through technology. Brutal Realities invites you to question the world around you and rethink what it means to be alive at a time of global climate crisis, cross-generational existential angst, and information overload.

Centered around the University of Colorado Boulder’s TECHNE Lab, the McMahon Gallery features a group exhibition of work from current and former TECHNE Lab faculty, graduate students and staff as well as the partners and instructors that have helped maintain it for nearly 20 years. New work is presented alongside near prophetic work from the past decade, all following a common thread of challenging our perception of reality in a world infused with alternative facts, Deep Fakes, AI bots, and surveillance capitalism.

The TECHNE Lab is a practice-based research initiative in the digitally-expanded intermedia arts and humanities, founded in 2002 by Professor Mark Amerika at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The lab serves as an artistic hub between the Department of Art History and the CMCI Doctoral Program in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance. TECHNE artists participating in the Brutal Realities exhibition include Déesse, Jon J. Satrom, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Melanie Clemmons, Ryan Wurst, Rick Silva, Nicholas O’Brien, and Mariana Pereira Vieira. In the summer of 2018, TECHNE Lab faculty and graduate artists held two simultaneous exhibitions in New York City, and this exhibition brings the art back home to Boulder.

In the MacMillian Family Lobby, Dominican-American artist Annette Isham physically and metaphorically places herself within the abstracted landscape of the West. Full of masculine connotation, the West became of interest to Isham as a vast canvas to impose a figure of feminine energy. Visually resembling patterned breasts as well as referencing ovum, the circular form travels in and out of the landscape defying laws of space and gravity through a constructed playing field.

The Polly Addison Gallery features work from Michael Theodore’s Why Time? Series; an enigmatic symphony of color and texture, each work focusing on a single specific environment. These works capture “time from a process that has no end and no beginning.” Through Theodore’s fields of movement, we are reminded of the slow-moving erosion of the earth, the waves of the oceans, and the cyclical nature of the sun, and yet, his digital touch makes the work seem unfamiliar, peeking curiosity.

Rounding out the exhibition is a collection of work from Regan Rosburg and Natascha Seideneck. Both interested in the minute details of the natural world, both women present strikingly beautiful work with a bleak underlying message. The work lures the viewer in--exposing material, substrate, object--and slowly reveals that the creation of this work directly connects to the destruction of the natural world. Using waste products, such as plastic, oil, chemicals, as well as discarded objects from the natural world, both women look to the future at a world destroyed from the effects of today.

Featured in Boulder Weekly

Featured in Daily Camera

Images by Lauren Click

Co-Curated by Jessica Kooiman Parker

The Dairy Arts Center, Boulder, CO

Dec. 16th, 2019 - Jan 12th, 2020

We Are What We Wear presents a limited survey of contemporary artists across the United States working with clothing as a form of artistic medium. Textiles, whether created or repurposed, hold physical, historical, as well as emotional weight. The smell from oil-stained cloth that permeates your grandfather’s closet and the floral perfume wafting off a freshly sprayed feather boa brings you back to a moment of connection, a certain place, or creates a nostalgic ping of longing for a time you use to know.

Using materials as sprawling as rust, kevlar, denim, and glass beads, the artists in this exhibition all question personal affinities through the exploration of clothing and the people who wear it. Presented primarily through sculptural work, We Are What We Wear displays itself as an exhibition for the community of Boulder; a starting point for extended conversation surrounding labor, passion, safety, and masculinity.

The exhibition will center around the 2018 Boedecker Path to Excellence Grant awardee The Pavlova Project. Created by local Boulder artist Peggy Turchette, this unique exhibition will walk viewers through the life and career of world-renowned ballerina Anna Pavlova. Through the painstaking recreation of Pavlova’s career-defining costumes and couture, Turchette will guide viewers through a biographical narrative of Pavlova’s life while providing personal insight into the extraordinary art of one of 20th century’s most inspiring women.

The Polly Addison Gallery will showcase the work of South Carolina-based artist Erika Diamond. Her works in Imminent Peril - Queer Collection are all created for specific LGBTQ identifying individuals in her personal network. All the works, created by weaving bullet-proof Kevlar material, are created as a response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting and push viewers to consider how one can express their individuality and be safe in public space at the same time.

New York-based artists Winnie van der Rijn and Noah Pica get paired together for How to Dismantle the Patriarchy in the Hand/Rudy Gallery. Painted walls bring to life destroyed, manipulated, and transformed Oxford shirts, an iconic symbol of mainstream masculinity, as an exploration into the potential of fluid or broken down masculine presentation.

Jim Arendt, a North Carolina-based artist, will round out the exhibition in the MacMillian Lobby. Arendt uses denim to create near life-size representations of individuals in his life, finding a connection between the material nature of repurposed denim and the personal qualities of the figures he represents. His work investigates labor and the impact of economic structures through the ease of availability and story of the material it is comprised of.

Featured in Boulder Weekly

Images by Lauren Click

A Gentle Pause

Solo Exhibition by Moe Gram

Alto Gallery, Denver, CO

October 2019

We live in a fast paced world; children grow up learning how to become busy and humans now live both a presented life and a real life. We do not have time to stop anymore.

We are bombarded constantly and yet asked to be reflective.

We are asked to be introspective.

We are asked to be ourselves in a world where we can’t even figure out who we are to other people. So how do we figure out who we are to ourselves?

Years of collecting, creating, thinking, expounding, and collecting and creating again have resulted in A Gentle Pause.

A guided exhibition, Gram leads you through a showcase of strength, down her path of recognition and growth as she understood and processed it in the moment it was happening. And while the exhibition extends a helping hand, the work itself presents as a large expanse for you to insert your own interpretation.

Abstract in nature and deeply personal, all that Gram asks is that you walk with her, sit with her, talk and look with her; but also simultaneously at her. Process the work in front of you while you process yourself. Sit alone while also completely engulfed in humanity at the same time.

Gram has created a space that is together overwhelming and welcoming within the same moment, presenting to you an opportunity to feel her development as she is experiencing it. A Gentle Pause takes your hand and guides you through the scrapbook of Gram’s life, from her California roots to the busy culture of Denver that she has found herself within currently.

Allow yourself the opportunity to walk, sand between your toes, into the mind of Moe Gram and take a moment to pause.

Photos courtesy of Raymundo Munõz and Alto Gallery

Mai Wyn Fine Art, in partnership with ReCreative Denver, is pleased to present the much anticipated solo exhibition We Were Here by Denver artist Lauri Lynnxe Murphy. A multi-disciplinary artist and activist, Murphy returns to her work with bees, snails and other environmentally affected species in this expansive eco-exhibition. One show, two venues, both conveniently located right across the street from one another in the 700-block of Santa Fe Drive in the heart of Denver’s Art District on Santa Fe.

From the artist’s statement:

Anyone older than 30 who went on family road trips probably remembers the constellation of splats on the windshield and half-smashed bugs stuck in the grill of the car. If you’ve gone on any road trips lately, you may have noticed a cleaner windshield, but that apparent benefit hides a terrifying reality: insects are facing an apocalypse. In April of 2019, a major study warned that 40% of insect species face near-term extinction. Another researcher who has gathered bugs for years estimates upwards of 70%. For perspective: insects are two thirds of the species on our planet.

Insects are the functional base of most ecosystems. The danger of losing honeybees is widely known for their pollination of most of what we eat, but nature has its own food

pyramid. Most humans, at the top of the food chain due to thumbs and brains that give us a terrifying advantage, operate mostly unaware of that food chain, confident that food comes from the grocery store in brightly labeled boxes. But insects are important not only as a food source for other animals and fish, but as the creators of soil plant-based food grows in as they break down organic matter, as the cleanup crews for carrion, and with many species, simply as bringers of joy and beauty, though only when they appeal aesthetically to humans. When they do not, or invade our spaces, we see them as a disgusting scourge. But like it or not, our own survival clearly is intertwined with theirs.

For the past 10 years, I’ve been working with insects in danger of disappearing. It started with concerns about Colony Collapse Disorder in bees, leading to me starting hives and learning everything I could about the bees’ ways in order to try to collaborate with them, carefully manipulating their behavior and patterns in the service of making art. When I became allergic to their stings, I found snails and their iridescent slime trails, who face extinction due to climate change, pollution, and ocean acidification. And on hikes and gathering wood for campfires, I found the trails that fascinated me as a child to the point that I would do rubbings of them -- the meandering paths on the surface of the wood carved by Pine and Spruce Beetles. In the beetles, I can explore two future extinctions at once, as climate change has exploded the population of beetles and decimated over a fifth of Colorado’s forests; the two species are engaged in a mutually assured destruction. I have pursued all of this work simultaneously for the past several years, and this is the first time all of these bodies of work have appeared together.

This is art predicated on failure. And perhaps to some degree, this is symbolically fitting, as it reflects our failure as a species to properly steward our home, placing these small collaborators in danger in the first place. Everything I do is trial and error at the beginning, but I approach my work like a scientist - performing experiments, and recording the results, which are only occasionally artwork until I learn how to work with the animals or organic materials I’ve chosen. I am handing over certain decisions to an element of chance, and yet, by creating protocols and with careful observation, I can predetermine and build in elements that I wish to see express themselves...color, irregular cells, shape. Ethics are of the utmost importance to me however, and I am careful to never cause harm and always disrupt their lives as little as possible.

My main goal, in aestheticizing these products of insects, is to create in people a sense of biophilia, and activate our innate tendency to seek connection with nature. If I can use beauty as a way to make people love and care for these small, rarely noticed creatures, perhaps they, and we, have a better chance at survival. I am preserving that which is seldom seen and making the invisible visible, if only that perhaps, we might appreciate the things we do not notice in the natural world, and grow appreciation for the beauty of this detritus.

Co-curated by Drew Austin, Ashley Frazier, and Michael F. Sperandeo

Redline Contemporary Arts Center and The Temple Artist’s Studios

June 2019, July 2018

Working collaboratively between Redline Contemporary Art Center and The Temple, curators Ashley Frazier, Drew Austin, and Michael F. Sperandeo present Lights Out Lights On: a one-night celebration of light-based installation and new media art.

During the course of the night, artists will activate unique spaces throughout the historic Temple with digital animation, experimental media, light-based installation and sculptural works, as well as a projected video on the outside facade of the building. At the same time, the entire gallery space of Redline will be blacked out to allow for projected film, interactive installation, experimental performance, and light-based projects of all kinds.

Featured in 1/1 Mag

Group Exhibition

Robyn Frances, Erica Green, Emilie Luckett, Jordan Lyn, Kaitlyn Tucek

ReCreative Denver

August 3rd - August 31st, 2018

Listen | Read

Thread/Bare pairs the work of five artists together to weave a story rich in individual experience. Working with textiles connects the five artists on view, while their personal stories will take on varied forms and mediums.

Textiles become a form of physical connection throughout the exhibition both literally and metaphorically. The stories that are presented converse with the viewer about lost familial connections, the need for exaltation of female figures, and the profound effects of love. Loose fiber explodes out of powerful, sensual female forms while within every painstakingly placed stitch is a new examination on how women are viewed in contemporary culture.

Thoughts on sensuality, heartbreak, repair, perception, and reclaiming the female narrative permeate the work on view. Works on paper, large-scale paintings, installation, as well as detailed embroidery works will be featured throughout the gallery.

Two Person Exhibition

Leo Rivera and Becky Wareing Steele

ReCreative Denver

April 2018

Large Spaces and Small Worlds features new works by Leo Rivera and Becky Wareing Steele.

Contrasting styles, methods of creation, and context, this two-person exhibition will pair large scale non-objective paintings in direct relation with miniature architectural prototypes, using sculpture as a means to add punctuation to a sentence created through paint. A site-specific collaborative installation will bring these two artists together, combining content and creating a single voice.

Thoughts on infinity, specificity, and micro/macro views of the world permeate these new bodies of work by two emerging contemporary artists in Denver. This exhibition will utilize the large space available in ReCreative Denver in a way that will have you visually stimulated with an inkling for further exploration of space.