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William Wylie

American Places

In the exhibition American Places William Wylie focuses on the concept of place; how we respond to the landscape, how we move from the general to the specific in our personal associations with it, and how our lives are interwoven into the histories of places. In his work over the past twenty years, Wylie has balanced a striking formal sensibility with a dedication to a documentary role for his photography. In this respect, his photographs are marked by both intensity and dispassion. He writes: “The landscape is a visual presentation of forces at work, from the biological and geological to the human. As an artist I am interested in the evocative quality of that presentation. I make photographs not only to honor what is in front of the camera but also to invoke a sense of inclusion (my own and hopefully an audience). The act of attention is a way of connecting and photography is a tool that supports our involvement with the world. “

For the two bodies of work represented in this exhibition Wylie used a landscape feature to create an itinerary by which to document the place, in both cases a pathway. One is a river, the Cache la Poudre River in northern Colorado, the other a two-lane highway, Route 36, traversing northern Kansas from border to border. By using an established geographical reference as a trajectory into the landscape Wylie accepts his route as a given. Concomitantly, these photographs document the personal experiences of the photographer. He spent four years working on each project, traveling (and in the case of the Poudre River, walking) the entire lengths of the commons. With this in mind, they can’t be viewed as only referencing the places themselves but also as locating a moment in time when a specific individual stood in front of a subject that mattered. That relationship is always paramount in Wylie’s images.

Riverwalk (1994-1998) is a collection of 49 photographs documenting the landscape surrounding the watershed along the Cache la Poudre River in Colorado. Both a Wild and Scenic River and one of the most polluted in Colorado, the place is being developed at a rapid pace. At the same time, Wylie attends to the river itself, its shifting flow and fluctuations in light, as well the manner in which it has shaped the environment through which it passes. The publication Riverwalk (UPC, 2000) won the 2000 Colorado Book Award.

Likewise, Route 36 (2004-2008) functions as both a program and a subject. Though Wylie’s images, we glimpse the Western prairie through the frame of trucking and agricultural industries. The turnouts and roadsides that draw his attention prove sparsely populated and largely neglected. His photographs are revealing not only of American spaces, but spatial practice: our production and consumption of space, our way stations and movement through it. This documentary series of photographs moves progressively westward, beginning at the Missouri River crossing, where oxbows form the platforms for the city of St. Joseph, and ending where the two lanes of Route 36 disappear into Interstate 70 at Byers, Colorado, within sight of the Rocky Mountains. These photographs document not only a geographical landscape, but a social one as well, recording a particular moment in the history of vernacular culture. Route 36 has just been released by Flood Editions.

As the poet Merrill Gilfillan has commented, “It seems continually necessary to reassert that landscape study and its reflective arts are anything but passive disciplines, that civilization in a sustaining, daily sense emerges most surely from good relations with one’s surroundings (the perfect word) and the inner landscape of possibility held in the head and heart.” (Merrill Gilfillan will be participating in an artist discussion with William Wylie in September, details will be announced shortly.)

ARTIST BIO
William Wylie received an MFA from The University if Michigan in 1989. He has published four books of his photographs, Riverwalk (University Press of Colorado, 2000), Stillwater (Nazraeli Press, 2002), Carrara (Center for American Places, 2009), and Route 36 (Flood Editions, 2010) all concerned with landscape and place. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 2005 and a Colorado Individual Artist Fellowship in 1998. His photographs and films have been shown both nationally and internationally, including A Complex Eden at The Museum of Fine Art, St. Petersburg, FL, 100 Great American Photographs at The Amon Carter Museum. Fort Worth, TX, and Forged Power at Arizona State University Art Museum. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Yale University Art Museum, among others. He lives in Charlottesville where he teaches photography at the University of Virginia.

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CC Summer Music Festival at GOCA121

The Colorado College Summer Music Festival brings their extraordinary students and faculty to join with GOCA121 on June 18 to bring music and art together. These incredible musicians will be creating new work based on their responses to the current exhibition, 4×4.

The evening promises to woo you with world class music, fabulous art, free wine and great place for dinner right next door (Nosh).

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SAY WHAT: art + poetry

Matthew Schumacher

7 pm at GOCA 121
121 S. Tejon

SAY WHAT is a new forum for poetry in Colorado Springs.

Poetry and contemporary art can be difficult to approach—they don’t always seem to make sense, but this program eases visitors into conversations about both (with a glass of wine and expert interpreters at hand). SAY WHAT is the product of community collaborators interested in teaching people about poetry through art and vice versa. Each session explores ideas related to structure, theme, language and content in poetry that can also be seen in the corresponding visual art exhibition.

The second installment of SAY WHAT will feature award-winning Oregon poet Matt Schumacher. Schumacher’s second full-length book, The Fire Diaries, was published this year. A shorter version, Fire Diary, was selected by Matthea Harvey for the Well Lit Press chapbook contest, and his first first collection, Spilling the Moon, appeared in 2008. Virgil Suarez writes, “To read a Matt Schumacher poem is to enter a world of riotous word riffs and fire-related incantations. Meditative, hauntingly chaotic, and beautiful, these poems will singe your memory. This ample collection glows with great personal and historical revelatory spark.”

BYOP (bring your own pillow) and enjoy the program.

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4X4

4 artists, 4 curators

AT GOCA121 | 121 S. Tejon St. | Suite 100

4×4: 4 artists, 4 curators developed out of a series of conversations between four local contemporary art curators. After many informal discussions about artists and exhibitions we decided to explore further the similarities and differences of our curatorial approaches by collaborating on a project featuring four Colorado artists.

While the artists are diverse in their chosen media and conceptual choices, taken as a whole, 4×4 challenges the viewer to consider space, scale and stories and ask questions about the relationships between objects, between object and space and between local visual arts institutions.

CURATORS
Caitlin Green (GOCA)
Blake Milteer (Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center)
Jessica Hunter Larsen (The I.D.E.A. Space at Colorado College)
Holly Parker (Smokebrush Gallery & Foundation)

ARTISTS
Andrew Beckham
Carol Golemboski
Kate Petley
Stacy Steers

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FREE CANDY!

...and the 2010 UCCS Senior Art Exhibition

FREE CANDY! is the annual Visual and Performing Arts exhibition highlighting work from 2010 graduating seniors. The exhibition is planned and executed from start to finish by the visual art students as part of their professional development course and is the sampling of work from 10 students working in sculpture, drawing, painting, digital media, video, and photography.

FEATURED ARTISTS
Laura Bearl
Jen Blair
Lisa Cross
Tracy Falsetto
Tiffany Gray
Frankie Medeiros
Emily Morgan
Daniela Oettinger
Gretchen Piper
Monica VanConant
Tim Winkelbauer

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1440: Moan

Pleasure and Pain

Taking inspiration from a sound that straddles pleasure and pain, Moan features art work in a variety of media by UCCS Visual Art faculty and students as a part of the City Dionysia Festival. A maelstrom of violence, The Bacchae is a potent source for examining the heart of revelry, intoxication, and vengeance. Opening reception: March 4, 6 – 9 pm. Closing reception (with a live performance of excerpts from the Bacchae score): April 2, 6 – 9 pm.

COMPLIMENTARY PARKING IN LOT 3 PROVIDED BY UCCS PARKING SERVICES.

Featuring work by:

Carol Dass
Aaron Graves
Claire Rau
Kim Lovelace
Corey Drieth
Laura Bearl
Erik Schubert
Taylor Stamp
Mariya Zvonkovich
Amber Marchlowska
Matt Barton
Courtney Matthews
Olivia Lundberg
Elizabeth Raitz
Pauline Foss
Brett Wilson
Valerie Brodar
Dom Puleo
Erin Elder
Lisa Cross

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AWOL: Rotozaza

ETIQUETTE, GURUGURU and WONDERMART

February 6, 2010 from 4pm - 7 pm at Shuga's (702 S. Cascade Avenue)

The Gallery of Contemporary Art and THEATREWORKS are proud to host the world premier of the ENTIRE Autoteatro Series by Rotozaza, a UK-based performance group. Three works make up the series: ETIQUETTE, GURUGURU and WONDERMART.

BUY TICKETS or call 719.255.3232 to make reservations.

ETIQUETTE by Ant Hampton and Silvia Mercuriali
Etiquette is a half-hour experience for two people in a public space. There is no-one watching – other people in the cafe or bar are not aware of it. You wear headphones which tell you what to say to each other, or to use one of the objects positioned to the side. There is a kind of magic involved – for it to work you just need to listen and respond accordingly. Etiquette is theatre at its most raw; it is live, insightful, philosophical and incredibly unique. The participants are both the actors and the audience, and the show offers the fantasy of being able to speak without having to think what to say.

GURUGURU by Ant Hampton with Joji Koyama and Isambard Khroustaliov
You have been told what to do every moment of the day, for years on end. The voice in your headphones has understood who you are and gives instructions which mirror what you’d be doing anyway. A life free of dither and uncertainty! In your job, this voice is a career-saver… but the day has come when you need to come ‘off the headphones’. You need help.

Five audience-participants enter a brightly lit room and discover chairs positioned for them around a screen. As they each follow different instructions via headphones, they find themselves at the centre of an oddly familiar dystopia, and that they’re wearing headphones permanently, ‘for their own good’. Proceedings are led by an on-screen, animated character whose twin roles of marketing and spiritual Guru are confused by his reliance on untested and accident-prone technologies. The overproduced, digital sheen of this focus-group world begins to crack, as the group edge towards the dangerous situation of having to think for themselves. In true Rotozaza style, a beautifully orchestrated chaos develops, exposing today’s consumer-mad inability to distinguish between what we want, and what we need.

WONDERMART by Silvia Mercuriali with Tommaso Perego and Matt Rudkin
Wondermart takes a mischievous swipe at the dominance of supermarket culture and consumerism. This interactive audio tour takes you on a journey of rediscovery through the familiar surroundings of the supermarket. Wearing headphones and anonymous behind your trolley, you are guided around the aisles immersed in a private world, as the carefully constructed soundscape overlays a fictional world that blurs the real with the imaginary.

Here’s what the press has to say:
“Wondermart is an absorbing journey into the heart of modern consumerism.” The List (Wondermart)

“The concept is clever and the result an altered engagement with the commonplace.” Irish Times (Wondermart)

“gripping… If the line between audience and performer seems blurred, Rotozaza’s Etiquette erases it entirely.” New York Times/Herald Tribune (Etiquette)

“This is a magical, unthreatening experience… the act of relinquishing responsibility for thought, word and action is unique and the effect is unmissable.” British Theatre Guide (Etiquette)

“Hugely entertaining… This smart, mysterious exercise in programmed thinking and collective chaos is strange but exhilarating.” The Times (GuruGuru)

“You may find yourself frantically looking for yourself again in the moments after the performance has finished.” The Guardian (GuruGuru)

MORE INFORMATION ON ROTOZAZA CAN BE FOUND ON THEIR WEBSITE: www.rotozaza.uk

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Intersections Film Festival

6pm, October 16 - 9pm October 18, 2009

IFF 2009 features award winning films and documentaries from Turkey, Iran, the Arab Middle East, and North Africa which explore the theme of women’s lives and experiences. The films document contemporary realities of the Middle East from honor killings to drug addiction and sexual abuse, from sharing intimate stories and frustrations in a beauty parlor to waiting for the return of one’s migrant working spouse. Experiences further include the challenges of pursuing one’s film studies in a war-torn city and getting married in a zone of conflict. Post-screening discussions/Q&As follow five out of the seven featured films and documentaries.

IFF 2009 is part of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS) support of cultural programming along the Front Range expanding an already vibrant fall film festival line-up. MORE INFORMATION.

We are pleased to be working with:

- ArteEast, a New York-based, international, non-profit organization supporting artists from the Middle East and North Africa
- Moon and Stars Project, a non-profit organization promoting Turkish culture and arts
- Fictionville Studio, LLC, a Brooklyn-based independent film production company
- Arab Film Distribution and Typecast Films, Seattle-based
- ANS International, Abdullah Oguz’s Istanbul-based production company

The SCHEDULE

Opening Night, Friday, October 16th at UCCS Dwire 121

6 PM
Opening Reception
6:45 PM
Welcome Statement – Dr. Carole Woodall, IFF Executive Curator
7 PM
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (France 2007), 95 minutes
Discussion with Dr. Rashna Singh, Department of English / WEST at UCCS

Saturday, October 17th at UCCS Dwire 121

10:30 AM
Hiba Bassem’s Baghdad Days (Iraq/UK 2005), 35 minutes
Discussion with Dr. Aditi Mitra, Department of Sociology / WEST at UCCS
Screening held in conjunction with the 4th annual Woman-to-Woman Dialogue Series “Women’s Experiences: Surviving and Thriving” sponsored by the American Association of University Women and the Matrix Center.
Noon
Yasmine Kassari’s L’enfant Endormi [The Sleeping Child] (Morocco/Belgium 2004), 95 minutes
3 PM
Abdullah O?uz’s Mutluluk [Bliss] (Turkey/Greece 2007) 126 minutes
Discussion with Dr. Sölen Sanli, Department of Sociology at Metro State
6 PM
Hamid Rahmanian’s The Glass House (USA/Iran 2008), 92 minutes
Q&A with director, Hamid Rahmanian, and producer, Melissa Hibbard

Sunday, October 18th at the fine arts center

4:30 PM in the Music Room
Hany Abu-Assad’s Rana’s Wedding (Palestine 2002), 90 minutes
Discussion with Dr. Livia Alexander, Executive Director of ArteEast
6:30 PM in the Lobby
Closing Reception
7:30 PM in the Upper Gallery
Nadine Labaki’s Caramel (Lebanon/France 2007), 95 minutes

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Flaunt: Evolution

UNDER the Colorado Ave. Bridge

September 12.2009, 7 – 11 pm

Presented by FutureSelf, the Gallery of Contemporary Art and THEATREWORKS

This is it. The art show where Y-chromosomal Adam meets mitochondrial Eve, giving birth to a whole new class of aesthetic imaginings.

It’s Flaunt “Evolution.” An exhibit that showcases the creations of three forward-thinking organizations–FutureSelf, the Gallery of Contemporary Art, and THEATREWORKS—in a quest to advance our species through original works whose ideological themes are life, growth, and sustainability. Live music, video art, performance art, dance, experimental music and fashion all have a place in this year’s event.

As a nod to Flaunt’s origins the concept of “fashion show” mutates with a presentation that will emerge as the evening progresses. Flaunt’s original visionary, Jackie Goode of Idoru, will be on hand to choose members of the audience who truly manifest the Evolution of Fashion to take their turn on the catwalk. Dress to impress.

Don’t be the missing link. Order your tickets online at FlauntSprings.com or reserve them by phone at 719.255.3232.

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DISPLACEMENT

Cinema Out of Site

August 7 - 9, 2009 Lectures and Site-Specific Cinema

Image courtesy Jesse Kennedy.

Displacement is the perfect marriage of a program and a project. The program, AWOL: Art Without Limits is about creating new forums for discussion on art through site specific installations, happenings and non-traditional exhibition spaces. The project, Displacement, is a conversation based on the art of displaced cinema. Both the program and project value the importance and effect of space, and both challenge traditional expectations of what an exhibition site can and should be. This project, a collaboration between GOCA and TIE, The International Experimental Cinema Exposition, will be presented on the top floor of the Kiowa & Nevada parking garage in downtown Colorado Springs. Lectures will be offered to further explore the discourse of expanded (or displaced) cinema, aural experimentation, spectatorship, the recontectualization of found-footage, and parkour (the art of movement).

Displacement: Cinema Out of Site is collaboration and presentation of film works by contemporary Argentine and North American avant-gardists to encourage an intercontinental dialogue between artists. These artists, writers and curators are presenting moving image and sound creations on the concrete structure of a public parking garage. To understand the presentation and its relationship to parkour we must understand displacement. Rachel Cole, a participating artist, wrote “Place isn’t lost, it is rather “displaced,” undone, emptied of meaning of itself, a location without linear measurement.” Displaced is not misplaced. The cinema and this program are not lost; instead they have been stripped of popular expectations for what they should be. Many would say art should be in a gallery and film in a theater. This project uses an existing space, urban architecture, to redefine the viewer’s experience of the work presented.

A series of three lectures featuring filmmakers, artists and curators accompany this one-night-only film presentation. Each lecture pairs two speakers each with keen insight into the philosophies and techniques explored through the films.

AUG. 7 CITY HALL Council Chambers (107 N. Nevada Ave.)
Christopher May and Jimmy Gable will discuss the notion of displacementand displaced cinema and the history and philosophy of parkour.

Displacement occurs when the Id wants to do something of which the Super ego does not permit. The Ego thus finds some other way of releasing the psychic energy of the Id. Phobias may also use displacement as a mechanism for releasing energy that is caused in other ways. See also: Fantasy, Projection, Expanded Cinema, Curatorial Daydreaming, Surrealism.

Parkour is a discipline, non-competitive in nature, with the focus on the ability to move over, below, around, through, or anything to get by an obstacle as quickly and as efficiently as possible, as if in pursuit, usually in an urban environment. It’s about having the control and the know-how to create movement through an environment efficiently.

AUG. 8 GAY & LESBIAN FUND FOR COLORADO (315 E. Costilla)
Pablo Marin and Gregg Savage will discuss found footage and people as instruments.

Found-footage, the practice of recontectualization of someone else’s audiovisual materials, has certainly come a long way since its almost uncertain beginnings in the twentieth century. In perfect symbiosis with the groundbreaking concept of ready-mades in the field of art, this tradition surpassed practically every film frontier, from documentary to fiction, to find its true place within the avant-garde, where its nature is constantly redefined by both conceptual and technological possibilities.

Making music from the sounds of traceurs in the field, Gregg will talk about the experience of creating the music and sound worlds for the event Displacement: Cinema Out of Site. He will explore why it is essential for techology and tradition to find a happy medium in creating art, why randomness and chaos are essential to creativity, and how the philosophy and inspiration of Parkour can be utilized in making music.

AUG. 9 GAY & LESBIAN FUND FOR COLORADO (315 E. Costilla)
Dan Mancini and Rachel Cole will discuss the Tetris Effect and on-site distraction.

As a recurring practice parkour takes root in the mind. An apposite analogy is the Tetris Effect, wherein after extended bouts of Tetris, people consistently report seeing the entire world, buildings and cars, as tetrominoic pieces to be fit together. Similarly, through the proclivity of parkour, walls and railings that traditionally herd people around become open ended, a canvas on which to apply new physical rules. This phenomenon exemplifies the neroplasticity of the human brain, by which parkour literally amends a tracer’s perception of physical spaces, and even abstract ideas.

Parkour and experimental film share the quality of continual disturbance: the land, the background, the scene, the figures enveloped in it are transiently in the frenzy of the un-locatable, fleeting present. Displacement asks us to locate ourselves and thus be physical, embodied, carnally un-whole as much as starkly self-conscious.

PARTICIPANTS
Christopher May is the founder and primary curator behind TIE, The International Experimental Cinema Exposition. In addition to his work with TIE, May has curated and presented a decade of film programs for museums, film societies and colleges including the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Austrian Film Museum, MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, ICA-Boston, Cinemateca Uruguaya, and San Francisco Cinematheque. His (Super-8 & 16mm) film work currently explores the sensually visceral qualities of cinema and their topographical relationships with sub-cultural landscapes.

Pablo Marín was born in 1982 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Besides teaching and writing on avant-garde film (laregioncentral.blogspot.com) he’s a film/video curator and filmmaker. His films were premiered at several TIE festivals and tour programs and shown at International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Starting from Scratch (Netherlands), Pleasure Dome (Canada), Avanto Festival (Finland), no.w.here (England), amongst others. In 2009 he was invited as visiting artist to FAC’s Found-footage Workshop in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Gregg Savage is a composer of guitar and computer music who enjoys challenging perceptions of harmony and dissonance. He brings his background in avant-garde sound art, film composing, and underground dance music to fuse together compositions from non-traditional sound objects. He has a BM from Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA where he studied guitar and music synthesis. His music was recently featured in the 3 panel film project Film (Parkour) in the Masterpieces of New American Avant-Garde Cinema program at the Austrian Film Museum. He lives in Colorado.

Rachel Cole is a fiction writer who grew up in Denver and the Appalachians. She received a BA in English with a minor in Continental Philosophy from the University of Denver and is currently enrolled in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University. She is particularly fascinated by corporeal philosophy, 20th century to present studies in linguistics, the politics of territory, and trauma in contemporary art. Her interest in experimental film is the instability of images, the event of spectacle, and the intimacy of beauty which ignites the sensuality of binaries as much as the crisis of boundaries. A curated text project is forthcoming from zingmagazine #22.

Jesse Kennedy is a writer and filmmaker. He currently works exclusively in Super 8, a format in keeping with his interest in what poet Eileen Myles has termed “pathetic technologies:” seemingly simple, neglected, and/or antiquated technologies (from conversation to VHS), through which one may, nonetheless, still explore the limits of the possible. He has a BA in Writing and Literature from Naropa University, in Boulder, CO. His poetry has appeared in Bombay Gin. His films have been previously exhibited by TIE. He currently lives in El Rito, New Mexico.

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