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

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

Bus Chronicles is a collection of eighty poems composed in seventeen lines. Each chronicle is a fictional narrative based on unobtrusive and celebratory observations of passengers who ride the Colorado Springs Mountain Metropolitan Transit fixed route bus system. The project has two components, visual texts on the windows of each bus and an audio collage of the poems in the Downtown Terminal.

Artist Statement
The rich visual narratives shaped from the barest of essentials in Japanese Haiku and Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines are the inspiration for this series. Haiku’s seventeen morae and Fénéon’s three lines are sparse, evocative, and visually precise texts ripe with humor, sorrow, longing, and reflection. Each bus chronicle is a voyeuristic contemplation on isolation within a crowd; the mundane moments of reverie; and on the gender, ethnicity, age, disability, and class dynamics enveloped within the complex choreography between arrival and departure. This practice of everyday life is revealed in slender poetic gestures. The date, time, and geographic position are notated in order to demarcate the locus of a fleeting experience. A passenger’s physical characteristics, posture, clothing, personal artifacts, and actions while situated within the spatial constraints of the bus become the fertile ground on which to create the chronicles. Although based on actual observations each fictional narrative contemplates the routine and the deviant, the ethereal and the grounded, the known and the unknown woven into an intricate tapestry of movement, connection, and memory.

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

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.

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.

The WHITE PARTY: Clothed Entertainment in a Bare Naked Environment.
June 27, 7-10 P.M. at the Gallery of Contemporary Art.

GOCA is bidding farewell to the white walls of the UCCS gallery for a time, and venturing forth into the real world of Colorado Springs with our new public art-rage program, AWOL—Art Without Limits.

In celebration of this historic moment, we cordially invite you to join us for a colorful evening of music, food and spirits when we’ll offer a fond goodbye to what was, and a hearty hello for what will be.  BUY TICKETS ONLINE.

Wear your finest white apparel so you can sufficiently blend in with our beautiful, blank, white walls.

TICKETS (buy early, buy often)
ONLINE: $35
AT THE DOOR: $40

This event is the kick-off party / fundraiser for AWOL. Everything you give will go directly toward AWOL events, exhibitions and programs. We can’t do this without you.

White Party Images

GOCA @ UCCS & I.D.E.A. @ COLORADO COLLEGE

Theme: Economic Creativity
Installation: Beginning, Thursday, June 18 at 5 PM
Reception: Friday, June 19, 5 PM at the FAC Modern (in the Plaza of the Rockies), 121 S. Tejon.

The Gallery of Contemporary Art at UCCS and IDEA @ Colorado College are excited to announce the second presentation 1440 Minutes, a joint public program supporting Colorado contemporary artists. 1440 Minutes is a twenty-four hour art installation and exhibition event, curated around the theme of “Economic Creativity.” Great innovations arise in times of crisis; these innovations drive future economic and cultural growth. Economic Creativity presents artists who examine how, during this time of great change, we can – and should – use or re-use elements of our personal, cultural, and material past to re-envision a healthy, sustainable future. Featured artists: atomic elroy & zelda bubbles, Phillip Faulkner, David Fodel and Melanie Grimes & Jocelyn Nevel.

Special thanks to the Fine Arts Center for generously allowing UCCS and CC to use the FAC Modern for this project. Installations will begin at 5 PM on Thursday, June 18 and must be completed by 5 PM on Friday, June 19, 2009 (the public is welcomed and encouraged to stop in on Friday and watch the installation).

The reception will be held on Friday, June 19, 2009, 5-8 p.m. COPPeR (The Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region), Bristol and Nosh are kindly sponsoring the evening’s festivities.

Three cash prizes of $500 will be awarded by a panel of jurors.

Throughout the students’ college experiences they honed their skills to arrive at the pinnacle of their undergraduate education. The seniors have chosen their strongest works for exhibition and have worked as a curatorial team to present them to the on and off campus communities.

The opening reception is free and open to the public. Parking restrictions will be lifted for Lots 1 & 3 only for the opening reception on Friday, May 1 from 5:30 – 8:30 pm.

Teach Me Show Me pairs student curators in the gallery management program with faculty members and gallery staff for hands on curatorial experience and professional development.

The exhibition will run from February 27 though April 11, 2009, and will have an opening reception on Friday, February 27, 2009 from 5:30 – 8:30 p.m. Parking restrictions will be lifted for Lots 1 & 3 only for the opening reception.

Featured faculty artists
Matt Barton . Valerie Brodar . Louis Cicotello . Carol Dass . Corey Drieth . Lin Fife . Pauline Foss . Hellen Eberhardie-Dunn . Julia Lathrop . Carol Myers . Claire Rau . Betty Ross . Murray Ross . Mariya Zvonkovich . Dean Hadlock . Olivia Lundberg . Erik Schubert

The artist’s statements are available for download here in a PDF.

Teach Me Show Me Images

Installation View

Installation View

Matt Barton

Valerie Brodar

Louis Cicotello

Carol Dass

Corey Drieth

Hellen Eberhardie-Dunn

Lin Fife

Pauline Foss

Dean Hadlock

Carolyn Intemann

Julia Lathrop (Hoerner)

Olivia Lundberg

Carol Mordecai Myers

Claire Rau

Betty Ross

Murry Ross

Eric Schubert

Mariya Zvonkovich

En Espanol

The opening reception for this exhibition, opening December 12, 2008, includes works by Cristian Alarcón Ismodes, Fernando Gutierrez and Diego Lama, three visual artists from Lima, Peru. Their works allow us to address contemporary art from Peru through multiple perspectives and ideas on identity, resistance and embodiment.

Implicit in these artistic approaches are reflections upon the relationship between artist and technique, image and domination, violence and body. Untitled aims to reflect upon the evolving nature of contemporary Peruvian art in its dialogue with global and local languages and perspectives.

Fernando Gutierrez “Huanchaco” develops the story of Superchaco, a tragic Peruvian superhero. Through paintings, videos and animations. Superchaco helps us reflect on the new urban and global cultures as they affect visions and aspirations in emerging societies. Influenced by comics and pop culture, Huanchaco steals, recycles and subverts new but established symbols of consumer culture, rendering them “Peruvian’ in all their contradiction and reconfigured symbolic content.

Diego Lama approaches conflict and violence from a very personal and physical perspective, using cinematic resources to reflect upon their relationship to painting and photography. Lama’s conscious approach in the use of visual media and his interest in addressing essential themes as love and death, provides for pieces of exquisite yet sordid textures, sublime and twisted characters whose internal conflicts rise and deform what is to be expected.

Works by Cristian Alarcón Ismodes come from a preoccupation with the Peruvian periphery – the provinces – and their experience with armed violence in recent history. Working with animation, Alarcón creates a Peruvian character, The Cuy-rata, rendering it a grotesque creature, who literally eats alive the naive yet loaded referent of Mickey Mouse, the famous rodent, as “naturally” as most Peruvians eat the traditional baked guinea pig or “cuy” dish; a mediated circle of food and ingestion of symbols and ideologies.

Negative space is often thought of in terms of our two and three-dimensional visual world.  The landscape rendered behind the figure in a portrait or the empty air between the legs of a bronze statue can be seen as negative space, whereas the figure and the bronze statue are seen as positive space.  The gaps of negative space are not areas that we are intended to observe at a highly conscious level, but are to remain in the background and unnoticed.  However, these interstitial spaces are what help define their companion positive space by interrupting the continuity of the positive space.

Mind the Gap seeks to extend the reach of negative space to consider time and concept as well as the visual.  The artists in the exhibition deal with pauses in dialogue rather than the words spoken, small aberrations in architecture rather than the building’s looming facade, or a vacant lot rather than the occupied store next door. The artists take the background and make it the foreground.  By pointing out what is typically unnoticed, we are encouraged to re-examine our world and look around the obvious to the other parts that make up our existence: the gaps.

“This exhibition brings together some tremendous talent and intellectual rigor to Colorado Springs,” says departing Director Christopher Lynn.  “The various practices of the artists will allow a number of entry points to an idea that most people don’t even notice by definition: the unnoticed.”

Participating artists have been gathered from around the globe: Jared Lindsay Clark (Brooklyn), Jennifer Danos (Minneapolis), e-Xplo (Berlin, New York), John Pilson (New York), Sarah Ross (Bloomington, IL), and Doron Solomons (Tel Aviv).

Exhibition artist, John Pilson, will be showing work from a series entitled Interregna, a term which means the interim between the reigns of rulers.  The Gallery of Contemporary Art itself is experiencing an interregnum with the departure of its Director, Christopher Lynn.  The exhibition’s opening reception will introduce the Gallery’s new Interim Director, Caitlin Green, who takes the helm after Christopher Lynn’s exit.

Mind the Gap Exhibition Images

Overview of the Mind the Gap exhibition

   

Jared Clark
Bilt 39, 2008
Found objects: plinths, refrigerators, washer, dryer, stove, microwave ovens, filing cabinets, computers, wood, styrofoam

   

Jared Clark
Bilt 39 (back), 2008
Found objects: plinths, refrigerators, washer, dryer, stove, microwave ovens, filing cabinets, computers, wood, styrofoam

   

Jared Clark
Bilt 38 (back), 2008
Styrofoam

   

Jennifer Danos
Untitled (Real Floors 2), 2008
Natural Oak Contact Paper

   

Jennifer Danos
Untitled (Real Floors 2), 2008
Natural Oak Contact Paper
28 x 34″

   

Jennifer Danos
Untitled (Real Floors 2) close up, 2008
Natural Oak Contact Paper

   

e-Xplo
Letters to Larry, 2008
Audio Play
Located at Heller Ranch

   

John Pilson
Above the Grid, 2000
2-channel video

   

John Pilson
Above the Grid, 2000
2-channel video, different frame

   

John Pilson
Above the Grid (Suit and Ball), three Interegnas: Monster, Grapefruit, and Maura, 1999-2007
Silver Gelatin Prints

   

Sarah Ross
Archisuits, 2005
Custom Jogging Suits, Inkjet Prints and DVD

   

Sarah Ross
Archisuits, 2005
Custom Jogging Suits

   

Doron Solomons
Tonight’s Headlines and My Collected Silences, 2006 and 1996
DVD

Looking back at the Mind the Gap exhibition

Artist Bios

Jared Clark has had residencies at Kompact Living Space, Berlin, Germany; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; Art Omi, international artist residency, Hudson, NY; and has received the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Foundation Fellowship. His work has been exhibited at Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Denise Bibro Fine Arts, New York; SWARM Gallery, Oakland, CA; and Deitch Projects, New York City, NY.

Jennifer Danos has exhibited at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Minnesota Emerging Artists Program, Rochester Art Center, MN; High Energy Constructs; Los Angeles; the Arthouse, Austin, TX; and the Peeler Art Center at DePauw University, Greencastle, IN.

e-Xplo is an artist collective consisting of three accomplished artists: Heimo Lattner, Erin McGonigle and Rene Gabri. e-Xplo has exhibited as part of the Sharjah Biennial 8, United Arab Emirates; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA. Read more about their audio play Letters to Larry.

John Pilson is represented by Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, NY and has shown at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; LOOP ‘06, Barcelona, Spain; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; ArtPace, San Antonio, Texas; Zink and Gegner, Munich, Germany; Western Front Exhibitions, Vancouver, Canada; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands; P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; Prospect.1, New Orleans, LA; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.

Sarah Ross is the recipient of a grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. She has exhibited work in Messhall, Chicago, IL; YNKB, Copenhagen, DK; PS122 Gallery, New York, NY; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY; Institute for New Media, Frankfurt, Germany; and META Cultural Foundation, Bucharest, Romania.  Ross has also published writing in several journals and papers and organized events and art exhibitions.

Doron Solomons is represented by Sommer Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv and his work has been featured in exhibitions at the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel-Aviv; Herzliya Museum of Art, Herzliya; Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Flanders Fields Museum, Belgium; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston Texas; 50th Venice Biennial, Venice; and Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende Kunst (NGBK), Berlin. 

Matt Barton graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Art and Bachelors in Art Education from Montana State University and his Masters of Fine Art from Carnegie Mellon University. While growing up southern Indiana, he worked as a performer at Chuck E. Cheese, dancing in a rat suit while a mechanical animal band performed hit songs, such as, “Walkin’ on Sunshine.” True to his roots at Chuck E. Cheese, Matt’s puckish artwork often utilizes motorized, convulsing and gyrating plush and stuffed animals. Video collages are projected on the walls, providing a room-size environment for the activities of the mechanically enhanced woodland creatures.

Barton says, “I want to instill a bit of wonder and questioning in the lightest possible sense. I want to tickle a remote nerve ending in the imagination, stimulate atrophied curiosity, and evoke a small remnant of a childlike spark that recognizes the magic that can exist when we view the world through playful eyes.”

In the work of Corey Drieth, paint washes gently over the subtle wood grain of the surface of his panels. Resembling curtains or flowing water, his paintings act as meditative facades. Drieth cites Georgia O’Keefe, Arthur Dove and the minimalist Agnes Martin as influences upon his work suggesting his love of simple, small-scale abstraction. Drieth says of his work, “Inspired by the natural world, art history and religious traditions such as Zen Buddhism and Quaker Christianity, my paintings and drawings explore contemplative spiritual experience. Because [my paintings] require quietude during a time of de-humanizing speed, clutter and noise, they serve as both a foil to the frenetic activity of contemporary life and as a method of sustenance within it.”

Drieth was born and raised in Northern Colorado. He attended Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins and received undergraduate degrees in Philosophy/Comparative Religious Studies and Studio Art. He later attended graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he received his MFA in drawing and painting. Before arriving at UCCS, Drieth taught studio art classes at CSU, the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia.

Parking for the opening reception will be free in lots 3 & 4 only.

Images

  

Exhibiting artist Corey Drieth entertains guests in his space.

  

Patrons enjoy Matt Barton’s fort.

  

Exhibiting artist Matt Barton (in white t-shirt) chats with some visitors.

Exhibition Artists

• Rebecca Bauer
• Migdalia Caban
• Adam Eldridge
• Karen Freed
• Heidi Haire
• Scott Kakigi
• Joshua Kemp
• Sooin Kwon
• Charlotte Miller
• Jennifer O’Connell
• Carissa Szarkowski
• Alexis Treulieb
• Nancy Wells-Georgia
• Tyler Wendt

The Visual and Performing Arts department (VaPA) offers a cross-disciplinary degree that encourages innovative collaboration between disciplines. This focus integrates art history, film studies, museum and gallery practice, music, theatre, and visual arts. Students will complete this degree with a primary concentration in one area and develop a comprehensive knowledge in each of the major disciplines. Through studio arts, performance, theory, scholarship, and creative uses of media and technology, students will engage in an investigative approach to the arts, where the local and global converge, where cross-fertilization inspires critical thinking, dialogue, improvisation, and where diversity of thought is intrinsic to artistic process and practice.

The opening reception is free and open to the public. Parking restrictions will be lifted for Lots 3 & 4 only for the opening reception.

Images

Rebecca Bauer
Vertigo, 2008
Digital print on matte paper
28 x 34″

Migdalia Caban
The Healing of the Feminine, 2008
Acrylic on canvas
30 x 40″

Adam Eldridge
Untitled (Knowledge of Good and Evil), 2007
Wood and collage
24 x 96 x 4″

Karen Freed
Illumination II (Making Memory), 2007
Photograph on backlit transparency
22 x 16 1/2″

Heidi Haire
Gum Specimens 2007, 2007
Gum, pins, foam, wood, glass
15 x 15″

Scott Kakigi
The Metamorphosis, 2008
Mixed media
26 x 34″

Joshua Kemp
Untitled # 5 (Sienna and Crimson), 2007
Oil on canvas
40 x 55″

Sooin Kwon
New York in Memory, 2008
Digital print
15 x 15″

Charlotte Miller
Pilothouse Hood Ornament, 2004
Digital photograph
8.5 x 11″

Jennifer O’Connell
EG, 2008
Color Photograph
15 x 10″

Carissa Szarkowski
Lion’s Breath, 2007
Water-based rubber block print
9 x 6″

Alexis Treulieb
Snow Queen, 2008
Silver gelatin print
8 x 8″

Nancy K. Wells-Georgia
Withered Roses and Broken Hearts II, 2008
Silver gelatin photograph
11 x 14″

Tyler Wendt
Untitled, 2007
Acrylic and oil on wood
4 x 4’

The Gallery of Contemporary Art (GoCA) at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and the InterDisciplinary Experimental Arts program (IDEA) at Colorado College, are excited to announce a joint public program featuring Colorado contemporary artists. On Friday, April 11, IDEA and GoCA will host 1440 Minutes, a twenty-four-hour art installation and exhibition event, curated around the theme of “Social Spaces”. Simultaneous installations and performances by five Colorado artists will take place at GoCA, located at 1420 Austin Bluffs Parkway and Colorado College’s Coburn Gallery, located at 902 N. Cascade Avenue in the Worner Campus Center, as well as on a shuttle bus transporting visitors between the two sites. The public is invited to view the installation process at both locations on April 11 between the hours of 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. The frantic day of installation will culminate in a festive, free reception, hosted at both institutions, from 5 to 8 p.m. A shuttle bus, which will also host an art installation, will be available to transport attendees between locations.

Exhibition curators Christopher Lynn, Director of the Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and Jessica Hunter Larsen, Curator of the InterDisciplinary Experimental Arts program at Colorado College, selected the 1440 Minutes artists from a pool of 20 applicants who answered an open call for proposals. Artists were invited to submit installation or performance-based projects that interpreted the theme of “Social Spaces”. The artists must install their artworks in the galleries in under 24 hours; they will begin at 5 p.m. on Thursday, April 10th and must be done by 5 p.m. on Friday, April 11, 2008. The public may view the installation process at both galleries on Friday, April 11 between the hours of 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.; a reception will take place at both locations from 5 to 8 p.m. Curators Hunter Larsen and Lynn have conceived of the project as a way to open an ongoing dialogue among art, artists, and gallery audiences, as well as a way to link two vibrant contemporary art spaces in Colorado Springs.

Selected artists include:

• atomic elroy and the artofficial Choir
• The Bridge Club (featuring Julie Wills, Emily Bivens, Christine Owen & Annie Strader)
• Valerie Brodar and Angela Forster
• Goatsilk (featuring Caroline Peters & Ben Bloch)
• Jocelyn Nevel & Melanie Grimes
• Robert Snowden and Streeter Wright

Regular parking restrictions will be lifted for Lot 3 only from 4:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Šolman employs a “block man” as an actor or proxy in his project. This protagonist can be both an empty vessel into which we may project ourselves or others, or a perfected, Platonic being that no one can be. This character is pathetic, searching, worshiped, and enigmatic. The Gallery of Contemporary Art will be exhibiting Šolman’s drawings, storyboards, and animation tests that orbit around The Heart of Perspective, the Making of the Film.

Šolman is a Croatian living and working in New York. His work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, New York; 20th Slavonia Bienalle, Galerija umjetnina, Osijek, Croatia; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, Croatia; House of Croatian Artists (HDLU), Zagreb, Croatia; Gallery MC / The Doors Art Foundation, New York; Merano Arte edificio Cassa di Risparmio, Merano, Italy; Liquidacion Total, Madrid, Spain; Swiss Institute-Contemporary Art, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Centre Place, Melbourne, Australia; Space Lab, Cleveland; and Alexandria Biennale, Alexandria, Egypt. He has also participated in the prestigious Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Residency, Workspace: The Woolworth Building Studios, New York; the P.S.1 Studio Program, New York; and the residency at the Cimelice Castle, Czech Republic.

Events

Pre-Show Appetizer
Thursday, February 7, 2008, 7:00 p.m.
Learn more about the artist and themes in the exhibition, Dario Šolman: The Heart of Perspective, the Making of the Film. Impress your family and amaze your friends with the insightful knowledge you will display at the opening reception – knowledge that you picked up weeks earlier at the Pre-Show Appetizer. Update (03.18.08): You can now listen to the audio recording of the Pre-Show Appetizer here.

Opening Reception
Friday, February 22, 2008
Supporter Reception: 5:30 – 7:00 p.m.
Public Reception: 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
The artist Dario Šolman will be in conversation with Gallery Director Christopher Lynn during the Supporter Reception 5:30-7:00 p.m. with the discussion beginning at 6:00 p.m. At 7:00 p.m. the Gallery will open its doors to the public to enjoy food, drink and fantastic art.

Each of the artists in Young Moderns utilizes the theory and techniques of late Modernist painting in their work whether their work can be easily categorized as painting or not. Sarah Braman’s sculptural work utilizes the flat surfaces of cardboard, Plexiglas, and plywood as grounds for her scumbled paint marks. She places these multiple supports for her paint together at various angles to create angular sculptures whose surfaces are treated as paintings.

Todd Chilton’s pared down subject matter and use of geometric forms is akin to the work of Frank Stella or Kenneth Noland. Chilton’s abstractions do not try to hide the fact that a human hand made his paintings. His lines are crooked and the paint drips, bestowing his paintings with a wry sense of humor that winks at history while creating new forms with the tools history gave him. Chilton has said, “I do think it could be useful to look at my work in the context of that moment in the history of abstraction if only to see that it functions with an awareness of its history. I think that I make historically aware paintings that are of their own time.”

As his predecessors were concerned with stripping painting of all unnecessary elements, John McEnroe strips his works of all materials but paint. McEnroe pours and drips paint across a large slab, allows it to dry, and then peels the paint from the slab. These “paintings” look like curtains or skinned beasts that hover somewhere between a painting and a sculpture as the sheets of paint ripple against the wall and drape over hooks and bolts.

These three “painters” use the theories and practices of late Modernism as a springboard to create smart works that seem unconcerned with their status as painting, sculpture, or conceptual exercises.

Events

Pre-Show Appetizer
Thursday, November 29, 7:00 p.m.
Learn more about the artists and themes in the exhibition, Young Moderns: Sarah Braman, Todd Chilton & John McEnroe. Impress your family and amaze your friends with the insightful knowledge you will display at the opening reception – knowledge that you picked up weeks earlier at the Pre-Show Appetizer. Regular permit parking restrictions are lifted for Lot 1 during the presentation. Listen to an audio recording of the Appetizer here.

Opening Reception
Friday, December 14, 2007
Supporter’s Reception: 5:30-7:00 p.m. (for GoCA Supporters and UCCS Students)
Public Reception: 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Join us at the opening reception for Young Moderns. During the Supporter’s Reception (5:30-7:00) you can catch an early glimpse of the exhibition and hear the artists speak at 6:00 p.m. The doors will open at 7:00 p.m. for the public to enjoy excellent artwork, food, drink, and conversation. Regular permit parking restrictions will be lifted for Lots 3 & 4 only during the opening reception.

Colonialism is a term used to describe the occupation of an area by a group of people who then impose rule or influence over the previous inhabitants. People may occupy ideas, commerce, and social settings in the same way that they may occupy land. Copyright law that allows people to lay claim to ideas, high school cliques that govern social boundaries, and commercial exports that dominate corners of the market are all forms of colonialism.

A clear example of the West’s colonial tendencies is found in the Manifest Destiny – a slogan and doctrine promoted in the 1800’s that stated America’s divine right to push West and absorb lands by force if necessary. This mentality, although not currently promoted, is still a driving force in the West’s relationship to the world. The West exports its people, politics, culture and products to occupy and influence the land, minds and markets of the world.

Colonization often results in hybrid cultures when competing customs clash. Anime is the result of the export of American animation to the Japan which in turn took what it liked, added its own style and subjects and exported it to the West where it is wildly popular. Cheerleader culture is absorbed and modified by American minority youth to make something quite different from its white bread origins.

Manifest: Colonial Tendencies of the West features approximately thirty works by artists from around the globe. Each artist in Manifest takes the benign and aggressive aspects of Western colonization and makes manifest the resulting mixtures of culture, politics, and commerce. Manifest presents work by Philip Kwame Apagya, Amy Chan, Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed, Patti Hallock, Danny Ledonne, Louise Noguchi, and Kehinde Wiley. The exhibition features documentary photographs of Wild West recreation villages, a film that hypes American sterotypes, paintings of franchise restaurants dropped into pastoral landscapes, a video game that deals with the Columbine Massacre, paintings and sculpture of hip-hop culture, photographs that document suburban basements, and portraits of Ghanaian citizens taken in front of backdrops depicting their dream lives filled with Western exports.

“This exhibition will be a major step forward for the contemporary art scene in Colorado Springs,” said Christopher Lynn, Director of the Gallery of Contemporary Art, UCCS. “We will be exhibiting internationally-known artists who have never shown in Colorado. Manifest tackles difficult topics in a way that we feel the public will understand and respond.”

Manifest: Colonial Tendencies of the West was curated by Christopher Lynn, Director of the Gallery of Contemporary Art, UCCS. This is Lynn’s first curated exhibition for UCCS. Previously, Lynn was the Assistant Curator of Museums and Galleries at DePauw University.

Catalogs

Catalogs are available for the exhibition:

• $8 for GoCA Supporters and UCCS students
• $10 for the general public.

Events

Pre-Show Appetizer
Thursday, August 30, 7:00 p.m.
Learn more about the artists and themes in the exhibition, Manifest: Colonial Tendencies of the West. Impress your family and amaze your friends with the insightful knowledge you will display at the opening reception that you picked up weeks earlier at the Pre-Show Appetizer. Regular permit parking restrictions are lifted for lots 3 and 4 during the presentation.

Opening Reception
Friday, September 14
Supporter Reception: 5:30 – 7:00 p.m. (for GoCA Supporters and UCCS Students)
Public Reception: 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
The opening reception will consist of breakdancing, digital and manual coloring book activities, food, fun, and the some of the best contemporary art seen in the region. A reception for Gallery Supporters will begin at 5:30 p.m. Manifest artist Louise Noguchi will speak from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. At 7:00 we will open our doors to the public to view the exhibition and participate in Gallery activities until 9:00 p.m. Permit parking restrictions will be lifted for lots 3 and 4 only during the opening reception.

Soul Mechanics: Breakdancing Informance
Friday, September 21, 6:00 p.m.
The Colorado Springs b-boy group will present an “informance” (lecture/performance) at the Gallery of Contemporary Art. Soul Mechanic’s tight breakdancing moves reveal the myriad of cultural influences that created the phenomenon in 1970’s urban environments. Join us as we learn more about breakdancing, its culture, and roots.

Anime Nation
Every Thursday between September 20 and November 15, 7:00 p.m.
Join us as we watch pivotal Anime series and movies at the Gallery of Contemporary Art, UCCS. Regular permit parking restrictions are lifted for lots 3 and 4 during the Anime screenings.

Bad Art Night: Shadowing Kara Walker
Saturday, October 13, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Create bad art in the style of Kara Walker’s colonial themed silhouettes. As always, the rule at Bad Art Night is that no good art is allowed. Permit parking restrictions are not enforced at UCCS on Saturdays.

Film Night: Future Remembrance
Friday, November 9, 7:00 p.m.
Come view Future Remembrance (USA, 1998, color, 55 min.), a film by Tobias Wendl and Nancy du Plessis featuring Manifest artist Philip Kwame Apagya. This is a delightful, exuberant, documentary about the role of photography, photographers and the art of image making in Ghana. We meet the photographers, sculptors and painters who tell us in their own words about the economic, social, cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual motivations of their work. Innovation and improvisation abound, from the traveling photographer who has been making and selling his own cameras out of wood and scrap since the 1930’s to the studio photographers who specialize in providing elaborate backdrops that inspire their customers poses. The influence of American print media on local artists exists but the resulting work is so transformed in the process that the original source is almost unrecognizable. Future Remembrance is the winner of the Award For Excellence Society for Visual Anthropology Award, Vitas Folklore Film Festival, UCLA.

Settlers of Catan-A-Thon / Exhibition Closing
Saturday, November 17, 1:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Joins us at the Gallery as we play marathon sessions of the popular board game, Settlers of Catan. Settle the land of Catan and harvest its natural resources to build villages and cities while oppressing your opponents for fun and profit. Permit parking restrictions are not enforced at UCCS on Saturdays.

This exhibition is sponsored in part by:

The Pikes Peak Watercolor Society (P.P.W.S.) was founded to promote excellence in the watercolor media and to encourage artistic achievement in the community. Their first exhibit was held at the Pikes Peak Center in Colorado Springs in March of 1988, with a 2nd exhibit during Christmas of that same year. Today the P.P.W.S. continues to promote and encourage watercolor through its sponsorship of exhibitions, scholarships, workshops, and through its support of other local arts organizations and educational institutions.

Events

Opening Reception
Friday, June 15, 5:00 – 7:30 p.m.
Parking will be free in lots 1, 3, and 4 during the opening reception.

Frank Webb Watercolor Workshop
June 4,5,6, 2007, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Frank Webb of Edgewood, Pennsylvania has been awarded a Dolphin Fellowship of the American Watercolor Society and is a past national vice president. Other memberships include: the National Watercolor Society, Allied Artists of America, Audubon Artists, Knickerbocker Artists, Rocky Mountain National Watermedia Association, and the Pittsburgh Watercolor Society.

His more than ninety major awards include: the Bronze Medal of Honor, the Walser Greathouse Medal, and the Mary Pleissner award of the American Watercolor Society; the Grumbacher Gold Medal of the National Watercolor Society; the gold medal of Audubon Artists; and the Sisek purchase award of the Butler Midyear. He has represented the American Watercolor Society in international exhibitions in Canada, New York, England, Scotland, Mexico, and has participated in invitationals in Australia and the Republic of China.

Webb has authored three books on painting and design. He is listed in Who’s Who in American Art and Who’s Who in the East. He has been self-employed as an artist since 1958, and has conducted painting seminars in 50 States and numerous foreign locations.

Among his collectors are: the Butler Institute of American Art, the Taiwan Art Education Institute, the Tweed Art Museum of the University of Minnesota, and the Palmer Museum of the Pennsyvania State University. Gallery affiliations include: the Birchstone Gallery, Egg Harbor, WI; the Gallery of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Claremont Fine Arts Gallery of Claremont, CA.

To register for the Frank Webb Workshop please fill out and return the application you may download here. The cost is $275 for the three day workshop. A maximum of 30 people may register for the class. Contact Frank Davey at 719.634.8529 or e-mail frankdavey@comcast.netfor an application form and for Frank Webb’s suggested list of materials for the workshop.

Participating Seniors

Carla Archuleta
Ryan Beebe
Michelle Berthiaume
Carrie Eggleton
Jeffrey Foster
Bill Fuller
Miriam Mitchell
Jessie Peterson
Maureen Ross
Victoria Rust
Peter Song
Michelle Weigold
Lisa Willis

VaPA

The Visual and Performing Arts department (VaPA) offers a cross-disciplinary degree that encourages innovative collaboration between disciplines. This focus integrates art history, film studies, museum and gallery practice, music, theatre, and visual arts. Students will complete this degree with a primary concentration in one area and develop a comprehensive knowledge in each of the major disciplines. Through studio arts, performance, theory, scholarship, and creative uses of media and technology, students will engage in an investigative approach to the arts, where the local and global converge, where cross-fertilization inspires critical thinking, dialogue, improvisation, and where diversity of thought is intrinsic to artistic process and practice.

When students complete this degree, they will have the skills and knowledge to enter graduate school or a variety of careers in the arts.

Events

Opening Reception
Friday, May 4, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Parking will be free in lots 1, 3, and 4 during the opening reception.

Images

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