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AWOL: Bus Chronicles

A public art installation by Valerie Brodar

The Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (GOCA), the City of Colorado Springs and Mountain Metropolitan Transit are proud to announce a new public art installation, Bus Chronicles by renowned artist and UCCS faculty member Valerie Brodar. This project is part of the AWOL: Art Without Limits. A new program developed by GOCA to create new forums for discussion on art and culture through site specific installations, happenings and non-traditional exhibition spaces. Bus Chronicles will be the third project in this year-long series and is made possible, in part, by a generous grant from the Pikes Peak Community Foundation.

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.

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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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The White Party

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

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1440 Minutes

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.

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The Lights Are On: Artgasm 2009

May 1 - June 12, 2009

Opening Reception: Fri. May 1, 2009
5:30 - 8:30 p.m.

The Lights Are On: Artgasm is the annual Visual and Performing Arts exhibition highlighting work from 2009 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 culmination and sampling of work from 19 students working in sculpture, drawing, painting, digital media, video, and photography.

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.

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TEACH ME SHOW ME

2009 Faculty Exhibition

FEBRUARY 27 - APRIL 11, 2009
Opening Reception: Fri. Feb. 27, 2009
5:30 - 8:30 p.m.

TEACH ME SHOW ME: 2009 Faculty Exhibition is a biennial show highlighting the work of UCCS Visual and Performing Arts (VaPA) faculty. The exhibition includes sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, installation, video and digital media. Current and emeriti faculty members are represented in this year’s exhibition.

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

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