Gildar Gallery is pleased to present Rocky Mountain High, an exhibition of works by 15 contemporary artists mining mythologies of a much storied region in the American West. Opening Saturday, April 19th with a public reception from 6-9pm, the show runs through May 24th, 2014

The Rocky Mountains– majestic backdrops to the onward thrust of western expansion, beer cans, brake lights, long tokes and the glory of god. Extending in the US down from Montana to New Mexico with its heart in Colorado, the 85 million year-old range continues to hold an inescapable allure for each new generation of pioneering seekers, speculators and storytellers.  Perpetuated as barriers to overcome, ascendant formations to behold, and great treasure chests of resources to exploit, these tall rocks bare tall tales. The artists in "Rocky Mountain High" take the mystique of this frontier land as their point of departure. At times embellishing, debunking and conflating romantic views of the landscape and its surrounding cultures, the work in this exhibit, which comes from all over the country, reflects the complexity of defining a sense of place amidst layers myth.

The sublime beauty of the terrain itself has been a locus of inspiration for imaginative minds traveling West.  Following various expeditions during and just after the civil war, Rocky Mountain School artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran helped establish the grandiose aesthetics of wonder associated with the region's landscape. The swelling colors and exaggerated lighting in their paintings created glowing visions of the Rocky Mountain inhabitants and surroundings. In the 1950's nature photographers like Ansel Adams continued this tradition of romantic depictions of the range and adjacent areas in stunning black and white images published in magazines around the country.  At the same time, beat writer Jack Kerouac would also help to reignite America's love affair with the narrative of the Western outpost. Revelatory passages from sojourns in Colorado littered his stream of conscious novels depicting epic drug-fueled road trips from coast to coast.  Of course these bucolic images in admiration for the wildness of the open land also served to promote its occupation by throngs of migrants enamored by visions of free living in god's country.

Since their time as ancestral ritual grounds of the indigenous tribes who first populated the region, the Rocky Mountains have served as beacons for those seeking perpetual return, symbolic living and a higher spiritual connection. From its early territorial days, the land has played host to numerous fringe religious groups who found refuge in the crevices and shadows of these earthen behemoths. From turn-of-the-century utopian collectives to the Klu Klux Klan in the 1920's, counterculture communes in the 1960's and more recently  fundamentalist churches and various new age religions, the territory continues to serve as a magnet for atavists from the far right to the far out. Of course, not everyone looks beyond the mountaintops for their ultimate reward. Many have looked on these juggernauts of metamorphic rock as literal and metaphorical gold mines.

As the story goes, it is here at the threshold to the West that a man can stake a claim and strike it rich. A hotbed for major commodity rushes, the Rocky Mountain region has attracted wanderers from all over high on the notion of watching their fortunes rise.  From gold and silver in the mid 19th century to coal, oil and gas in the 20th and now grass in the 21st, each new resource boom brings with it another surge in optimism and population growth.  And when the fever breaks? Historically a few tycoons count their gains far away from the ghost towns and trash heaps left behind. Often laborers are left broken spirited and broken bodied. A number of artists have been their to document this harsh reality. Photographers like Lou Dold captured the brutality of the infamous Ludlow Massacre on April 20, 1914 when coal miners striking over working conditions and the Colorado National Guard became embroiled in one of the bloodiest armed labor struggles in the nation's history. Even in times of calm, harsh conditions persisted. Documenting housing communities in the late '60's at the eastern edge of the Rockies, photographer Robert Adams revealed the stark banality of modern frontier existence that in his words "cared almost not a thing for the people who lived inside." In our current era, hundreds of mom and pop marijuana dispensaries that seemed to sprout overnight have shuttered just as quickly or been consumed by conglomerates as the price of product falls and the cost of doing business rises. Still the green rush marches on as thousands flock to this new industry in search of work and wealth.

Perhaps nothing can more succinctly capture a region's sense of mythology more than a song. In 1972 the American folk balladeer, John Denver penned "Rocky Mountain High" tapping into a familiar naturalist sentimentality that resonated across the nation. The song climbed to #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 list and eventually became an official Colorado state song.  Beginning with a story of the singer's personal self discovery after moving to Aspen where he was "born in the summer of his 27th year", this tinkling ode to the area's natural grandeur praises the sublime mountains with views "as far as you can see", and the solemnity of the "quiet solitude, the forest and the streams".  Despite painting a dewy eyed vision of the region, where one can sit in harmony with "friends around the campfire and everybody's high", the song ends with a sobering lament. In the final verse, Denver sings of his fear of those who, "tear the mountains down to bring in a couple more / more people, more scars upon the land".

Like waking from a dream, as the realities of human intervention come into focus, Denver's vision of the unmolested Rocky Mountain environment wavers. This admission of doubt followed by the final return to the soaring chorus is indicative of the ambivalence that occurs so often when myth is confronted by the actualities of daily living. For a moment the mirage is pierced, while the desire to embrace its reassuring promises cannot be ignored. How does one reconcile these opposing forces? What happens when the boom goes bust, when the mountain guru preaching a practice of mindfulness turns out to be a womanizing alcoholic, when the friendly natives helping settlers in the soft light of the mountainous foreground are wiped out by a government sanctioned massacre, when the company creating jobs for your neighbors dumps toxic waste in your backyard? At some point every high has its come down, that's how you know it's time to take another hit. The artists In Rocky Mountain High wrestle and revel in this paradox of identity within a region not soon to shed its own powerful illusions.

In the exhibition "Inside-Out" early work by renowned New York artist Dan Asher (1947-2010) is presented beside contemporary works by established Colorado artists Margaret Neumann and William Stockman.

The term "inside-out" is a paradox, a fusion of dichotomies, but also infers an action or movement: the unseen is exposed; secrets are brought to light; the insides are laid bare. This process can be therapeutic, traumatic, revelatory, accidental, liberating, exposing, and more. In the context of this exhibition, the term functions as a pun, taking on layered meaning. Much like the pantheistic universe of the Greeks, art can reflect the human psyche - the workings of the mind are dramatized in a rarified form. In addition, the role of the artist in society - as visionary, commentator, investigator, provocateur - can lead to a societal position on the periphery, a place of solitude and reflection wherein the artist walks the line between the exterior world and their own interior life. These artists are exploring in varying degrees themselves, human nature, and society, and producing artwork via these examinations which both share and diverge in content and aesthetic. A distinct intensity exudes from all the work, finding its source in process, release, and the image.

Gildar Gallery is thrilled to host a solo exhibition by the renowned painter Clark Richert titled Symmetry and Dimension. The show, the artist's first in two years, is curated in collaboration with Richert's longtime dealer Robin Rule. Running from November 15th,2013 – January 18th, 2014, the exhibit opens on the evening of Thursday, November 14th with a reception from 6pm to 10pm.

Symmetry and Dimension offers ardent followers of Clark Richert and those new to his artwork fresh insight into this important artist's rigorous and visually stunning explorations. With a forthcoming essay by curator/critic and former MCA Denver director Cydney Payton, the exhibit unlocks new insights into Richert's uniquely consistent yet evolving historical and contemporary concerns. On display will be new and recent paintings, prints and a film-based object by Richert that illustrate abstract tessellating geometries and their application as multidimensional structures within artist lead communities.

For nearly 50 years Clark Richert has envisioned – and at times predated– in paint what scientists have sought through empirical observation. Known for his colorful patternistic canvases, Richert initially found himself inspired with mathematical patterning in the early 1960's when he came across the efficient geometry and humanitarian ideals of BuckRminster Fuller's geodesic dome. With a belief that pattern recognition is at the core of human understanding Richert began exploring new patterns in his paintings. He applied his discoveries in the construction of the famed art commune Drop City in southern Colorado, which he cofounded in 1965 with other likeminded artists Gene Bernofsky, JoAnn Bernofsky and Richard Kallweit.

By 1970, Richert, who was intuitively observing shadows cast by three-dimensional forms, found that one such structure – the rhombic tricontahedron – placed under sunlight casts a shadow in the form of a two dimensional pattern made from tiling a pair of differently shaped diamonds. Richert noted that this pattern tiled across a plane never repeated itself. The resulting aperiodic tessellation included a number of shapes that exhibited five-fold symmetry; these forms could be perfectly superimposed upon themselves by rotating on a center point in five equal increments. This discovery broke with the long held rule that five-fold symmetry was strictly impossible for any two dimensional packing of shapes. This so-called forbidden symmetry became the main subject for much of Richert's paintings.

To contextualize this achievement, skip ahead to 1976. Physicist Roger Penrose discovers this same non-repeating tessellation with five-fold symmetry dubbing it the now famous Penrose Tile. Later in 1983, through experiments with metal alloys, Israeli material scientist Dan Schectman finds this same structure existing in the natural world as the quasicrystal. This revelation breaks with the fundamental laws of crystallography, ushering in a scientific revolution and eventually earning Shectman the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Richert's relationship to five-fold symmetry and non-repeating tessellations has not dimmed since his initial investigations; and he continues to search further for new patterns. Most recently, Richert has become interested in the quasicrystal properties of a 10 dimensional form called the enneacontahedron. A two dimensional view of this form occupies a selection of paintings and prints in Symmetry and Dimension.

While certainly steeped in exacting methodologies, Richert's paintings can also be appreciated without a background in theoretical mathematics. As Richert observes, all humans are imbued with the powerful ability of pattern recognition. In this way his paintings offer a point of entrée to even the most casual viewers, who will find in his work surprising optical experiences.

The paintings in the exhibit are accompanied by a film-based object made in collaboration with Richert and the production team No Norizon. This projection on canvas illustrates the magnitudes of complexity that can be built from simple beginnings as a set of lines, rotated and layered on top of itself to create a latticed quasicrystal formation in a mesmerizing visual array.

In addition to Richert's abstracted geometries, on display are a series of three painted landscapes. These paintings depict patterns applied to building structures within artist-run communities that have influenced Richert's thinking or been a product of his prodigious mind.

The first painting depicts Black Mountain College, the experimental school in North Carolina that ran from 1933 to 1957, attracting some of the most experimental members of that generation's avant garde – individuals such as Buckminster Fuller who built his first geodesic dome there. The second painting in this series reveals a view of Drop City and the variety of geometric housing structures built by Richert and fellow residents. These structures, based on Fuller's dome and Steve Baer's zonahedra, were built from recycled materials including wood, car hoods and bottle caps, making Drop City an early "green" community well before that term entered our language as an environmental buzzword. Since the disbandment of Drop City starting in the late 1960's, Richert has continued to seek out new utopian models leading him to develop the design for a conceptual community called the Artists Residential Environmental Area (AREA). In his third and last canvas in the landscape series, Richert paints AREA into existence with a hypothetical perspective of this new sustainable artist community and its earth-sheltered studio/domiciles.

A resurgent interest within and beyond the region in Richert's work at Drop City sheds new light on this significant artist's achievements. Recently Richert's work has been exhibited in the traveling museum exhibit West of Center, which started at the MCA Denver and recently came to a close at the Mills College Art Museum after stopping at the Scottsdale Museum of Art and the University of Oregon Art Museum. Concurrently, the Drop City documentary has been released and screened at the PS1 MoMA dome in New York, where Richert spoke; and will be coming back to Denver for a screening at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art on January 16th. Richert was further recognized by the scientific community in the February 2012 issue of Chemistry in Australia, which acknowledged his early fivefold symmetry discovery in 1970. The essay accompanying the exhibition by Cydney Payton further unveils new perspectives on Richert's fascinating history and his relationship to current themes in contemporary art.


More About the Artist

Clark Richert received his MFA from the University of Colorado and his BFA from the University of Kansas. He is currently the head of painting at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. In 1966 he was co-recipient the Dymaxion Award from Buckminster R. Fuller, and he was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980. His work can be found in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Wichita Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Amoco, Container Corporation of America, and many other prominent private and public collections.


About the Galleries

Gildar Gallery, which opened in January 2012 has quickly built a reputation for cutting edge exhibitions and has been called one of the city's top galleries by The Denver Post, The Westword, 5280 magazine and Modern in Denver. In keeping with its model of collaborative engagement, for this exhibit the gallery is working alongside Robin Rule, one of Denver's longest standing contemporary art dealers. For 25 years Rule has nurtured the careers of some of Colorado's most well known artists and brought renowned works from around the country for exhibit in the city.

More About the Artist

Gildar Gallery is pleased to present two concurrent exhibitions by Utah based artists Peter Everett and Jared Clark. This exhibition continues the gallery's commitment to participating in cultural exchanges with a diversity of artists and communities.

Peter Everett
Peter Everett's paintings exist between expectation and uncertainty. Systems of color and form are established by the artist only to be transgressed by chance decisions with paint. The resulting surfaces of Everett's oil paintings present a flattened liminal space made of layered choices between order and disorder. In this way the artist's work engages most immediately with minimalism – at first embracing essentialist principles only to quickly refute them. Reactions of happenstance expression and at times obsessive ornamentation rupture these simple rules in favor of a "hyper stimulated visual experience".

However to view Everett's paintings in a purely formal light would be to package them too tightly. The artist's interest in ambivalence can be seen also as an allusion to narrative, or more specifically, speculative moments between narrative. In this way the artist sees his work as containing "projected characters". Within the paintings forms vascillate between the abstract and representational, connected by the sense that they exist in unstable and possibly "magical or apocalyptic" environments just before or after great action.

Seeing Everett's paintings as part of a disrupted stories connects them with periods that have existed in between the linear timeline of history. Often marked by an energetic freedom and anxiety, during these breaks in the graph of progress a sense of displacement persisted with no vision of what was to come next. Still artists strove for discovery giving rise to experimentation. Think late Gothic, and Mannerist painters just before and after the Renaissance stumbling sincerely towards perspective and then making a conscious break from it first towards intellectual exaggeration and eventually the ostentation of Baroque art. More recently Punks in the mid-late 1970's exhibited this charged sense of apprehension, excitement and rupturing. Sandwiched between the self assurance of the 1960's Counter Culture and the confident resurgence of consumer culture that would sweep through the 1980's, early Punk waved the flag for ridiculous failure and the indefinable.

Rather than stagnation, in all of these periods a sense of radial expansion into the unknown pervades. Peter Everett's paintings in all of their conflated elements acknowledge that perhaps we exist in a similarly complex 'in between' time. The steady march forward has been replaced by a questioning of where we are and what comes next. And while no one has their finger on the pulse, everything is still possible.

More about the artist

Peter Everett received an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally with recent exhibitions at Santa Reparata in Florence Italy, HPGRP Gallery in NYC, The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, The Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, CA, Curious Matter in Jersey City, NJ, K-Space Contemporary in Corpus Christi, TX, and the Spectrum Project Space in Perth, Australia.


Jared Clark
Jared Clark literally transforms trash into treasure. Through his interventions, found three-dimensional objects take on the aesthetic of highly attractive paintings and sculptures. His most recent series on display in his exhibit Styropoxy Paintings consist of discarded polystyrene, more commonly referred to as Styrofoam, which the artist fills and coats with colored resin. At times flattening space and at others accentuating depth and dimension, Clark uses the constraints and negative space of this material normally relegated to a packaging product, to defy viewer's expectations and in his words find "redemption" for what has been thrown away.

Immediate connections to modern environmental and capitalist concerns arise as junk is turned into a slick consumer friendly and long lasting (Styrofoam takes one million years to biodegrade if undisturbed) product. In their highly reflective yet translucent surfaces in which light both penetrates and seems to emit, reference to modern electronic screens and digital color gradients emerge. Yet as inert objects they recall the dead mirrored screens of devices built for obsolescence.

With a highly polished reflective luster, Clark's creations evolved from garbage trigger an almost Pavlovian response as objects of desire. Beginning with monochrome fields paired together in diptychs Clark finds his work approaches modern and minimalist art experiments from well outside of their ideal set of parameters. In the most recent groupings of shifting gradients an examination of kitsch emerges. The simple combination of format and hue simultaneously evokes cliché postcard sunsets while the illuminated presence of the work transcends these tired images to inspire a renewed sense of wonderment.

More About the Artist

Jared Clark received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Virginia Commonwealth University. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad including exhibitions in Utah, New York, Los Angeles and Berlin as well as being featured at the Armory Art Fair in New York City as well as Scope and NADA in Miami. Clark has participated in the Kompact Living Space residency in Berlin, Art Omi and the Deadelus Fellowship at the Robert Motherwell Foundation. His work has been exhibited in a number of museums including solo shows at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and most recently the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. He is currently featured in issue 108 of New American Paintings.

The Everyday Circus

More than partners in art, Denver based Hollis + Lana are also partners in life. As husband and wife intimately combining their professional and personal interactions, their collaborative artwork physically mirrors this relational blurring.

From back and forth layering of line and pigment to the literal push and pull of material in space, Hollis + Lana's tag team process brings to life forms that are literally out of shape. Twisted, stretched, pinched and contorted, these images and objects of indistinct subject matter serve as evidence of a series of communication tug-of-wars. However, a completely seamless and exacting style reveals that each side is regularly allowing themselves to get yanked across the dividing line into the other's territory. Seeing this harmony amidst chaos viewers often leave asking the question, where does one hand stop and the other begin?

"At some point early on in our conversations "tell me what you're thinking" became "show me what you're thinking." We traded words for charcoal, pens, brushes and paint. When we create together we speak through an convergence of our combined experience. We tell each other stories visually, starting with one of us making a mark. We take turns picking up the narrative until the individual work is resolved. The iterative process of our artistic collaboration, though filled with familiar tensions that attend any act of communication, is ultimately an act of trust, one where we both rely on a shared vocabulary to give and to receive without judgment or expectation."

The Everyday Circus includes paintings, drawings and sculptures that reflect Hollis + Lana's continued interest in the combination of contrasting elements: high and low culture, intuitive action and obsessive finishing, hard work and juvenile distractions to name a few. In a time when spectacle is commonplace and the circus is always in town, a sense of the mundane sets into all aspects of life. Through unexpected juxtapositions and the revelation of an authentic exchange between people, Hollis + Lana allow the eye to see anew. Employing a host of techniques and materials from charcoal and graphite to acrylic paint, air brush, and fiberglass molding, the two artists achieve an impressive illusion of the tangible despite the depicted forms remaining unidentifiable. Seemingly odd yet satisfying color pairings add to visual rediscovery— edibly sweet Candy Land hues intertwine with fleshy tones one might expect to see in an endoscopic exploration. Rather than jarring the senses with quick visual gags, Hollis + Lana reward viewers for the time they invest compelling them to take more than a moment to enjoy the show.

The History of Weather

Gildar Gallery is pleased to invite sisters Ashley and Sarah Williams to the gallery for two concurrent exhibitions under one umbrella titled The History of Weather. While these talented young artists maintain independent practices in Nederland, Colorado and Chicago, Illinois respectively, both return to their shared childhood bemusement with natural disasters as the genesis for their current work.

Raised in Roanoke County, Virginia amidst the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Williams sisters recall an isolated yet wonder-filled childhood. Relying on each other's sprawling imaginations for entertainment they developed elaborate games Inspired by images of natural disasters discovered in their parents' formidable collection of National Geographic and Smithsonian books. In these storm pictures the two sisters found not only a catalyst for their youthful fantasies, but also a perpetual source of content for their now mature creative undertakings.

As the adage goes, you can't argue with the weather. As a force beyond human control, the weather's shifting course demands acknowledgement of our subservience to its will - a fact that even insurance companies have embraced in labeling destructive atmospheric conditions 'acts of god'. Through both its combined majesty and catastrophic potential, weather inherently has the ability to pull people's attention away from our workaday social concerns to behold the gravity of natural occurrences, such as the passage of time.

Within the works of both Ashley and Sarah Williams' presented in The History of Weather a relationship between temporality and state change coexist while each artist approaches these phenomena by their own means. Melding the organic and man-made Sarah' ever evolving mixed media sculpture constructed on site at the gallery appears at once engineered and alive. The structure presents a distinct organization of stacked materials, while it also appears to be eroding beneath a mysterious primordial substance. Repeatedly built, deconstructed and reconfigured into new forms by the artist through a process of impulse and action, Sarah's creations experience a weathering process not unfamiliar to that which occurs in nature:

"My work, because it grows from previous pieces, shares a certain lineage just within the material which travels from one piece to the next. I think about geography and the movement and re-working of landforms through time."

Smoothed by the artist's hands, her imposing sculpture finds itself in constant transition. Material as well aids to the transformational qualities of the work, as partially set plaster shifts during the course of the artwork's life. Fusing geological, architectural and biomorphic elements, Williams' structure conjures the intertwined and at times embattled relationship between human effort and the indifference of nature.

In contrast to the freeform immediacy of Sarah's sculptures, Ashley's immaculate oil paintings are the product of deliberate planning and exacting brushwork. Reminiscent of 19th century scientific and zoological illustration the emergent forms in her work while familiar have no corollary in the real world. Purely imagined, an amorphous cloud-like entity has emerged as Ashley's dominant tableau. She describes this shape floating through space as "awkward", at times dangerous and also fragile. Appearing first in her work ten years ago, this precarious cluster has been accumulating ever since. As she says:

"This shape has been traveling, evolving and reacting to experience for over a decade, gathering dust and creating well-worn paths on the landscape. It is a very old storm."

Despite a painstaking approach to painting, Ashley's works in this exhibit suggest a distinct sense of movement. Throughout the series her fugitive body evolves in many incarnations, billowing onward, pulsing in agitated space and exploding in suspended action. At all times the work, "hovers in the space between solidity and ephemerality, between a 'being' and an 'event'".

As climatologists attempt to predict the next planetary phase, and meteorologists make next week's forecast, a regular bombardment persists of the unexpected and at times cataclysmic. And while people continue to ride the emotional highs and lows of societal tumult, without requiring viewers to endure a colossal tempest the Williams sisters invite viewers to consider the impact of atmospheric events as perhaps the truly palpable markers in the onward march of time.

Sweat Baby Sweat

Gildar Gallery invites you to get wet at SWEAT BABY SWEAT, a summer group show at our pop-up space in sunny Los Angeles. Curated by LA-based artist, Adam Stamp, this exhibition brings together friends of both Adams (Stamp and Gildar) from New York, Mexico City, Denver, Portland, and Los Angeles.

SWEAT BABY SWEAT gathers a group of artists whose subjective concerns are integral to the fantasies and realities of Los Angeles - addressing the more obvious traits of heat, sexiness, carnality, obsession, excess, and outward mobility or the less told stories of loneliness, alienation, failure, and defeat. Whether looking at the shining surface or the dark underbelly of a land where big dreams go to live and die, a stalwart ability to laugh it off is requisite for long-term survival. So too a discernible sense of humor persists within the works in Sweat Baby Sweat.

The term "sweat" circulates as an unencumbered cultural signifier, with its duel interpretation being equally valid in light of the show. While sweat takes into account the varied sensory experiences connected to vigorous pleasure, sex, dancing, summer, and the sun, it is equally connected to the notion of hard labor. Despite real-world/art-world obstacles, work flows uninhibitedly from each creator. The act of work is both an extension of the self and central to each artist's cult of personality, so any labor, in a traditional sense, comes naturally. For each of these artists, distinctions between exuberant play and strenuous undertaking dissolve in the heat of their oft-possessed creative practice.

Los Angeles, the city that practically invented summer, is the ideal setting to gather this cohort of hot, hardworking artists from across North America. An exhibit that turns its back on the notion on summer group shows as lazy and boring, Sweat Baby Sweat makes a strong statement about the changing conditions of a 24/7/365 art-world. During the season of elaborate vacations and the coveted summer break, these artists just can't stop, won't stop putting in work.

Alterations Disconnect Memory from the Dream by Amber Cobb

Gildar Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Denver based artist Amber Cobb Alterations Disconnect Memory from the Dream Amber Cobb has long drawn on the duality between the attractive and the abject in her highly personal sculptures and drawings. Mattresses, stripped of their initial form and re-stretched over new frames are mounted to the wall as both sculptural objects and paintings. Treating their surfaces with household liquids – ink, motor oil, coffee and soap, Cobb transforms the soft quilted material giving each piece the appearance of a well-worn receptacle of the human body. With additional layers of silicone poured and painted on, these objects acquire a glossy and often 'just used' quality that, as the artist describes, depict "the burden of life with both living and dying stains".

Within Cobb's intricate drawings, many delicate hairline marks, and at times actual hair, also reference the body. Undulating bundles spill over one another tapering to stretched sinews. These tissue-like shapes, like the mattress works, are also coated with a silicone skin. Graceful execution and minimal composition contrast corporeal content as again attraction and repulsion coexist. Inviting, the slick rubberized surface at once begs a tactile response, while if left unprotected, quickly attracts the detritus of its surroundings.

The title of the exhibit references the first few moments of waking when any body movement will affect one's ability to recall the contents of the previous night's subconscious journey. Cobb, who describes her work as semi-autobiographical in nature, discusses this powerful series:

"This new body of work investigates the complex relationship I have with intimacy, love, and loss. There are moments when I am embraced by warm memories of my younger days, a smile, a hug, and a tender touch. Embedded within these recollections are souvenirs of anticipation and anxiety. The memories I adore and embrace are stained with a stagnant fog. Memories I have lived with my entire life. I have spent a lot of time working through them but I feel as though I have reached a plateau and the memories just linger, co-existing with my past and present. While the memories are far from ideal they are a part of me. Like a dull chronic pain, it aches and sometimes flares up, but I've become used to it and it doesn't bother me because it is what I know. I ask myself these questions: Is it possible that I am comforted by this pain. If it wasn't there would I feel empty? Who would I be today without it?"

More About the Artist

Amber Cobb is a Colorado based artist, living and working in the Denver area. In 2011 she received her M.F.A. in Sculpture from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her work has been exhibited in a number of exhibitions at institutions throughout the state including the Arvada Center, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, a forthcoming installation at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and at RedLine where she is currently participating in a two year artist residency. Her sculptures, installations, and drawings explore memory and the imagination in a nonlinear fashion. The underlying narratives within the work involve a combination of Cobb's personal history, barroom tales, and "redneck" stereotypes as well as an amalgamation of abstract memories and appropriated stories.

Long Lost by Ryan Everson

Gildar Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of new nostalgic works by Portland artist Ryan Everson titled Long Lost. Using "re-imagined objects" Everson transports his viewers back to a seemingly simpler and more mysterious existence before the birth of an easily searchable world —a time when a navigation system was an overly wrinkled topographic map and a heart for adventure. However tangible though, Everson's recollections are nonetheless a fantasy. It is this very sense of yearning for something that never truly existed that his work examines.

Coupling retro hand made signage with altered childhood explorer objects and plywood constructions Everson creates a believable past to return to. Using broad terms of longing in his sign pieces like "missing out" and "alone again" the artist taps into a universal sense of loss. Vintage Boy Scout walkie talkies, knapsacks and arrows help lead us deeper into the fog of this fabricated yet familiar memory. Documenting his pieces in environmental settings, Everson further heightens this sense of suspended reality.

Although illusion plays a major role in the sentiment of Everson's work the artist is indebted to his real world artistic predecessors. One can't help but see within Everson's rustic vision images of great American folktales; Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn floating down the Mississippi, Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassidy barreling down a stretch of highway, the Hardy Boy's unearthing a clue. In his use of language Everson finds himself amongst a lineage of fine artists working with the impact of the aphorism such as Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Barbara Krueger and Jenny Holzer, while his carefully handcrafted representations recall the wooden recreations of artists such as Tom Sachs and Lee Stoetzel.

While Everson's work invites audiences to develop their own mythology with it, he cannot deny his own personal desire for the inexplicable: "My life becomes increasingly planned, documented and recounted, and as time passes I become comfortable. Longing for the moments when I was confronted by the expanse of uncertainty, I look for new ways to feel the fear and excitement of being truly lost."

About the Artist

Ryan Everson received his MFA in sculpture from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012 and his BFA in Sculpture from the University of Oregon in 2009. His three dimensional artwork examines emotional states such as fame, fear of the unknown, introspection and sincerity. Often marked by a sense for theatrical melodrama and brooding humor, Everson's art often emits a dark comedic mood. The Artist currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Real Is a Feeling

Gildar Gallery presents Real is a Feeling, an exhibit featuring mechanical image reproduction as a way of exploring subjective perception. Part of Denver's Month of Photography, this thematic group show was inspired by the song of the same name by artist / musician / provocateur Travis Egedy aka Pictureplane. This group show consists of a selection of works all immersed in the manipulation, questioning and fabrication of the real.

Perspective wobbles between the simulated and the sincere as authentic copies, altered documentation and artifacts of both convincing and suspect origin encounter each other. Internal themes emerge amongst these objects in dialog — surface, beauty, authorship and the spiritual interact through an underlying sense of play. In this multifaceted display of work the realness of the medium itself comes under scrutiny as traditional photography, digital appropriation and even sculptural duplication become intertwined.

The very advent of symbols at the dawn of human civilization began an ongoing dialog with re-presented versions of events, emotions and ideas. This lead the father of western philosophy, Plato, eventually to question people's ability to see beyond their own illusions. While not a new notion, artists of every era inevitably engage with the inescapable bias of perspective. Contributing their own unique filters using the means available within their time, these artists perpetually expand and compound this ongoing paradox of the human attempt to communicate truth. Real is a Feeling furthers this historical conversation with its own highly subjective selection of poignant contemporary voices.

Gildar Gallery presents two concurrent exhibitions by Maryland based artists Sidney Pink and Bill Dunlap. Both artists create representational works on spare backdrops to very different effect.

New Works By Sidney Pink

Sidney Pink (born 1979) is an American artist who creates watercolor and graphite drawings. Pink lived and worked in Japan for four years where he found inspiration for his art. He has exhibited in New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, L.A., Berlin, and Tokyo and was nominated for a Jury Prize at Takashi Murakami's art festival, 'GEISAI Museum 2.' In a review of Pink's work, Japanzine magazine described Pink as, "one of Japan's most inspirational gaijin [foreign] artists." His work has been featured in various publications including Fine Line Magazine, Japan's Artcollector, and the New York Times Magazine. Pink has a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He now lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland 

The spacious graphite and watercolor drawings of Sidney Pink offer a world of possibilities at the early moments of conception. Not yet grounded in location, a host of often repeating and archetypal characters populate a blank void. Inspired by the artist's time spent living in Japan, this emerging narrative and its figures present an outsider's perhaps impossible yet necessary attempt to accurately internalize and transmit a foreign culture.

Lacking the ability to speak the language and fully engage with the environment in which he found himself, Pink spent much of his four years living in Ebina, Kanagawa Prefecture as an observer. Surrounded by the people and symbols of a landscape, yet isolated by an implacable communication barrier, he began depicting his own imagined narrative based on the visual elements he regularly encountered, including the pervasive aesthetics of Japanese pop culture including anime and manga. Pink developed an illustrated reality that taps into the subtle humor of a perceived national psyche in which the mundane and the absurd live side by side.

Even floating in an empty vacuum, iconic imagery found in Pink's work, such as the school girl and the salary man suit, firmly place the work within the particularities of the Japanese cultural context. Here the value of technological progress and productivity meet with more esoteric traditions and fantastic myths. As the body of work continues to grow so do the narrative components as more characters and graphic elements connecting them are introduced. However, rather than preplanning a discernible plot or arch, Pink sees the story he is creating as a more discursive path emerging in the moments of creation:

"I feel like there might be a bigger puzzle that I'm trying to figure out and once I figure it out, if it's even possible, then I'll be done – Not that I believe I'll ever get there. There's certainly a narrative, but I don't necessarily have all of the details. For me I do the illustration as a way of finding that narrative."

This series of work itself seemed to the artist to have appeared in a sudden burst without forethought. After three years in Japan without any significant artistic output, one evening Pink suddenly found himself compelled to begin drawing and in a matter of a few days a stack of paper appeared containing the first characters from this new world. He has continued in this vein and has been following a compulsion to discover the next developments in this expanding universe ever since.

One cannot separate the artist's process from the content of the work and in Pink's case this is all too true. For each of his drawings, Pink uses himself as a model. With the artist posing as all of his characters in full costume, from school girl to astronaut, Pink's drawings become more than visionary fiction, they begin to take on the role of a collective self portrait. In this way the artist as foreigner not only appropriates what he has witnessed for re-interpretation, but in fact absorbs his blended world of observations and imagination, making it for him at least, very real.

Paintings by Bill Dunlap

In the project gallery Bill Dunlap presents a series of his emotionally raw mixed media portraits. He has has acquired a national following in the lowbrow art community and has exhibited his iconic paintings across the US, gaining recognition for a variety of work. This series displays the artist's interest in the visceral side of human existence.

Immediately a connection to the turbulent works of the great British painter Francis Bacon is apparent in Dunlap's contorted forms. And like his grotesque predecessor, Dunlap began his career as a painter late at the age of 37. However, wholly his own both in technique and subject matter, Dunlap's portraits use gestural acrylic and spray paint techniques and have begun to examine clearly American themes.

For example, his most recent work in the exhibit titled Portrait of a Racist derives from the artist's interest in 18th century Colonial portraiture by artists like John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart. A bitter irony within these historical works and their subjects captivated Dunlap; these heroic champions of liberty immortalized with painstaking likenesses, also had monstrous qualities, most notably their participation in the great atrocity of human slavery. Splicing the iconic swastika tattoo on the forehead of infamous and charismatic 20th century sociopath, Charles Manson, with the refined pose of James Madison, Dunlap began abstracting the face until it no longer resembled any particular individual but contained the essence of this conflicted sentiment.

Rising out of darkness Dunlap's images combine the raw energy of expressive abstraction, with the recognizable form of the human head. Describing these works as macabre would be an understatement. When asked about his preoccupation with violence Dunlap responded with a succinct worldview, "Everything we call progress is violence against someone or something that stood before it. I'm interested in seeing these disasters. I dissect in order to reveal."

Gildar Gallery presents a special exhibition of naturalist sentiment by artist Emi Brady. Titled Swarm, this exhibit will be the first of its kind at the gallery in which a large scale installation will engulf the entire main room with individual available works on display in the project gallery. This will be Brady's first exhibition in Denver after having showed regularly in New York following her studies in printmaking at the School of Museum of Fine Arts and Pratt Institute where she received her MFA.

Employing the oldest of printmaking processes, the relief cut, Emi Brady literally extracts this media beyond its historically flat surface to create immersive three dimensional environments. Raised amidst the pervasive hunting culture of the American Southeast, Brady's swirling installations of birds and other creatures gathered en masse recall the artist's early fascinations with both animal anatomy and the relationship between human and animal behavior as social organisms.

Often returning to her initial backyard observations and fantasies growing up in Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama, Brady depicts various species of fowl and other fauna indigenous to those regions amassed in great flocks. The denseness of bodies contained within these larger forms lends to both sensations of chaos and coordination as individual identification is lost while the swarm begins to take on its own shape and intelligence. These creatures gathered in overwhelming numbers and unexpected variety beg the question: for what purpose? Perhaps a certain unity in necessity — a forced migration due to a sudden environmental shift, or perhaps these animals. like people, share some inexplicable underlying pull to form a collective social unit despite their differences. As Brady notes:

"The phenomenon of swarm behavior is eloquently expressed in flocks of birds. At a distance we observe how a flock moves as a singular unit while subtle turns of individuals can reverberate and create drastic changes. Within the human flock we are bound to social and cultural movement while maintaining sensitivity to our individual experience. This is both humbling and frustrating, existing as an insignificant element of a whole while being trapped within an individual awareness."

More About the Artist

In Emi Brady's work the influence of both scientific observation and graphic representation emerges. Using art as a means for investigating phenomena in animal biology places Brady in the company of predecessors like the great ornithological explorer and illustrator John James Audubon as well as contemporary art luminaries such as Cui Guo Cian, Kate MccGwire and Walton Ford. As a printmaker, Brady's interest in pushing printmaking beyond its traditionally two dimensional format aligns her with other contemporary artists such as Dennis McNett, under whom she worked as a studio assistant, and fellow Pratt Institute alumni, Swoon. Brady's work has been exhibited throughout New York and has been featured on the Third Ward Blog and the forthcoming book "500 Paper Objects."

Gildar Gallery presents an exhibition of all new works on paper by Pattie Lee Becker. Recognized for her ability to extract psychological space into tangible form, her latest series titled Powers of Ten literally magnifies her established internal universe to entirely new degrees. Inspired by the eponymous Charles and Ray Eames film, this series of drawings presents a fantastic and highly personal internalization of the notion of worlds within worlds.

When released in 1977 the Eames' "Powers of Ten" wowed audiences by beautifully and systematically visualizing how by widening our field of view, the context of our reality can be radically transformed. With the film's frame zooming out from an afternoon picnic in the park by magnitudes of ten, audiences were jettisoned out into the far reaches of the cosmos and then quickly transported back in to examine the very smallest building blocks of that same reality.

In Pattie Lee Becker's Powers of Ten drawings she takes this principle of scalable reality and applies it inward. Within the mind however, empiricism gives way to a highly subjective and personal logic. Becker applies her own rules of magnification to her established taxonomies to reveal their highly cyclical relationships. With her previous works identifying the artist's individually separate worlds of materials, structures and flora and fauna, Becker's ten drawings in this series now place these surrealities in perspective to each other. Layered in space with fittingly inverted perspective, objects appear to grow larger rather than smaller as they recede into the distance of these detailed mind-scapes. Like perpetually turning a kaleidoscope to watch repeating elements shift in magnitude and relation to each other, it is unclear and perhaps unnecessary to understand exactly one's own orientation in Becker's fascinating universe.

About the Artist

The alternatively vibrant and moody work of Pattie Lee Becker unfolds as a vague subconscious world of unexpected proportions. Through drawing, printmaking and sculpture, familiar and foreign forms arise in hauntingly playful relationships. Raised in the great Midwest, Pattie Lee Becker spent her childhood surrounded by prairie and open sky before relocating to the East Coast to attend the Rhode Island School of Design. After graduating she attend attended Columbia University's School of the Arts where she received her MFA. Becker has been awarded numerous residencies and fellowships and has taught as a professor at the University of Colorado, Naropa University and the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.

Gildar Gallery presents two exhibitions of works on paper by talented artists Max Kauffman and Tom Mazzullo. Both artists share an interest in the human necessity to infuse symbols with meaning. However, from there both artist's diverge greatly in their approach to engaging this phenomenon.
 

In the main gallery Max Kauffman returns with an exhibition of all new watercolor and ink drawings marking an evolution in his sought after style. Exhibiting his works across North America, Kauffman has gained a following for his ethereal floating worlds. Exploring the role of narrative as a vessel for creating meaning from the often perplexing array of unrelated experiences people encounter everyday, in this exhibition titled The Reptilian Brain in Autumn, Kauffman's mystical reality, governed by its own array of symbols and myths, has taken on a muted and anthropological tone. The whimsy of the past meets with a sobering palette as unstable visions form. An omnipresent fog invites viewers to peer through and devise their own reality as buildings and beings appear caught in moments of uncertainty.

On display in the project gallery, Tom Mazzullo's extruded letters present symbols out of context. An expert of the medieval drawing practice of silverpoint, in this series titled Incantations, Mazzullo pulls on a historical medium to create sleek, minimal explorations of semiotic relationships. In conversation with painters such as Ed Ruscha and Wayne White and the concrete poetry of John Cage, Mazzullo renders three dimensional typography outside of its place within traditional visual language

Gildar Gallery presents Alkahest an exhibition of all new paintings by Jonathan Saiz. His latest series of richly executed oil paintings explores man's desire for transcendence through the material world. The title of the series refers to a universal solvent once sought by Alchemists, which if found promised wealth to its discovered, while jeopardizing the existence of the physical world. In keeping with this paradoxical legend, Saiz conjures beautifully translucent geometric forms as unstable containers for an extravagant array of, "curiously shifting histories". These fragmented visions appear always on the brink of breaking beyond the bounds of their crystalline chambers, at once becoming attainable and at risk of dissolving in an instant.
 

In the Project Gallery, Johanna Mueller showcases her new series of totemic works tilted New Icons. Including one of a kind, hand colored and gold leafed engravings as well as mixed media painting, this body of reverent objects displays the artist's interest in the use of animalistic symbolism as a means for processing human experience. Combining iconographies across time and geography, from Zuni Fetishes to Hindu Mandalas and Celtic Lore, Mueller envisions a modern bestiary wholly her own.

In this two person showcase, the displaced human form takes the foreground as the body and head rarely meet. Evan Isoline, who works with masterful printmaking methods and mixed media, fragments the human body from the neck down in order to understand its role as a symbol for larger societal values. Conversely from within the confines of a hospital room, Steven Prochyra utilizes the immediacy of graphite to isolates the faces of those looking in, re-contextualizing the intimate and distant relationships that exist between patient and caregiver, observed and the observer.