September 21-24, 2018

URBAN AGGREGATE | curated by Joshua Ware

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Urbanscapes provide a centrally-located space for people to coalesce in order to exchange ideas, experiences, intimacies, and aesthetics. At its best, such spaces provide us with the ability to express our identities and beliefs, while simultaneously better understanding those of others; at its worst, these spaces become an echo-chamber for dominant modes of thought that reinforce traditional hierarchies. As such, urbanscapes can be thought of as contested zones that possess the ability to promote social and cultural diversity or, conversely, limit the scope of human imagination and intelligence. Ultimately, residents of (and visitors to) a particular urbanscape determine the social, cultural, aesthetic, and economic mores of that space. To this extent, URBAN AGGREGATE attempts to document Denver’s complex nexus of aesthetic and cultural relationships. Moreover, the show seeks to foster community through the creation of a historically-contingent, aesthetic document of the city. In doing so, it champions the strengths of our Denver’s creative population, while simultaneously calling attention to social, cultural, and economic issues that we currently experience.

Featuring: Suchitra Mattai, Diego Rodriguez-Warner & Matthew J Mahoney, Sammy Lee, Sarah Bowling, Ashley Frazier, Eric Dallimore, Sueyeun Juliette Lee & Eric Baus. 

Through a diverse multimedia practice, Suchitra Mattai weaves narratives of “the other,” invoking fractured landscapes and reclaiming cultural artifacts (often colonial and domestic in nature). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has appeared in various publications such as The American Scholar, The Daily Serving, New American Paintings, and Entropy. Recent and upcoming projects include participation in an international biennial (TBA, 2019), a travelling group exhibition with the Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC (2019), commissions with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and the Denver Art Museum, and a solo exhibition at the CVA Denver.

Diego Rodriguez-Warner was born in Managua, Nicaragua in 1986. In 2008, he studied under the Cuban Minister for Fine Arts, Lesbia Vent Dumois, in Havana, and received a BA in Fine Art and COIN Theory from Hampshire College in 2009. In 2013, he received his MFA from the Printmaking Department of the Rhode Island School of Design. Upon graduation he was awarded the Tobey Devan Lewis Fellowship, presented to a single graduating MFA demonstrating "Exceptional Promise," which he used to fund an 18 month exploratory sojourn in Berlin. Diego now lives and works in Denver.  

Matthew J Mahoney was born in Palm Springs, CA, in 1988. He earned a BA in Art Education from Point Nazarene University in 2010, and his MFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. Matthew has been included in a variety of group shows in California, Rhode Island, New York, and Boston, and was the recipient of both the Leslie Von Kolb Memorial Award, and an award for first place in the 2012 Annual Juried Exhibition at the Athenaeum Museum in La Jolla, California. His sculptural techniques evolved from years of practicing origami and fly-tying. His subject matter is derived from recognizable shapes, figuration, iconography, pop imagery, and material value. Matthew passed away in January of 2017, and we all miss the fuck out of him. 

Born in S. Korea, Sammy Seung-min Lee is a Denver-based artist who creates conceptual and process-based works that are immersive installations, relief-bas, sculptures and book works. Her work focuses on spatial, narrative, and sequential qualities excavated from personal history and memories, as Lee incorporates her diverse explorations in art and architecture. Currently, Lee is a resident artist at Redline, serves as Board of Directors for Asian Art Association at Denver Art Museum, and operates a new contemporary Asian art project and residency space called Collective SML | k in Santa Fe Art District, Denver.

Sarah Bowling (b. 1993) lives and works in her native home of Denver, Colorado. Bowling received her BFA in Painting and Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows across the country, including Aggregate Space, Oakland, CA, as well as Sullivan Gallery, Archer Beach Haus, and LVL3, all in Chicago, IL among others. She was recently selected to be a RedLine artist in residence for the next two years in Denver, CO. Her work is in several private and corporate collections throughout the US.

Ashley Frazier is a Colorado native based in Denver. Her work is a focused mixture of sculpture, drawing, photography and installation. The duality between past and present informs her process which involves collecting and cataloguing, repeating and reflecting, demolishing and reconstructing. Her work often explores the relationship of people and their surroundings by pairing the allure with grotesque, alongside the natural and artificial. Through this process, her work reveals a personal vulnerability in creating a visual autobiography based in the exploration of these dualities. 

Eric Robert Dallimore is a contemporary artist whose primary medium is woodworking, but also employs a variety of surprising materials in his driven works of art. His work is often a comment on current political-social narratives and environmentalism in the modern era. His most recent work focuses on the divisive nature of our country and has begun to incorporate aspects of performance art into his stoic, large scale sculptures and installations. Eric is also the founder and artistic director of Leon, a leading-edge gallery that intentionally challenges limitations, and provides an environment for artistic exploration that is free from the market pressure and economic constraints of commercial galleries.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee is a video artist and writer currently based in Denver. Recent performance installations include Peace Light (2018) for Asian Arts Initiative’s 25th anniversary exhibition series in Philadelphia, and Blue Light and Wave (2016), a featured presentation at Chicago’s city-wide performance arts festival, IN>TIME. Her most recent book No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise (Kore, 2017) explores starlight, distance, and grief. A former Pew Fellow in the Arts, she has held several residencies for poetry, video art, and dance in Norway, Iceland, and the US. You can find her at silentbroadcast.com.

Eric Baus is the author of five books of poetry: The Tranquilized Tongue, (City Lights 2014), Scared Text, winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009), and The To Sound, winner of the Verse Prize (Wave Books, 2004). How I Became a Hum is forthcoming from Octopus in 2018. He is also the author of several chapbooks, most recently The Rain Of The Ice (Above/Ground Press 2014). His poems have been translated into Spanish, Italian, and Finnish. He is a graduate of the PhD program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Denver as well as the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He teaches literature and creative writing at Regis University’s Mile High MFA program in Denver.

Elisa Gabbert is a poet and essayist and the author of four collections: The Word Pretty, forthcoming from Black Ocean in November of 2018; L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016), The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013), and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). She is currently writing a book about disasters, forthcoming from FSG Originals.

Anna Moschovakis's recent books include Eleanor, Or The Rejection of the Progress of Love (Coffee House Press, 2018), They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (CHP, 2016), and the English translation of Bresson on Bresson (NYRB Classics, 2017). Current projects are excerpted in Black Sun Lit and Paris Review. She's part of the artist-run collectives Ugly Duckling Presse and Bushel, and teaches at Pratt and in Bard's interdisciplinary MFA. She lives with others in upstate and downstate New York.

Hours

  • Friday, September 21 | Opening Reception | 7-11pm with sound performance by Eric Baus

  • Saturday, September 22 | 12-5pm

  • Sunday, September 23 | 12-5pm

  • Monday, September 24 | Closing Reception | 7-10pm readings by Elisa Gabbert & Anna Moschovakis @ 7