ALTOGALLERY

Opening reception: December 7 (6 - 10 PM)

First Friday reception: January 4 (6 - 10 PM)

ABOUT A BREATH BEFORE

A Breath Before combines the works of Lindsay Smith Gustave and Kaitlyn Tucek. The first two-person exhibition between Gustave and Tucek, A Breath Before raises questions of instinct, patience, and motherhood. This exhibition brings together each artists’ independent reaction to their experience as mothers, one equally stoic and dynamic, the other delicate and composed, but both vulnerable in their contemplation of the space that exists between the body and that from which it grows.

 

Tucek follows instinct and records the invisible momentum of a body in space. An exercise in subtlety, she records the exquisite pain and pleasure of motherhood, understanding the ebb-and-flow between both. Painted representations of a monolithic entity withstands outside forces and protects, while still understanding the limits of control. An object, suspended in time, taking a breath in contemplation of the pace and multitudes of life. Serving as a pillar or monument to life, overlooking the circumstances gained by the course of events and the resultant multitudes of an individual identity.

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For Gustave, this body of work explores genetic inheritance, vulnerability, and emotional response. These vessels contain human moments: processing familial pathology and the generational self. Objects are held within specific spaces but grow to fill them. Imagined as delicate beaded petals, leaves, and bowing fronds preserved in custom hand blown glass shells, meticulous construction and abstraction of experience coalesce. The space between object and container provides a moment to focus on the interstices connecting physical action and memory. These works lay bare expectations and psychoses, embrace the transparency to invite shared experience, and although intentionally contained, still flourish.

 

A Breath Before offers a pause for inhalation, the anticipation before the gentle nudge into entropy when the breath leaves the body and becomes something else of its own.

 

LINDSAY SMITH GUSTAVE lives and works in Denver, CO. Gustave received a BFA with Honors in printmaking in 2007, and a Master’s in Art History in 2014, both from the University of Denver. A multidisciplinary artist, her work seeks to express the remnants of daily existence through visual artifact. Reproductions of specific moments or vague memories infuses them with meaning by challenging the division between memory and immediate experience. She highlights overlooked moments for their ability to subconsciously construct our realities. Her works are divided into series to best represent the different facets of her practice: meaning making in daily spaces, meditations in space, and human experience.

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KAITLYN TUCEK lives and works in Denver, CO. From Long Island, NY, Tucek graduated from Pratt Institute in 2007 and was awarded her Master’s from CUNY Queens College in 2013. Mother to two under 5, Tucek is a multi-disciplinary artist who is often labeled a feminist. After years of figurative and representational work, based in observational drawing, Tucek has simplified her focus to the line itself as a representation of the endlessness of organic form. Her work is in constant search of a pleasurable tension between flat fields of color and loose, organic marks and forms. Mark-making functions as a continuum, each line a part of a greater whole, continuous and evolving. Tucek has been featured in Hyperallergic, Westword, Modern in Denver, and was recently named one of Denver’s top 5 artists to watch and collect by 5280 Magazine. In addition to her art, Tucek occasionally moonlights in art and museum education, illustration and curatorial work.

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