ALTOGALLERY

Opening Reception: First Friday, January 3, 2020

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ABOUT

JUSTIN ANKENBAUER received a BFA in painting from Western Kentucky University. He creates work to convey how we connect through process and to reinforce the importance of caring for and exploring the unknown through play.

 

CLAY BROOKS is an artist and designer currently working in video games and interactive digital art. Trained as a traditional painter he has taken to digital media and the diverse approaches to creation they provide. He explores themes ranging from urban fantasy to absurd realism.

 

DAVID FRAILE is an electronic technician and multimedia artist living in Denver, Colorado. His work reflects on the complexity of our relationships with analog and digital technologies, using modified circuits and code to create generative media environments.

 

Bearwarp's "Glass Codecs" is an interactive archive of fragmented texts, sounds, and images that document an enigmatic artifact. Through the process of exploring these documents the viewer uncovers layers of narrative, revealing the madness, obsession and fragility of the cryptic figure responsible for its creation.

 

Additional Contributions By: Denise Landreth, Giuliano Jones, Maureen Igoe, Kara Renner

 

MICHAEL F. SPERANDEO - Using new media as a platform allows my work to escape the confines of the real and venture into the surreal. I use current technologies such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and 3D rendering tools to create interactive experiences. My work is narrative focused and draws reference from mythology and symbolism. Informed by loaded imagery contained within philosophical and antiquated iconography, my work is a response to outdated and sometimes unrelatable symbolism from historical ideologies.

 

The series, fractalism, was inspired by a mathematician who created a program to determine the presence of fractals in Jackson Polloc paintings. This paper's conclusion was the foundation of this series. By creating a specific proportion of pattern to randomness the work took shape.

 

NOAH TRAVIS PHILLIPS is an artist and educator; he received a BA from Naropa University in Fine Art and Environmental Studies and his MFA from the University of Denver in Emergent Digital Practices. His methodologies involve appropriation and digital/analog collage and montage strategies with the assistance of algorithmic systems. Phillips creates adaptable and multi-centered artworks with a practice that includes 2D and 3D digital fabrication, videos, books, performance, and the internet. Phillips' interdisciplinary research interests integrate personal mythology, the Anthropocene and the Posthuman.

 

Phillips’ most recent exhibitions include a performance lecture at the Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, TX (“Where Secrets Are Still Kept”) and a group show at JuiceBox Gallery (“Pre-Text n.1”); as well as the Welcome to My Homepage Digital Artist Residency and SketchUp Artist Residency. His work was featured in the 2018 The Wrong Biennale for new digital art. He performed in the 2015 Biennial of the Americas. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. Phillips is Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor in Emergent Digital Practices at University of Denver. He lives and works in Boulder, Colorado. He can be found online at noahtravisphillips.com.

 

The art of Noah Travis Phillips amalgamates made, found, and modified media. This material is often sourced from his personal archive, which he has been accumulating for more than two decades. He has a multilinear approach to 2D and 3D digital fabrication, videos, books, performance, and the internet, working with them in adaptable and multi-centered compositions and formats.

 

His work with appropriated and anonymous internet media and art historical sources is shaped by the dynamic between digital/algorithmic systems and human meaningfulness, marking whatever he makes with his unique aesthetic imprint. With the ocean of media and imagery constantly flowing and growing around us, Phillips is the artist as synthesizer, transformer, and composer. Through recontextualization, radical interconnections, and amplification, these materials become part of his oeuvre; intensifying a personal mythology and engaging in discourses that include the posthuman, the Anthropocene, and the art historical. Phillips is making the epic ordinary and the ordinary epic.

 

ZACH SLIVE KEISS - Glitchwave is the combination of Glitch Art and Synthwave, the two biggest influences in my work. The glitch is a conceptual component to the piece. Glitch being used broadly in the term. The errors being exploited are sometimes analog or digital. Elements of the painting are processed using computer software then used as a reference photo for the final painting. The distinctive 1980’s aesthetic is conveyed by the vibrant use of color and computer graphics rendered by old technology. My visualization of the 80’s is not how it was portrayed in history, it is to be considered as a modern take on the revision of the 1980’s aesthetic.

 

My work is designed to be seen in two lighting condition to create two different impacts. In the presence of gallery lighting, I want the work to create the sense of being sentient. In comparison when Artificial Intelligence becomes indistinctive to humans so is my quality of craftsmanship of my art. The smoothness of the substrate is used to convey blurred line between man and machine. This is to draw the connection to glitch art being primarily a digital form of work.

 

Additionally, I tend to focus on lighting. I became fascinated with light in dark places after walking the streets of inner cities at night. The visual impact of the fluorescent and neon lights contrasted with the dark blues and purples in it’s surrounding environment was mesmerizing. I also found it captivating that most people never get the chance to experience that or if they do, they don’t stop to take in the view. With each piece, I try to recreate that feeling of being mesmerized by the light. To accomplish this with a similar impact, I use UV light sensitive additives in acrylic paint. When shown in the presence of a UV Light, the color’s vibrance is greatly increased. To contrast this, the dark sections of the painting become richer. The use of these lighting condition not only make the colors glow, it is used to create dimensionality within a 2D painting. The use of black is intended to create an illusion of depth. I wanted segments of the painting to feel as if it were a dark alley way in the heart of the city which could be explored. The pop of color simulates the brightness of neon signage in the dark on the other side of those alley ways.

 

The creative process for each piece starts out on the computer. I use a combination of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to illustrate and then compose a template that I will later paint. This is the only point in the process that isn’t structured, rather freeform. The time varies that it takes me to figure out which design elements work together, color and composition layout. Once I have locked in a complete composition I prepare my substrate. I have chosen to work with MDF. I then create stencils using the digital design as a template. At this point I think about the painting in terms of layers like Photoshop. This helps me translate the layer vectors to stencil layers. Finally, an airbrush is my method of application of paint. The fine specs of paint are comparable to the pixels on a computer monitor.