ALTOGALLERY

Opening Reception: First Friday September 6, 6 - 10 PM

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ABOUT

Everyday life is driven by the engine of routine. We may not understand or acknowledge the processes that keep it moving, but with differing degrees of efficiency, it gets us where we want to go. So many of these daily behavioral patterns start and end at home. Many are set up with the implicit aim of creating more time for work, family, friends, activities, and interests. Yet so often our habits override our lives, leaving little room for wandering, experimenting, and seeing things from different perspectives. Inevitably we become rigid algorithms of our own making, yielding the same answers to the same questions everyday.

Further, the more we become accustomed to these patterns, the less we are aware of them. We lose track of time in our churning rhythms, and wear starts to show, sometimes too late to mend.

The complex interrelationships between habit, habitation, and habituation are useful, damaging, and unavoidable. Through works by Ashley Frazier, Clay Hawkley, Eileen Roscina, Thomas Scharfenberg, and Anduriel Widmark, Natural Patterns: HABIT(u)ation seeks to remind us of our patterned nature, while inviting evaluation of the benefits and detriments that habits imbue in our lives.

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"I made this work as I moved from Boulder to Conifer, Colorado. I used images from both locations that relate to surveillance technologies and my desire for privacy and personal space. The conveniences and inconveniences of today's tracking technologies are unique to our milieu. This work is informed by how we habituate, engage with and are subject to these technologies." -- Clay Hawkley

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Clay Hawkley recently completed a two-year residency at RedLine Contemporary Art Center. He has also been a resident artist at Grin City Collective and the Vermont Studio Center. He studied photography at Boise State University and has exhibited work in Denver, Boulder and Longmont since 2005.

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Rerouting

Parlor scope 

2019

 

"The images inside the parlor scope serve as a visual metaphor for my habitual overuse of a smartphone: fragmented thought patterns, a limited attention span, and abbreviated focus. Here, I have gathered personal items from my childhood and teenage years that have been singularly replaced by this piece of technology. 

 

The smartphone is a revolutionary tool, and it is not inherently harmful. However, I believe that my increased use/dependency over the years has created negative habits in my life. Compulsive checking and switching tasks has prevented me from entering states of deep creative flow and focus. I often catch myself staring at the blank screen like a dopamine-releasing oracle, using it as a crutch in social situations when I feel overwhelmed, bored, awkward and filing any amount of downtime in the day with its blue light.  

For the duration of this show, I hope to reroute my neural pathways by taking a technology fast from this device -- carefully observing the cost of its convenience and how my habits change without obsessive use." -- Eileen Roscina

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