Telluride Arts, Art Walk: Eldridge & Dewey at Slate Gray

29 Sep Telluride Arts, Art Walk: Eldridge & Dewey at Slate Gray

Telluride Arts’ First Thursday Art Walk is a festive celebration of the art scene in downtown Telluride. Participating venues host receptions to introduce new exhibits. The October Art Walk takes place Thursday, October 3, 5 – 8 p.m.

During the months of October and November Gallery 81435  features the work of Denver-based artist Trine Bumiller. Her art explores the relationship between memory and experience through paintings that interpret the environment through abstraction. Part of the exhibition includes Bumiller’s newest series, “Monumental,” 129 oil paintings of American national monuments, revisited in pink hues.

Also for October and November Telluride Arts HQ is mounting a community show titled “An Exhibition of Broken/Mended Parts”  Awhile ago, the nonprofit put out an open call for entries of X-rays, as well as for optional small artifacts, short stories, poems, etc. that describe how “you broke and/or got back together.” Nearly 30 submissions were received and will be displayed, representing a full range of injuries and procedures. The narratives told through these portraits of broken insides is a unique, sometimes dark, reflection of the lifestyles we choose to live.

MiXX Projects + Atelier is showcasing local talent, including work of perennial favorites Meredith Nemirov and Britt Bradford, as well as work by a new artist (and MiXX team member) Edith Willey. The three very different styles add up to one great example of the creative diversity that can be found in this out-of-the-way place we call home.

The Telluride Gallery of Fine Art presents the artwork of Johannes Girardoni, Austrian-born, American sculptor and installation artist whose work is exhibited worldwide. Girardoni’s art is also part of the 2nd annual Original Thinkers Festival, a highly curated event that melds speakers, films, and performance into a powerful four-day experience, most at the “Big Idea” (aka Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village), October 3 – October 6. Full schedule here. Tickets/passes here. 

And Slate Gray Gallery Telluride presents “Mosaic” an exhibit featuring the work of Alexandra Eldridge of Santa Fe and Jenn Dewey of Amulet Arts in Ridgway, CO. Please scroll down for more.

For other Art Walk venues and further details about the above, go here.

Becoming Wolf, Alexandra Eldridge at Slate Gray.

Artist Alexandra Eldridge:

William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker, raised in a church that believed in the “Doctrine of Correspondence,” which holds that everything material mirrors something spiritual.

Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is regarded today as a major, if iconoclastic figure, a religious visionary whose art and poetry prefigured, and came to influence, the Romantic movement.

Blake valued imagination above reason, but unlike later Romantics, he deferred to inner visions and spiritual perception as surer indication of The Truth than sentiment or emotional response to nature.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite,” Blake wrote in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” “For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

In essence, Blake imagined the kingdom of heaven on earth. In other words, he believed that whatever was divine in God must be divine in man.

Carl Jung was born on July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, Switzerland. He believed in the “complex,” or emotionally charged associations. Jung collaborated with Sigmund Freud, but disagreed with him about the sexual basis of neuroses. He founded analytical psychology and advanced the idea of introvert and extrovert personalities, archetypes, and the power of the unconscious…

Or, in this context, the place where Alexandra Eldridge’s deeply poetic art emerges:

No Bird Soars Too High

“My paintings come from a place where contradictions are allowed, paradox reigns, and reason is abandoned. My search is for the inherent radiance in all things . . . the extraordinary in the ordinary.

“The process of painting parallels the movement of psyche, helping me to understand the world as a deeper reality. The rich-soul experiences of my life become tangible. Each painting is a small acknowledgment of the inner life that can, perhaps, reveal its own share of soul, and that share of soul may connect to someone else’s share of soul. Then, perhaps, beauty may be granted.”

In October and opening with Telluride Arts’ First Thursday Art Walk on October 3, Slate Gray presents “Mosaic” an exhibit featuring the photo-based work of Alexandra Eldridge most recently of Santa Fe.

In addition to her magical art in which the animal kingdom offers up colorful avatars to illustrate the human condition, Eldridge is well known for co-founding a colony in Athens, Ohio, named “Golgonooza,” a community based on Blake’s philosophies and the name of his mythical city of art and science.

Unconditional Love

Fox Divining

The child of artists, Alexandra Eldridge received her bachelor’s degree in art and literature from Ohio University.

In addition to more than 40 solo shows, Alexandra Eldridge has participated in numerous group shows in New York, California, New Mexico, and elsewhere in the United States.

She also has shown in many international exhibitions as well, in such cities as Paris, London, Belgrade, and Ljubljana.

Eldridge has also painted commissioned murals in the Place de Vosges, Paris, and her work has been used for the covers of 10 poetry collections.

In addition to channeling both Blake and Jung through her art, travel also stimulates the artist’s creative juices: Eldridge has led to artist residencies on the Island of Elba, Italy, and at the Valparaiso Foundation in Spain.

Alexandra Eldridge’s work has been featured in Art News, Art Ltd., Art on Paper, New American Painting, and American Art Collector. Her images grace the walls of many prestigious collections, as well as in the private collections of actors William Hurt, Steve Buscemi, and Edie Falco.

Alexandra Eldridge is represented by Nuart Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Diehl Gallery, Jackson, Wyoming; Friesen Gallery, Ketchum, Idaho; and Slate Gray Gallery, Telluride.

Jenn Dewey, Amulet Arts:

Also in October, local jewelry designer and goldsmith Jenn Dewey will share a selection of her ethnic jewelry and textile collections from a recent trip throughout Southern Morocco.

A student of ethnic arts, symbolism, and the intersections of cultural influences, Dewey’s Moroccan collection will include antique and vintage Amazigh (Berber) jewelry, tribal and urban adornments and protective amulets, old handcrafted judaica in silver, new designs by Moroccan artisans and traditional Tuareg silversmiths, functional vintage weavings, unique decor items, and more.

In her own work, Jenn Dewey uses only fairmined certified and recycled noble metals, ethically sourced gems.

She is the owner of Amulet Arts Studio/Gallery in Ridgway, CO.