Telluride Arts, 6/17 Art Walk: Venue Changes, Valley Floor+

30 May Telluride Arts, 6/17 Art Walk: Venue Changes, Valley Floor+

Telluride Arts promotes a culture of the arts within the Telluride Arts District, which contains a remarkable concentration of activities that engage artists from around the region and across the globe. Telluride Arts’ First Thursday Art Walk is a festive celebration of the art scene in downtown Telluride for art lovers, community, and friends. Participating venues host receptions from 5 –8 p.m. to introduce new exhibits.

The first Art Walk of the summer season will see some changes, including new and expanded venues at the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art and MiXX Projects & Atelier, plus the fact that Telluride Music Company has joined the line-up. Telluride Music Company plans to feature a special guitar for each Art Walk, in addition to hosting a performance. For the June Walk three performances by local Alex Paul are planned.

A free gallery guide offers a self-guided tour that can be used any time to find galleries open most days. Guides are available at participating spaces and at the Telluride Arts offices at 135 West Pacific, across the street from the Telluride Library. 

Listen to Open Art Radio on KOTO from 12-1 p.m. on First Thursdays to hear interviews with artists.

For further information, you can also call 970-728-3930.

Please scroll down for highlights of June shows.

A quote from iconic Pop artist Jasper Johns works as a through-line for some of the shows featured during Telluride Arts’ June Art Walk:

“Take an object, do something to it, do something else to it. What you do, alters what you want to do. In seeing one thing, we probably see many.”

Think about what happens when we say the words of a mantra or prayer over and over again. Rituals – and images – of any kind gather power through repetition.

Lucky for us, for those deeply concerned about climate change, Justin Brice Guariglia likes to repeat himself.

Untitled Study. Acrylic on wood panel. ©Justin Brice Guariglia, Courtesy of the Artist. Image from Justin’s new body of work.

Justin, a multi-disciplinary, contemporary Brooklyn-based artist and polymath, regularly collaborates with philosophers and scientists – since 2015, he has been working on projects with NASA, getting a bird’s eye view from NASA planes – to understand, then reflect back to his audience, the complexities of our rapidly changing, highly challenged Blue Marble.

Justin’s images – in Telluride, variations on the theme of melting glaciers – straddle the crossroads of painting, printmaking, photography, and sculpture to explore mankind’s relationship to ecology in the Anthropocene era. His monochrome paintings derived from aerial photography –  printer as paintbrush – is the artist’s attempt to weaponize art against human ignorance and indifference. His inspiring, albeit chilling body of work has roots in hard news. But it really works because his paintings seduce the viewer into witnessing loss firsthand through art that is haunting.

Truth is, Justin’s images could be considered fossils of a dying age because they could easily outlive the glaciers they depict.

Justin’s eerily serene, contemplative work went on display over Mountainfilm in a show entitled “Phenomena ad Noumena.” And the paintings remain on display at the newly renovated Telluride Gallery of Fine Art, now a big, bright expansive space that seems to perfectly match the personalities of its new owners, Ashley Hayward and Michel Goldeberg. 

“I would like to express tremendous gratitude to the team at Telluride Gallery who worked tirelessly to complete the ambitious remodel project and show in time for Mountainfilm. To our delight we exceeded all expectations by highlighting the very best parts of the gallery. In alignment with Mountainfilm’s ‘The New Normal,’ we changed all lighting to LED, cutting our energy costs by 80%,” explained Ashley. “We also added attractive on-site storage, which allowed us not only to add 55 additional linear feet to the gallery, but also significantly to reduce travel time to off-site, out-of-town storage locations, further cutting fossil fuel emissions. But we are not done yet. We will continue to explore ways we can further contribute to our community’s carbon-neutral goals.”

Ashley continues,“Along with the newly designed space, we have also focused on ways to contribute positively to the Telluride region and Arts District by incorporating educational programming into the gallery’s vision: regular artist talks, panel discussions, mini-video documentaries, family tours, books to explore, and so much more. We so look forward to sharing these experiences with you and your family and friends.”

The newly renovated Telluride Gallery of Fine Art.

Justins’s work will be up through mid-June, including a special edition Mountainfilm poster, acrylic on Hahnemühle Paper, in an edition of 25. (The Gallery shares profits from sales with Mountainfilm.)

(Go here to listen to a podcast with Justin Brice Guariglia.)

Artist Meredith Nemirov likes to repeat herself too, with Aspen trees her insistent muse.

Meredith’s aspens, image, Nicko Ferguson.

Meredith has been painting aspen trees obsessively for about nine years, finding joy and solace when needed in their graceful, humorous, awkward, changeable forms. Only her once-anthropomorphized shapes have been reduced, – happily, brilliantly, we might add – to shape and color without reference to figure and ground. Meredith’s Aspens reinforce, rather than fight, the two-dimensional medium in which she works.

“When you paint something over and over again, repetitive forms begin to catch your eye as do certain colors. I think my abstractions dance, reflecting my interest in rhythm and pattern. My colors, however, still accurately reflect the natural world,” the artist explains.

Meredith Nemirov is a new addition to the wonderful stable at MiXX, her work on display at the newly renovated and expanded atelier in a group show entitled “Beyond the Lines” that includes Minas Halaj, Peggy Lee, and Aondrea Maynard.

“We are proud to present a variety of painting practices including Halaj’s alluring, mixed-media portraiture featuring vintage floral appliqué; Lee’s geo-organic abstractions; Maynard’s meditative landscapes; and Nemirov’s idiosyncratic Aspen studies. The June exhibition highlights the passion and vibrancy of each artist’s practice, at the same time it celebrates the medium’s ever-changing ability to reflect the many dimensions of nature that fire up the artistic imagination,” said gallery manager Hannah Knudsen.

Meredith also teaches regularly at the Ah Haa School for the Arts. Go here for summer class details.

Image, at MiXX.

And on the subject of repetition, it is time to crow all over again about how Telluride saved its big, beautiful “welcome mat,” the Valley Floor. The 10th anniversary celebration of Telluride’s acquisition of the property takes place Thursday – Saturday, June 1 – 3. 2017. For full details of the weekend activities, click on this link.

Valley Floor in Spring with Magpie, by Meredith Nemirov, teaching throughout the summer at Ah Haa. Now showing at MiXX.

Kicking off the activities, Ah Haa is hosting a show of work celebrating the Valley Floor submitted by the greater Telluride community. The evening also includes a performance by the Telluride Dance Collective.  (Seating is limited, so drop by Ah Haa to pick up your tickets.)

That same day, the Telluride Historical Museum opens its summer exhibit, which looks back to the past and forward to the future of the Valley Floor. 

For more on Art Walk, go here.

Art Walk, all participating venues, June:

Ah Haa School for the Arts

American Bookbinding Academy

Baked in Telluride

Elinoff & Co. Gallery

Gallery 81435

LDGiles at Happy Print Studio

Lustre Gallery

Medicine Ranch

MiXX projects + atelier

Picaya

Slate Gray Gallery

Studio G

Telluride Arts HQ Gallery

Telluride Gallery of Fine Art

Telluride Music Co.