Telluride Arts, March Scene: Brooke, Molly, & More, Art Walk, 3/5!

02 Mar Telluride Arts, March Scene: Brooke, Molly, & More, Art Walk, 3/5!

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 on the first Thursday of each month through April 2020. 

A complimentary gallery guide offering a self-guided tour is available at Visit Telluride on W. Colorado Avenue and at participating venues, which are open to the public most days.

Image, Molly Perrault of Telluride Arts.

Telluride Arts promotes a culture of the arts within the Telluride Arts District, which contains a remarkable concentration of arts and cultural activities that engages artists and art lovers from around the region – even across the globe.

Two of those uniquely talented artists work for Telluride Arts, supporting executive director Kate Jones, who helms the nonprofit that serves the region’s grassroots arts community, arts-based initiatives, and art lovers, and is superintending the renaissance of the historic Telluride Transfer Warehouse on the corner of Pacific and Fir.

One of those artists is Brooke Einbender, whose cutting-edge work suggests visual force fields, images grounded in the natural world that seem to capture, contain, and convey spiritual energy. Call it Op Art 2.0., on display at Telluride Arts’ Gallery 81435 through the month of March in a show titled “The Unknown Zone.”

Einbender is a San Francisco, California native. In 2017, she graduated from Wake Forest University as a Presidential Scholar for Visual Arts with a concentration in painting. The artist then moved to Telluride from New York City in September 2018 to pursue her work. 

Virtual Reality (VR) is the use of computer technology to create a simulated environment. Einbender was a 2019 Telluride Arts Small Artist Grant recipient; she used that money to purchase her own VR equipment.

Since then, the artist’s digital portfolio of immersive experiences has established her reputation as a “VJ,” or “Visual Jockey” who has collaborated with numerous festivals including the Telluride Fire Festival, Telluride’s Original Thinkers, The Hemp Expo in San Diego, and Ranetas Festival in Alcañiz, Spain. For those events and other collaborative partners Einbender creates one-of-a-kind virtual reality projections that completely transform a space allowing viewers to experience it anew. She is also collaborating with a scientist at UCLA to render his lab’s molecular research and discoveries into a Virtual Reality experiences.

Breathe Out, oil by Brooke Einbender.

The work of this multidisciplinary artist blends several disciplines including painting, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, installation, and video, to form an altogether “Unknown Zone” of Art. In fact, Einbender is a leading pioneer in the exploration of Virtual Reality, having established new frontiers at the intersection of art and technology in the context of its impact on human consciousness.

The artist approaches her Virtual Reality and oil paintings like a scientist approaches each new experiment. When starting a new piece, Einbender has no clear vision of the end result  With intuition as her only guide, she begins her creative process with disorderly random acts, embracing all her mistakes and the unknown. Her painting practice shifts between chaos and order, organic and geometric shapes, irregularity and symmetry. The goal is to constantly dissect, replicate, and layer parts of her oil paintings to create new “material” as a basis for future 3D digital works.

Breath In.

Fun in the Distance.

In the end, each of Brooke Einbender’s oils has a soulful doppelganger in a virtual plane of existence and therefore a new digital identity. Collectively Einbender’s body of work raises a major question: In today’s world, where does the real begin and the virtual end? Or can we no longer distinguish between the two?

(In alphabetical order), Molly Perrault is second of the two impactful artists whose day job is working for Telluride Arts.

Molly, caught in the act.

Perrault uses paper shards carefully cut from magazines for the color and textures in her masterpieces, obsessively, meticulously, seamlessly manipulating these jigsaw puzzle-like pieces to create the illusion of painting without paint. With a focus on rendering landscapes, the artist is driven to reflect and slowly reconstruct places that have been sources of inspiration, adventure, and comfort.

Perrault’s process is cyclical: nature is the source of  the paper on which the magazines are printed, then used again to represent nature, underlining acts of destruction and reconstruction.

Her detail-oriented approach to making art is a way to subvert the artificial colors and sleek page layouts found everywhere in mainstream print media. In the end, Molly Perrault’s eye-popping work transforms glossy contents into a much more subdued state that reflects the natural world.

Hey Man, How Are You,” Molly Perrault.

Molly Perrault is a graduate of Louisiana State University, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. After spending most of her upbringing in South Louisiana, she moved to Colorado in 2015 to experience the West. In Telluride she enjoys long road trips, stimulating hikes, and being part of the region’s robust cultural community.

The Raw Simplicity by Molly Perrault.

Perrault debuted her first solo exhibition, “Regeneration,” in June 2018 at the Telluride Arts HQ Gallery. She has also displayed her work at MiXX Projects + Atelier in Telluride. Most recently, she was awarded Best in Show at the Annual Ouray County Arts Association Fine Art Show in Ouray, CO in August 2019. In February 2019, Perrault was awarded 1st Place in Ah Haa School for the Arts’ Annual Juried Exhibition, “12×12.”

Throughout the month of March Telluride Arts HQ presents “Layers,” an exhibit featuring the art of Molly Perrault alongside that of Brandon Berkel. The exhibit explores two different approaches to the medium of collage.

Image, Molly Perrault.

For Brandon Berkel, the act of creating is simply a process of guiding his imagination from internal to external places.

After moving from St. Louis, Missouri to Telluride to work on his second novel, Berkel felt inspired to switch to a more visual medium. With a background in writing, he continues to tell stories – but now through his mixed-media collages. He invents and arranges surreal landscapes, merging elements of reality and fantasy. His current growing body of work is deeply inspired by the epic landscapes of the San Juan Mountains.

Art Walk, more:

During the month of March, starting with Art Walk, Telluride’s Ah Haa School for the Arts presents the Youth Art Exhibition & Awards. The Youth Art Awards honor regional middle and high school students for their creativity and interest in the arts. Students featured in the exhibition have demonstrated a sincere interest in visual arts and attend school in Telluride, Rico, Norwood, Nucla, Naturita, Paradox Valley, Ridgway or Ouray.

In March the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art presents four new artists in a group exhibition. LéAna Clifton of Marfa, TX presents hand-manipulated, long-exposure abstract photographs of freight trains running through the West Texas desert. Telluride’s own Nicole Finger presents a series of masterful photorealist oil paintings. Kelly O’Connor of San Antonio, TX, creates juxtapositions of appropriated film stills, advertising and magazine images with brightly hued whimsical collage elements. Additional artists from the gallery stable are also on display in this very colorful, eclectic group show. (Go here for more on that show.)

“Sauced,” Nicole Finger.

Slate Gray Gallery presents a group exhibition titled “Immerse.” The show features four regional emerging abstract painters: Niki Woehler and Andrew Brown, two Abstract Expressionistsm are part of Slate Gray’s regular stable. They are joined by artists new to Slate Graay: local painter and sculptor, Daniel Kanow, and Prescott-based oil painter, Phillip Timper. (Go here for more on that show.)

For a deep dive into the shows at other Art Walk venues, go here.

Venues Hosting Art Walk receptions:

Ah Haa School for the Arts
AVEDA Spa Telluride
Baked in Telluride
Elinoff & Co.
ETHOS
Gallery 81435
Gold Mountain Gallery
Kamruz Gallery
Lustre Gallery
MiXX projects + atelier
Rinkevich Gallery (Mountain Village)
Slate Gray Gallery
Telluride Arts HQ Gallery
Telluride Gallery of Fine Art
The Turquoise Door Gallery

Other March exhibitions:

Ghost Town
La Cocina de Luz
Studio G