 over to Valerie. Valerie Elbacher is our first speaker of this evening and for over 16 years she has served as the director of the Visiting Artist Program at the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder. This position allowed her to work with artists, curators, and scholars from around the globe. It also introduced her to the founding members and participants of the art knots. She has been a member of the group for 10 years and has had the opportunity to travel to Korea, Sarajevo, and Mexico to participate in shows. Her formal training is in printmaking. Most recently she works with fiber and textiles. So with that, Valerie, would you please turn on your camera and Mike and you can take it away. Okay, hello everybody. This is a new experience for us all, isn't it? And I want to thank everybody at CVA for putting on such a fabulous show. I know that I really enjoyed being able to go into the gallery and be able to view live art. So thank you. Thank you so much for all your hard work. The show looks great. The piece that I have up in the show as is seen here is titled Reducing the Odds of C12H22011 aka Malaria. When I have just been living abroad for the past three years, I know I mentioned in my bio that I was in the visiting artist director for 16 years, but I got to a point in my career where I really felt that there was a lot more to life. And in particular, Trina, who's also going to be speaking tonight, she and I did a trip to Sarajevo for one of the exhibitions, the Art Noc exhibitions and being able to be in a place where the art is being exhibited is quite strong and that solidified my desire to travel and to live abroad. And so after working at CU for 16 years, I left my position and kind of joined the circus of the Peace Corps and went over to serve in Thailand for 27 months. Living in Thailand was a very different experience mostly because you're dealing with a culture that puts value on community and versus the individual. And so when this call for walls came out, I really wasn't thinking of, I mean, I had let all my walls down. And so therefore I was thinking of walls that protect versus walls that divide. And so this piece that you're looking at, the blue netting, is mosquito netting. And most people have some version of this that they sleep under every night in order to protect themselves from the mosquitoes that are infected with malaria because they're typically biting between 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock in the morning. And so in order to protect yourself and your family, you need to be sleeping under netting. And not that I was always sleeping under this, but whenever I was in my room, this would be, I would have to be under this netting structure in order to protect myself from being built. So this is literally recreating the space that I slept in and the room because it was part of my room. One of the things that I did each night while living in this environment was an art project where I was collecting, I was struck by how hard people work. And I was struck by how hard people work in really hard, in a hard environment. It is incredibly hot. It's almost 100 degrees every day with 90% humidity. And yet people are out in the fields, they're planting rice, they're cutting down sugarcane, they're carrying things on their back. And so what's inside this tent are bags that I collected, and then I embroidered them. So every night I was sitting here oftentimes on the floor because I did not have furniture until maybe six months into my residency. So I would just be sitting here in the middle of this net embroidering. So if we go on to the next slide, I would collect these plastic bags that represented things that were being grown. All these bags had to be carried by somebody to get from point A to point B. These were soybeans and so I collected bags that I found to have an interesting graphic component and embroidered that. For a detail we can go to the next slide. Oops, I guess it wasn't a dehylp. And then this is a sugar company. So a lots of sugar is made. They have more sugar there than I've ever been exposed to delicious sugars. This was a brown sugar bag that would be delivered for sale at different shops. And then the next slide. And then this was another bag that I embellished and then we can go on. This was my actual living space and so you can kind of see here. I did finally get a little table. I did end up getting a chair and then all of my yarns are on the floor. So the blue space was where I would actually sit and read and and do my artwork. The pink space was where I would sleep. So you can go on to the next slide. I think this piece is also in the show and it's sugar. So the main crops, the main things that are being produced and carried on people's backs are rice, ice, fertilizer, sugar, feed for animals. I mean everything has to be carried and people are doing this all manually. So I was just really intrigued by what the work, the work that people had to do and wanted to pay homage to them. So part of the reason that I was over in Thailand was working with the Peace Corps was because I was working with children and I felt that it was really important to introduce them to the arts. And so I also, in addition to doing my own art, I would, I think we can go on to the next slide. Oh, here's a detail of the embroidery. We go on to the next slide. Then one became 20. And so typically what I would do in the process here is I would take up a picture of who it was that I was collecting the bag from so that I could document my travels and I could also document the worker. And I think if we show this next slide I might be able to show up, no, here's some more, just in my living space. There's, I had a lot of windows but there is no, there were no screens on any of these windows. So we go on to the next slide. I keep wondering, I had a hard time putting this in. So this was, if we can go back. So this was a man who was delivering ice. And so as I was starting to say, my process would be that I would collect a bag and document the purse, the worker, and then be able to kind of show them in their, in their environment and also pay honor to the work that they were doing. Okay, so next slide. And then I worked on a project where I was working with Buddhist monks. And in this particular piece, I was incorporating art and the fact that each day of the week has a different, has a different pose of the Buddha. And so I would have them draw the pose of the Buddha because they were very familiar with, with the Buddha. And then in to practice their English, they would then be telling me more about the Buddha stance or the mudra that the Buddha was in and why that was important to them. Next slide please. And then I was working with grade school children. And again, I really was trying to get them to tell me about their homes and their families. And so I would have them draw pictures. And then they would be able to tell about what was in the picture. And they could start to practice, practice their English. And, and there are very shy people. So it was always difficult to get them to draw, to draw themselves out and to be able to, to practice and to speak to foreigners and, and just to, to speak in a second language. Next slide. So these were all of my students. Next slide. Again, talking about their family and their home. Next slide. And these were, I was working with kindergarten to eighth grade, eighth grade, and then again, novice monks and working in a university. So the way in which I really feel that service is a big part of, of what it is that I'm trying to do. A lot of my artwork revolves around working with, with found imagery as, and found objects as I try to incorporate them into the challenge of, of the art, maybe an art knots project. And this was a way in which a way in which I could respond to walls, being, protecting these children and protecting families as I was breaking down the walls of, and being, being a member of their community. And so it was a really rewarding experience. And I learned a lot and had a wonderful time being able to share my gifts with, with these people. Next slide. I'm not sure if we have any more. I think that's it. Yeah, that's, that is the end of, of my, my little presentation of reducing the odds of, I've got to read it because I could never remember it. C12H22011 aka Malaria. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you for that Valerie. That was so fascinating to hear about your experience in Thailand with Peace Corps. I love, love to hear more about that. But we do have a question from a guest from Heather. She says, I love these. They're so beautiful. Can you speak to the colors you have for the mosquito nets, the walls working and sleeping? Well, Thai, Thai, the Thai people love color. And so they, they have all sorts of very vivid sleeping nets and, and everything that they wear is very, very, very colorful. I just happened to try to find the largest structure that I could because otherwise I was just feeling, you know, very small in my living, in my living space. But the color, the color just represents their love of color. And then Kristen asks if you dyed the tent blue or you found that? Oh, I found it. I wish I, I wish I dyed it. I did end up teaching myself the process of dyeing indigo. And I became fascinated with Shibori and indigo. And that was also one of the things that my, my village just couldn't understand why I would be immersing myself in blue dye and having blue hands and fingernails because that was really considered to be a peasant's job and not necessarily somebody who was educated and a teacher. There, there was a lot of, of, of uncertainty or, or, or yes uncertainty, like why would this, why is this foreign woman taking on the crafts of, of our, of our hill tribe? And, but it was a fascinating process. I did not dye my net though. So Valerie, I'm really interested in something you said about the cultural difference of the value they place on the community versus the individual. So as an artist, you know, we all know that's a very individual practice for the most part. Even being part of a collective, the actual art making is very individual. Did you feel that that experience working in Thailand for two years impacted your way of making art at all? Well, I mean, because I was still working on my own and I was kind of an island unto myself, I, I was still, I was still doing my own work. Although what I did find that I would do is I would include my students in the process. So I would hand things over to them and allow them to take on the finish or, you know, just take on the experience. And so I do really feel like it has changed my need to be in control and to really, I really feel like I'm much more open to collaboration and really want to take that on. Oh, that's really cool. What a great thing to take away from that experience. Yeah. We have another question from Adrienne. What would you say to artists about travel and how do people get started traveling if we haven't? Oh, well, you just get a passport. Well, no, you don't know. No, it's such a hard, that's a hard response. But you just have to, you just have to let go of fear and allow your heart to open up and to be open to new experiences. And as an artist, you just can see the beauty of life in, in everything. And I think that, you know, there's lots of residency programs out there that if you're looking for a way in which to be, be grounded in, in your travel, that might be an idea to look into residencies, apply for residencies so that you've got a mission or to really, and what I did was I really embraced all of the arts and crafts that were surrounding me in the, in the minority tribes and just watched them and, you know, sat at their, at their feet and gave, gave honor to their traditions and, you know, I just was a sponge. And so find something you like and just give it a try. And one of the beauties of being an Art Knots member is that you do get to travel to really interesting places that open your eyes to experiences that you never thought you would be stepping into. Hearing stories, talking to people and, and then you're part of the community. Yeah, that's a really great point. At our last artist talk last week, Martha had the opportunity to really talk about the Art Knots, how it got started and, and all the traveling that you do as a group. And it's so fascinating the way the, the group, the collective really focuses on showing art in places that hasn't seen, where they haven't seen contemporary American artwork. And so she talked about the DMZ and the remote village on the border of China and Russia and just some really incredible, Sarajevo, really incredible places. Yeah, you really get to share, share other people's experiences and you realize people just love that you're paying attention to them and that you're, you're sharing stories and, and that you're one, you know, that we're not separate, that walls are a construct of our, of our mind and our government. So it's people to people interaction that opens, opens you up so much. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining us this evening and thank you for being part of the exhibition. Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate all the time and energy. It's a wonderful. Okay, thanks Valerie. Turn off my camera. Thank you. I'm looking forward to hearing everybody else. So one thing that I forgot to mention in my opening remarks is that we have two more evenings of these artist talks and I'm going to post that in the chat in just a moment. A link to our website where you will see the dates and times for the upcoming talks is along with the list of the artists who are speaking. And I also wanted to take a second to acknowledge the staff at CBA. I usually do this in our live events, the opening or artist talks in the gallery, but we don't have that opportunity this time around. So I just wanted to give a shout out to all the staff at CBA who worked really hard to get this exhibition up and who've been doing a lot of behind the scenes work to make these artist talks happen. This is an experiment for us. So big thanks to Adrienne Christie who's a member of the art department at MSU Denver and to Jenna Miles who's helped make this artist talk possible. To Kristin Smith and all the students who managed the install and Katie Taft who's doing the education programs. They are just a wonderful crew to work with and I'm really honored to have them with me at CBA. So with that I will introduce our next speaker. I don't know if Gail is can hear me but Gail if you can hear me if you could turn off your camera because right now your camera is front and center on everyone's screen. I'm sorry to call you out but it's really it's hard for anyone to know because our faces are down at the bottom and you can't tell that you are highlighted. Our next speaker this evening is Trina Buemiller. Trina is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of gosh okay let me start over. Trina is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and spent a year with RISD in Rome, Italy. After graduating she lived in York City and worked for Betsy Parson and Jack Tilton Galleries and pursuing her own studio work. Since moving to Colorado she's exhibited her work nationwide in galleries and museums and I will add worldwide as well and she has been reviewed in Art in America Art News and the new art examiner. Her work has been commissioned by the Four Seasons, the Peninsula Hotel, Hong Kong, Jacobs Engineering and she's also in the corporate collections of Chase Manhattan, HBSC and CenturyLink. Public collections include the City of Denver, the State of Colorado, the University of Iowa and the Japanese Consulate. Trina currently lives and works in Denver and Frazier, Colorado. So with that I will let Trina take over. Thanks Trina. Hi everyone thank you so much for being here. This is a new experience for me as well and I'm very grateful to CVA, to Cecily, to Jenna, to Adrienne for hosting this tonight and for hosting our exhibition. I almost cried when I saw it. It was so beautiful walking in for the first time. It's beautifully displayed and I hope that everyone is local, that can, will go down and see it because I think it's important to see the art in person. I'm going to talk a little bit about where, how I got to my work so you won't see the actual work until the end. I'm just going to talk about where it came from. I think that's something sometimes people want to know about work and my journey with this piece about walls actually started here at the CVA. This is that pink project on the right was for an exhibition with another collective called Pink Progression and it was a piece related to the women's movement but also to the environmental movement and in it I depicted all 129 national monuments that at the time and currently are still being threatened by the current administration. One of those national monuments was Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument which you can see in the center of the detail panel on the left and then I actually made another painting of it as well so that square yellow painting is also a painting at Organ Pipe Cactus from the National Monument and the reason I am focusing on this one is that it happens to be right on the border of Mexico and the United States and it is an area that is being very hotly watched and contested and where there actually is a piece of the border wall being built. There's several reasons for this one is that it is actually federal land so it's easier for them to seize it and build the wall. If you go to the next slide I can talk some more about the area down there and so in Arizona the landscape is very barren and dry it looks like this along the border it's very much desert and but there's also these beautiful features of the landscape on the left you see a saguaro cactus which is often get to be quite large and live hundreds of years and on the right you see the Organ Pipe Cactus. This happens to be a fairly young one not as big as the one that I depicted in my painting but these cactus only grow in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument so they're very special so the idea of building a border wall there and destroying these cactus in the process is very devastating. There's other factors that come into play the the wall would cut across my animal migration patterns it would also threaten the saguaro cactus and other endangered animal species and perhaps most important of all there's a Native American tribe that lives there their artifacts and their ceremonies and their burial grounds are in this national monument and a lot of that would be destroyed in the building of this wall and again all of this is still in light of the the very human toll that building a wall would take to cut across the land to prevent people from traveling from migrating to separate families and then the countless deaths there's been 7,000 deaths in the Arizona desert since this wall had this barrier has been built. If you go to the next slide I can well actually I want to keep talking about this one for a minute and then the other thing that's interesting about the idea that it's in Arizona is that my mother happens to live there and the first thing I thought of actually when I heard about this exhibition about walls was her own sickness she has dementia and dementia in itself as many of you probably know is a sort of wall that keeps you from knowing someone when they lose their memories you lose their experiences their ability to communicate anything about the past or the future and and so it there are her own wall has been put up and it separates her from her loved ones and her friends so when I go to Arizona and I go quite frequently she lives there in a memory care unit along near my sister Karen and if you're watching Karen hi and one of the things I do with her is I put her in the car and I drive her to places out in the desert first of all it's beautiful it's a chance for her to get out and it's a chance for me to see these places and also to do my research but most of all it's a chance for us to connect because we only need to talk about what's in front of us not the past or the future but the present and what's what's here in the here and now and my work often has dealt with the landscape and memory and this idea and and primarily because of her in the last 10 years or so so you can go on to the next slide on one of my recent trips there I did get very close to the Mexican border and you start to see signs like this as you're driving down and then actually in the park itself you'll see a sign like this which is kind of unfriendly and sinister when you think about the fact that you're in a national park and you should be enjoying the wildlife and the natural features there's other even more sinister signs that say please do not feed or give water to anyone that you encounter so this is this is what made me realize that this this area and this subject might be something that would be worth researching and making making artwork about for this show you can go to the next slide and so the wall actually and I would like to rename it Trump's wall is being built it is currently being constructed there were a number of prototypes presented of course they chose the most expensive one which happened to be consisting of these steel bollards that are 30 feet tall their set their square pillar is set at an angle and filled with concrete they are about 12 inches wide when you look at them head on and then there's about a six inch gap in between them you can find this information by going online it's hard to know exactly how much of the wall has been built so far I think it's maybe about 18 miles this is on a border that is 18 almost 1800 miles long so you can see they haven't gotten very far with it but what they've done so far has been devastating they're bulldozing a 60 foot wild swath across the desert they're going through these sacred areas they're cutting off these migration patterns and they're also draining a sacred pool of water or lake to use for the concrete and building the wall so there's a lot of horrible repercussions from this and again not to mention the human toll that it's taking and you can keep and not to mention also the expense I believe it was something like 21 million dollars 21 million dollars per mile of wall and 66 billion total for the whole wall and that's as of today if it keeps going of course the cost would increase um so keep going next slide um so I wanted to do something that expressed the enormity of this so I want to make something big and also express something of the physical feeling of being at the wall or near the wall and so I devised a painting that was made up of wood panels the dimensions of which would echo those of the wall they're 12 inch wide panels with smaller six inch wide ones in between but I have reversed it I've made positive negative negative positive and rather than completely obliterating the the dark areas as if it was steel I decided to make it a night a night vision of this landscape of this desert landscape mostly because I just wanted to give a sense of this idea of the crossing the border you would do it at night it would be somehow mysterious and dark but also something um sort of pleasant as well thinking that you might be crossing over um it's also of course very dangerous which is denoted by the cactus itself and then these bars that are like a prison um so these are quite this is the this is a sketch the one of the original sketches and then the watercolor that I use to make my work and I often do this to plan out my work I have lots of ideas coming in but I need to know how the work is going to to develop especially when you're working large and you don't want to waste materials these so these are on 80 inch tall panels that are 12 inches wide and then the smaller ones are 80 inches high by six inches wide and you can go on to the next side and I can show you a little bit about how I make them so this is the panels lined up in my studio which I happen to actually the wall behind me is the wall that you see there and um I just prop them up I just sewed them I prepared them I cut them to size and then I just put them up and started sketching my cactus and laying out the composition and I wanted it to be a big beautiful landscape of this of this desert um I kept going back to the beauty of this landscape and how tragic it is that it's being destroyed in in the name of this horrible idea I'm good to the next one and my first layers of paint are very thin I end up incorporating about 40 layers of paint in a painting over the progress of the painting so it takes about 40 days for each layer to dry in between this is the first layer you can see the underpainting is a very different color than what it was what it's meant to end up as and that's on purpose every layer that I paint shows through in some way at the end and the build up creates this feeling that there is a timelessness quality timelessness to it and a quality of of depth and resonance that I don't think I would get if I just painted in one sitting I can go to the next slide and then here I am blocking in color starting to outline the shapes the colors continue to develop they get lighter and darker in various areas and they start to I start to add details and look at the overall composition and always comparing it to the sketch that I started with go to the next one and then the colors change ever so slightly I told you in the beginning how they started out warm and now they're they're turning more cool I watched the painting a lot at this stage and I make sure that it's something that it's developing the way I want it to in this case I notice that the sky becoming very gray and dreary with it was sort of ominous and gave it a quality that I liked but I wasn't sure I wanted to keep it there so I kept going to make it more like the sketch and if you show the next slide oh okay there's one more after this I forgot what order they are in this gives you a sense of like how much planning goes into my these are just a couple of the pages of several many pages of notes on the left is my daily painting schedule what colors I put down what I what I want to do next I actually in on the right side you can actually see there's another series on the same page I was sort of busy doing two different series at the same time that one was called in memoriam but it's a little it's a little nutty I probably never go back and look at those but I for some reason I like the idea of recording it and documenting it and on the right is my diagram for how I was going to put these together the dimensions how they were going to be hung on the wall I wasn't entirely successful with that but luckily cva came through at the end and helped out but but again you know who knew I needed this much math to make art but you do and if you go to the next slide you can see some of the details so then the on the right or how the paintings look from the side some of the colors that you can see on the in the middle where the the the depth of the color the orange is coming through this is why it's nice to see work in person because you can see things like this that you wouldn't see in a regular side you can also see how the panels fit together it's not perfect there is a little bit of a of a jarring quality or an interruption and on the left you can see how I was painting them in my studio I would usually paint upright but then sometimes lay them down on my tables to to either put a glaze on them or to separate them in some way and lay them flat because the the paint that I use is very thin and almost like watercolor you can go to the next one and then here it is at cva and again I just love the way all of the work all of the art knots work fits together how in the installation the curation of the show pieces are playing off of each other and resonating with each with each other I think each one of us you know approach this in a very unique way and yet they all somehow work together through this theme of walls and you can also get a sense of the scale here and then go to the next one which will be my final slide and this is how it how it ended up in the end and you can see it it actually turned out a little bit bluer than the original sketch and as it was going in their progress photos but I really liked this blue quality this sort of hopeful feeling this sort of soft yet stark element that it had and the dark panels didn't get as dark as I expected them to but I wanted I liked the way that you could see what was happening and to give them a feeling of hope and sort of a magical landscape that is interrupted which is which is unfortunate but I think overall I wanted to express this idea of hope and the beauty of the landscape and the resonance of you know the idea of of going to somewhere better and hopefully we're headed in some our country is headed in a better place and to make that connection between the personal and the political and the universal and perhaps also the political so that's that's the end of my talk does anyone have any questions thank you Trina that was fantastic it's so cool to see the process and the different steps that you go through and I have to say that the layering of the paint really gives it this shimmering quality when you see it in person that I associate with like a heat shimmer and that you would see in the desert so it's so cool that you can pull that off yeah that's absolutely true and you do see that heat shimmer in the desert and I have to say on my many trips to Arizona with my mother and being down there I'm always struck by that stark bright clarity of the landscape there and definitely wanted to evoke some of that and to give it that life that I feel like it it has it looks like a desert a dry wasteland when you first look at it but it's it's anything but it's much more than that yeah it really comes through with your painting so that was very interesting to see the process so we do have a few questions um Kristen asks if you had considered using a different material for your substrate considering the metal of the border wall uh no not really I mean I I I considered it but I didn't want to make it a copy or a mere illustration of the wall I didn't try to duplicate what a wall looks like in the landscape obviously um but I did want to get a sense of the scale and this interruption of the landscape or the barrier effect of the of the of the wall in the landscape um my usual substrate is wood so it was a material I was familiar with I also was trying to consider the practical um implications of using a material and as it was the wood was fairly heavy I think you guys would have murdered me if it was metal and you had to hang that um so no no not for this painting but I did want to keep the dimensions similar um so Adrienne asks did you envision this piece as viewer facing north or south I think it's universal I think you can you can I mean I didn't really again want to make an illustration this is not a real place and a real you know a real wall um but I think the idea of looking north and you are a family perhaps that that is you know doesn't have enough to eat or needs to do something to make your lives better that it would be you know something that you would look forward to as hopeful um it's it's a tragic situation no matter how you look at it so I'm trying to to perhaps paint it in a better light but also draw attention to it and I think I know Valerie talked a lot about the art knots and what we stand for but we are talking we are we are using art for social change we don't we don't um we're not standing on soap boxes and shouting but we do paint we use art art as our voice for expressing these ideas and in a time that's so uncertain and turmoil written that you can actually do something and paint something feels somewhat cathartic um it's somewhat helpful and hopeful thank you for that um we have another comment from Heather she says thanks for talking so much about your process I am outraged and delighted that's exactly I hope you feel yes I would definitely uh echo that same feeling the work is delightful this sentiment behind it or the the issue behind it is outrageous and really devastating but I love that you talk about the way you um reverse the positive and negative and you didn't just paint it as black as an obstacle but actually left it as um an emblem as for hope and that was really beautiful I love that love that idea um and one observation I had was that um the way you the the striations of the painting and the different panels not only implies the form of the the border fence but also the cactus in a way itself yeah when you show that original cactus I was like oh wow that you know really has that same kind of form to it it's yeah and I don't know I mean I didn't show any other work but if you go to my instagram or my website you'll see I often do break up things in vertical you know format um it's a it's a shape that I'm drawn to um the idea of a cactus being a barrier in it of itself is not lost to me as well I mean they're thorny things it can be dangerous but they can also be quite beautiful yeah absolutely well thank you so much for that Trina really great to have you with us tonight thank you so much this has been a wonderful show to be part of and I'm looking forward to hearing everyone else talk too fantastic okay so we will introduce the next speaker um Andrea Gordon Andrea was born and raised in Denver Colorado she studied economics at Colorado college with an unofficial minor in art history after college Andrea earned her law degree from the University of Denver College of Law while raising her three children she occasionally practiced law and also started her own mortgage closing business in 2010 Andrea began to pursue her lifelong passion for art by becoming a full-time artist she has since taken many classes at Denver's art students league where she continues to study art in a variety of mediums and genres Andrea is an emerging painter participating in jury shows in our market art markets in Denver and she has been um a member of the art not since 2015 so Andrea good to see you thank you I will let you take it from here thank you it's uh really um such a privilege for me to be a part of art not and to um be a part of this show at cba being part of art not says really been a great challenge for me a great learning experience um and I feel really fortunate to uh be a part of this collective I learned so much from every show we participate in and I've been lucky enough to um travel to one of the shows in Sarajevo which was really a life changing experience um it was unbelievable my piece for this show um I when I first uh thought about what to do for the show of course was before COVID and I really had in mind only the wall along the Mexico border and honestly um what I ended up making for this show was my plan B my plan my initial plan was to use light to create a three-dimensional um sort of light area that would have uh some sort of wall like uh component to it and I wanted to put it in a space in the gallery where um visitors would have to think about whether they should walk through the light or walk around the light and so the idea for that and the idea for the piece that I ultimately made are really the same which is all human beings have their own issues whether they're based on the way you were raised or they're based on fears that you developed over time or maybe they're just situational to specific moments in time but we all put up walls at some point and especially in this current political climate it seems like the walls that we tend to put up regardless of which side you fall on um they're becoming more and more impenetrable and they're becoming far more impenetrable than any physical wall that Trump is building and so I really wanted to speak to that to um this idea that we could and we all should really take a moment to consider the walls that um we have within ourselves and question them and think about how um they affect how we interact in life in really every situation because it's not the physical wall along the border that's really the the most significant issue it's um the attitudes um that people have that would make them want to build that wall um so I really wanted my piece to speak to that and I I didn't have um the technical know-how and wasn't able to figure out in time or make it work in the space at CDA to use the light idea so then I ended up deciding to paint a mannequin that is supposed to represent really people in general not any particular sex or kind of person um and I happened to use the figure of a woman because um within the time that I had to then create the piece I wasn't able to find sort of a an asexual kind of mannequin that would be more easily read as representing all people I actually hope that we're able to travel with this show and that I can make more pieces and incorporate other mannequins of different body types all different body types have a number of mannequins and paint them all in different kinds of patterns and each person would then have their own patterns that would really kind of be specific like we all have our own issues that um uh that are can be our walls that every mannequin would be painted differently um to represent that you know the whole variation of walls that we can all come up with and as it turns out the painting a mannequin like this is um much more similar to how I paint a lot of my abstract work anyway using these patterns that overlay each other and um and wind in and out of one another um so that's really what this piece is about just the walls that we all put up and um hoping that it might um make people think twice about your own wall and um how impenetrable those walls are that you might put up in any given situation thank you for talking us through that Andrea it's really interesting to hear how this came from your original plan a but now that you mention it I do I it totally makes sense to see how the projection onto the body is shown in this piece um so you have the brick wall and the street paint and the barbed wire all projected onto the body I think it's um it seems like a very natural progression from that original idea that you had that you weren't able to realize in the short time that you had to plan for this show but I hope you get to figure that one out because that sounds very interesting too um I also really was struck by what you said about um attitudes being more obstructive than actual walls that's really um a poignant statement and I'm wondering if you would talk about that a little bit more well it seems um just really especially in our current political climate that um it's the attitudes that are really um holding us back more than anything else um it's preventing us from really engaging in constructive conversations and finding constructive ways to deal with issues I mean it's natural that people have different attitudes about different subjects and don't necessarily agree but because of um these strong convictions the people seem they keep getting stronger it seems like that we're not able to um find ways then to work through issues together the way that I mean we have to we have no choice really and you know I did come up with this idea thinking about the wall but then when COVID came along um you know that's a whole another and it became a political thing I mean I don't know how a pandemic can become so political really it shouldn't and so that's another example of um how these walls are um becoming barriers and then you know the ultimate and at least in the United States right now is the um Black Lives Matter um and uh having to face um you know the systemic racism in in the country and some people just can't seem to get there um and so the and so this piece became just relevant to everything that is happening currently for us yeah absolutely I mean I think there's even the division of the masks you know the way people respond to the mask yeah that's yeah it's really interesting I really appointed um comment that you made uh so we do have a couple questions that I'll read front one from Kristin she said having been on the installation team I was responsible for moving the mannequin around the space and there was never a great place to grab it to carry it um it was kind of bizarre moving the human form imposing our will upon it did you find yourself experiencing any moments where it was emotionally jarring painting these borders on a human form now I didn't really experience that um I really enjoyed painting this three-dimensional object it was a it was a fun challenge but um for me it never resonated that I was painting kind of on a human form for me it was more just a three-dimensional object um okay and Adrienne asks could you talk about the yellow and black aspect of the patterns I got that just from uh you know police barriers that um you might see some of them are red and black sometimes but most of the time you see them they're yellow and black and I was really thinking about the protests at that time and and uh representing that um that was really going on at the moment that I was painting that piece um and then another question that I had for you was just about the experience in Sarajevo you mentioned that it was life-changing so I anytime someone has a life-changing experience I love to hear about it um it was just one of those times that I think because I was there with art knots and so we had this entree into a group of artists there that really immediately we had a connection with and um I think because of that our conversation maybe was a bit more intimate and I got to spend quite a bit of time with one artist in particular who as it turned out when we got there I think only two weeks previously he had been attending the war crime the war crime trial of one of the people who was accused of killing his dad during the war and just be able to hear about those kinds of personal experiences and then see how he um has how he is as a human being after uh living through that experience I mean he's a young man much younger than I am and he doesn't seem to have an ounce of bitterness in him despite that and just learning about um the war that they all went through and seeing them come through that was such great open hearts and spirit was just amazing wow that sounds incredible it is amazing when people who live in war torn places how they how we can't even imagine how they carry on yeah and here we are heading into uh not war torn but just a lot more um divisiveness than we've experienced in a long time and still people have it so much more extreme and so much worse and carry on it's really inspiring yeah yeah it was inspiring to be there and to meet these people and to see how they've moved on and and keep moving forward yeah okay we have another question from Heather she says great interpretation you may be said but I wondered did you fashion the head while unisex did you find yourself focused on anyone in particular did you struggle to make it not represent anyone specifically um well I did choose um um I mean I was really looking for patterns that would represent different kinds of barriers but I did intentionally want to make it not seem particularly male or female or any one kind of person in particular which is kind of hard to do with with a form that's so clearly and strongly female but that's what I had to work with at the time and somebody else brought to my attention that in fact having that um sort of idealized form of a female is in a way a different kind of wall that our society puts up saying you know if you don't fit this ideal then you're kind of not in the cool kids club or whatever but uh when I was making the piece I really wanted it as much as possible to not represent any type of person I wanted it to feel more universal I would say in a way that it does I mean like you mentioned it has the stereotypical female form but um because of the way you took the pattern over the face it does lose that sort of um individual recognizable aspects yeah I guess I did try to paint the pattern in a way that would deemphasize any particular body type or you know aspect of the female figure well fantastic thank you so much for sharing about your work and your process and how you came to create this work we love having it in the space and thank you so much yeah yeah okay well we'll introduce our next artist Robin Hextram let's see Robin is a contemporary oil painter who lives in works in the Denver area she grew up in a small coastal town called Stinson Beach in North California where she developed a passion for the natural environment during her undergraduate studies at USC she completed a double major in fine art and neuroscience while also rowing on the varsity women's crew team following this diverse experience she studied at Laguna College of Art and Design where she received her MFA in painting she then completed a second master's degree in modern and contemporary art history at UC Riverside her paintings represent a fusion of her traditional art training with her knowledge of art history and art theory Robin is now an assistant professor of visual art at Regis University she has gallery representation at Abend Gallery in Colorado Robin has exhibited her paintings across the country and is the recipient of grants from the Elizabeth Green Shields Foundation and the Strobar Foundation so thank you very much for joining us tonight Robin and I will let you take it away yeah thank you so much Leslie I really appreciate your hosting and I really appreciate the CVA for organizing this I'd also like to say I really appreciate the talk so far by Valerie Trina and Andrea it's always so nice to just hear directly from the artist your thought process and and get a little bit more into that deeper layer of content and and process within your work I'd also like to make a shout out to my drawing students we have class right now so they are attending class this way so I thought this would be really good for them to see and to see examples of contemporary artists exploring really meaningful issues getting into my artwork the painting that I created is a four by five foot oil painting and it's titled open borders so with this painting I was really looking at the possibility of opening up barriers and boundaries whether those barriers are social political or physical and I really as a lot of the artists have already spoken about here equally concerned about the human rights violations that we've seen in response to the refugee crisis to asylum seekers at the border that's been a recent development within the new administration under Trump is that we're now turning away people seeking asylum and generally just having very harsh immigration restrictions and for me personally it just it really recalls the fact that in US history we turned away Jewish refugees during the Holocaust you know when we look back at that historical event it feels so horrifying and yet you know how are we repeating some of those really problematic historical decisions to not open our country and help others so when I was thinking about how to approach this rather than going down a more kind of dark or sobering direction I decided I wanted to create a more celebratory work about a positive alternative present and or future so within this painting you see lots of really vibrant birds and butterflies and I've included those because those symbolize migration so the birds and butterflies are crossing the borders while human bodies cannot and the butterflies have been a really consistent symbol of immigrant rights that you've seen on different posters and protest signs so I wanted to include tons of birds and butterflies in here to really have that symbolism and you know when I was deciding what kinds of birds to paint I decided to paint birds that span or live in either you know North America, Central or South America to comment on the US Mexico border and to have this really harmonious sense between all of these different birds coming from different areas in a single space and you'll also see in this painting these kind of floating spheres so I wanted to create these kind of masses of exploding you know vegetation plants and flowers to represent different nations or countries and to have these somewhat self-contained but still interconnected worlds so that's why I chose to have the vines connect between the different floating spheres and then the flowers in the work represent the possibility of beauty and growth within this new world view so we have in general just this really kind of lively lush and you know really vibrant representation of a new perspective that we could take on and that also goes for having a really bright clear blue sky in the background to have another kind of layer of optimism in the work and just the overall vibrancy of the colors for their support this kind of optimistic mood that I'm going for in the piece so one of the reasons that I decided to take more of a perspective of celebration of the possibility of eliminating borders as opposed to actually focusing on the borders themselves is I've always I thought it's really interesting what the author and climate activist Naomi Klein has mentioned where she says that no is not enough so she has a whole book that that's that title right but in her argument it's no is not enough we can't just constantly criticize and shoot down while that criticism is really important and really necessary we also have to think about winning over hearts and minds with beautiful possibilities that lie ahead of us if we take the right steps towards supporting each other so that was something I was really thinking about with this piece is how can we have this much more bright and optimistic future with the possibility of new immigration policies and more free exchange between nations so that's why I've titled the piece open borders to really give this sense of openness possibility and kind of free exchange and freedom of movement within the work so yeah so thank you so much for having me that concludes my portion of the talk and I'm happy to answer any questions anyone has about my painting thank you Robin it's such a beautiful piece and it was great to hear you speak about it I love I love the idea of open borders and with the way the piece is displayed in the gallery it's right next to Michael Dixon's work which depicts children behind cages so it's very striking to see the way the birds and butterflies can just really cross borders and such a beautiful sentiment and I also love that you brought up the the book no is not enough and that the idea that we can't just be critical because it's it's very easy to be critical these days but bringing some possibilities for solution and getting past what the problems are is really important and poignant also just the idea of interconnected worlds we think so much about at least from my perspective there's so much talk about the border between us and Mexico and we think about the fence and the the barriers for people to come in even legally and financially and the danger they face coming over but the way that our worlds really are interconnected and it's just an arbitrary line drawn up by a war and the land continues the people continue and so I really love that you are speaking about it as interconnected worlds we have a question that I will read to you let's see for some reason I cannot see the whole question there we go I can't this is from Kristen I can't help to draw a correlation to traditional Dutch still life paintings of flowers and domestic items the flowers within the bouquets would in nature never bloom or exist at the same time or in the same place which really speaks to the freedom of travel and celebration of far off places your luminescent renderings are stunning and remind me of those flowers were these Dutch still life a source of inspiration for you yeah thank you so much Kristen for that question and the answer is resoundingly yes absolutely so and you'll see that in a lot of my work you can probably see in the paintings that are just in the background of me while I'm talking to my studio here you know I I just have a love and fascination for that tradition of Dutch still life painting I find them so exquisite and I was really drawn to those and continued to be drawn to those for you know my whole body of work but also for this painting and you know I think I also have like mixed feelings about that tradition right because on one hand it's like so exquisite and beautiful but on the other hand there's messaging within some of those Dutch still lives that it really promotes colonization and destruction of other countries so there's a lot of kind of mixture of light and dark in there so in a way this is kind of you know I think one could interpret it as like reclaiming that iconography in a way of like celebrating and supporting nations as opposed to just this sense of like one nation like dominating over another but yeah thank you so much for that question and and your eye was spot on it's absolutely yes okay so we have two more questions oh actually they're pouring in now okay Heather says wow that's amazing so many complexities if you want can you talk a little bit about your process how you lay your paint down yeah absolutely so it really depends on the kind of painting that I'm making so some of the kinds of paintings I've been doing recently I've been incorporating more abstraction and in that case I'm starting with an abstract background and building representational elements and kind of working back and forth for this painting typically what I'm doing is starting with really simply like blocking in an under painting and really simple colors and values and then gradually adding more layers and resolving that if you're familiar with the term direct versus indirect painting you know I'm doing direct more like all of Prima in the first phases where it's you know working with paint into paint and then the very last layer that's when I'll add transparent glazes to just get a little bit more luminosity but it definitely makes these pieces quite time intensive because each little flower or bird I'm having to paint is going to take three or four layers of paint to really get that finish so I was actually working on this painting on and off basically for this last year and I'll work on multiple paintings at the same time but I'm basically building up from simple to complex and I'm also organizing the composition somewhat intuitively so I you know don't really have very detailed sketches I tend to work more within like a response to what's happening with the painting and I kind of add elements as I start to see them being necessary. That's great to hear it's so interesting the different processes that you incorporate into your work so Kristen has an add-on to her question about the Dutch still life and she says also the desires of the women who painted the domestic scenes to leave the home so that's a really interesting comment just about flight and freedom of movement. Yeah absolutely and it's it's been interesting because I think I know it's like being a female artist I was at first like a little nervous to like paint so much floral imagery and I actually had one of my grad school professors told me that I would never get a teaching job if I submitted a portfolio of images that contained flowers because male faculty would see it and just shut it down. So it's been kind of I don't know it's been kind of fun that's something I kind of like with my painting is like taking something that I don't know some people could see as cliche or stereotypical and trying to kind of reclaim it and give it my own voice and and just you know go with it and really really run with it and and stop letting those kind of voices in my head dictate this is okay this is not okay this will work this this won't work so I definitely appreciate that comment. Well it's funny I think we all have a story of some advice that we've gotten from teachers or professors that you know have been stuck with us for the good and the bad so that's funny I wonder did you submit images of floral paintings to Regis when you applied? I did and I got the job so it was really fascinating. I love it. Just how I feel like okay you know sometimes people who display themselves as experts aren't always the expert in that field right? That's right that's right well and yeah that's just that's fantastic so I love that you are able to reclaim that. Okay we have another comment possibly question from Valerie I appreciate your use of flight and transformation by using butterflies birds and flowers it really does give a sense of hope. Yeah thanks Valerie. I agree with that comment so yeah that's fantastic I hope everyone gets a chance to come down and see it and to the Regis drawing students come see us come see the show we are open and we'd love to meet you and hear your thoughts on the show. So Robin have you made it down to CVA yet? I have yeah and it's an exquisite exhibition I was really really impressed with it. It was so interesting having this you know call for the show and you know you kind of working on your own stuff for a while and I was just so curious what the other artists were going to do and I was just so impressed by the diversity of approaches that people took to the same issue and the diversity of perspectives that people represented and yeah I found it really moving really powerful exhibition to see you know regardless of the self promotion aspect of it I think it's really worthwhile to check out especially in the times that we're in. Absolutely I agree well thank you so much Robin and thanks to the other speakers we had tonight Valerie Andrea and Trina it was so fantastic to see all of your faces and care about your work I hope everyone gets a chance to come down and see us we do have two more evenings of artist talks which I posted a link in the the conversation in the chat but if you can't find it in the chat you can just go to CVA's website and click on events and you'll find a link there we also send out information in our newsletters you can sign up to get on our mailing list and get information there and tomorrow night we have a really fun event that will also be online it's called socially distant culture club and it's an art making happy hour from the comfort of your own home but it's really fun not intimidating at all lots of people have said oh I didn't know if I should go but it's it's very low-key and fun and we'll be looking at the exhibition called revealing which is in our 965 project gallery it's a student curated space and so we'll be looking at that exhibition and getting inspiration and making artwork from that so you can find out more information about that on our website as well thank you so much everyone for being here this evening and I hope you make it down and see us at CVA