Paintings

#9 Burnscape, by Erika Osborne

"This painting captures a moment of rebirth after the Cameron Peak wildfire."

Erika Osborne is an artist and Associate Professor at Colorado State University whose artwork deals with cultural connections to place and environment. Most recently she has turned her focus towards the healing and regrowth that is possible after wildfires in the western United States. Erika has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a recent Fulbright fellowship to Mexico. Her work has been highlighted in four books surveying land and environmental art as well as in national and international art journals and magazines. Erika has also been a contributing author for books and journals including Arts Programming for the Anthropocene: Art in Community and Environment.

#8 Paisaje y Flor, by Luis Santacruz

"The painting contains visuals of a familiar landscape as a representation of home and self. The landscape as well as the flower are ambiguous in its origins embodying my identity as an immigrant."

Luis Santacruz is a Mexican-American artist based in Colorado. Having recently graduated from Colorado State University with a Bachelors in fine arts his current work deals with his identity as an immigrant. Santacruz, being undocumented, includes photography and storytelling as part of the process as he overcomes challenges to connect with his Mexican identity. He hopes to expand people's awareness of what it means to be an undocumented immigrant in the United States.

#7 False Positives, by Marius Lehene

"From excavated ground arises aboutness. Local and temporary it finds it hard to know itself, always already based on something else."

Marius Lehene is a Romanian-born visual artist living in the United States. His recent exhibitions include shows in the US, Romania, and South Korea. Lehene’s practice is concerned with aspects of self-reference and identity, approached often-time from a perspective of circumspection. He splits his time between the US, Romania, and India, the three cultural environments that inform his work. Lehene holds an MFA degree in Painting and Drawing from Southern Methodist University, US, and a BA in Economics from Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania. He also studied at the University of Art and Design - Cluj, Romania. Currently, Lehene teaches in the Department of Art and Art History at Colorado State University.

#6 Night Hunt, by Ajean Lee Ryan

"As of late, the past year due to COVID perhaps, I have been able to see the night sky much more clearly than ever before. This piece is about one night in particular in which the bats were flying along with the sparrows- all on the hunt to feast on the miller moths in flight in the dark."

Ajean Lee Ryan creates drawings, sculptures and installations based on the themes of abstraction, female identity and the domestic landscape. She received her BA with honors in Fine Arts with a concentration in Painting from UCLA and then went to receive her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at UC Berkeley. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in museums, galleries as well as non-profit spaces. Ajean has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the Creative Capital Workshop Grant. She is an Associate Professor of Drawing at Colorado State University and currently lives in Loveland, Colorado.

#5 Coyote Stepping Gingerly into the Putrid Morning Light, by Johnny DeFeo

Can you imagine a coyote who woke up on the wrong side of the bed? Mornings can be hard... equal parts hope and dread most days. I think the feeling transcends species lines. Sometimes the sun, no matter how warm and radiant, displeases to no end.

Johnny DeFeo lives and works in Taos, New Mexico. He earned his MFA in painting from CU Boulder in 2017. During his graduate studies he exhibited in national juried MFA exhibitions in New York and Chicago, and organized exhibitions and collaborative curatorial projects with artists and curators in Boulder and Denver. In the last three years he has exhibited works nationally and internationally. DeFeo creates artworks, textiles, and tufted yarn wall hangings, all of which belong to the concept of souvenir, attempting to capture the experiences he has in the natural world, where he feels free and most at home. He is a co-founder of Adventure Painting, a traveling artist residency organized along with painters Aaron Zulpo and Andrea Heimer. The residency takes artists out of their studios and into the landscapes of America, where they work together to pin down what makes this world so darn magical. DeFeo’s aesthetic is wild and playful, utilizing a dose of humor to transmit his earnest goal of creating objects that illuminate the connections between beauty both quintessential and manufactured. His work consists primarily of landscape scenes, most of which include animals. Often, the perspective expressed in these scenes is that of the animal, shifting the subject away from a human vantage point and revealing the mysteries of the natural world. Imagining that the creatures inhabiting America’s wilderness could be storytellers through objects and images the way that humans can, these objects portray the natural world with a tender perspective, and with mystical and legendary qualities.

#4 Touched a Star, by Grace Kennison

“Touched a star” is reminiscent of both a diary page in the life of a young woman and the story of Icarus in Greek mythology. It’s meant to capture a sort of fleeting feeling of heartbreak and pay homage to the duality of emotions that come with falling out of love with someone that you admire.

Grace Kennison (b. 1995 USA) is an artist based in Fort Collins, Colorado. She earned an BFA from the drawing department at CSU in the summer of 2018. Kennison was born and raised in Fort Collins and share a deep connection to this land that influences her work heavily, she is interested in depicting the American west. Her painting practice is a ritual that reconstitutes her world. This ritual conjures female-centric visions and stories of trauma, resistance, and of women's complicated historical relationship to western land. Throughout her practice, she recognizes that, as a white woman, her identity itself is a rich object of critique. She has developed a visual language that draws from the romanticization of the American West while troubling its central ideologies of masculine power and white supremacy. In her paintings, she playfully explores settler colonialism's persistence in the attitudes, postures, and symbols of machismo in contemporary life.

#3 Time is a Viscous Material, by Johnny Plastini

“Time is a Viscous Material humorously translates psychological mechanisms of prediction and remembrance from the metaphysical realm to the physical space of paint on canvas"

Johnny Plastini. (b. 1986, USA) is a material-centric artist who advocates poetically for the multiplicity of agents participating with human-derived systems of logic, thus encouraging us to analyze our own architectures and discover new cultural ecologies. He received his BA in studio art with a painting emphasis from the University of California, Santa Cruz and received his MFA in printmaking from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. Plastini has completed residencies at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, and at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. He has exhibited extensively at museums, conferences, non-profit spaces, art fairs, and galleries, nationally and internationally. Recent exhibition venues include: Cheltenham Center for the Arts, Ulrich Museum of Art, Bradbury Art Museum, New Bedford Art Museum, SITE: Brooklyn, Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Manhattan Graphics Center, Lee Gallery at Clemson University, McMaster Museum of Art, and Southampton Art Center, among others. Plastini has been featured in numerous publications including CRED, West Branch (Bucknell University), Studio Visit, and New American Paintings. Plastini’s work is held in the permanent public collections of Zayed University, United Arab Emirates, and in the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University. His work is also held in the Special Collections Archive in the Norlin Library at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and in the Artist Printmaker Research Collection (AP/RC) at the Museum of Texas Tech University. Johnny Plastini is currently an Assistant Professor and Area Coordinator of Printmaking in the Department of Art and Art History at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.

#2 Solitude, by Jessica Langley

"Solitude is a meditation on the process of foraging, getting lost and wandering, in which the surface is activated through the use of meandering color and line."

Jessica Langley (b. 1981, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers how cultural symbols of nature and certain representations of landscape are experienced both directly and through the mediated and sublimated image. Using foraged materials, fresco, digital print, sculpture, and collage she is exploring abstraction as a form which dehumanizes place and investigating how the analogous dichotomy of abstraction/representation and the objective/subjective perspectives complicate this relationship. Langley is based in Colorado where she is the editor of the Pikes Peak Mycological Society newsletter and a full-time instructor of Visual Art at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. She has exhibited her work internationally in such cities as Belfast, Berlin, Mexico City, New York, Reykjavík, and Santa Cruz, as well as being featured in the Pittsburgh Biennial and the Queens International. She has been an artist-in-residence in numerous programs including Skaftfell Center of Visual Art in Iceland, Askeaton Contemporary Art in Ireland, the SPACES World Artist Program in Cleveland, and the Digital Painting Atelier at OCAD-U in Toronto. She was a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship and the Leifur Eiriksson Foundation Scholarship for research in Iceland, and she earned her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2008. She is an amateur mycologist, and her artwork and writings have been published in New American Paintings, NPR, Hyperallergic, Temporary Art Review, and the New York Mycological Society Newsletter. She is co-founder of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run-gallery in Brooklyn, NY; The Stephen and George Laundry Line, a project space in Queens, NY; and The Yard, a site for public art in Colorado Springs.