Being a nonprofit gallery means art and artists, not money, are the priorities at Leon

Denverite | 05/21/2020

Leon gallery’s directors are feeling fairly confident about finances. For now.

But “we will need to stay ahead of this so we don’t find ourselves another wonderful arts organization that had to close for various reasons, in this case the pandemic,” said Eric Dallimore, artistic director of the nonprofit art and event space at 1112 East 17th Avenue in the City Park West neighborhood.

Photo by Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite

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Please Stand By

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A small gift of beauty & art for the world in our windows along 17th and Park Avenue.

Ongoing through mid July

Jared David Paul Anderson: April 22nd – May 4th

*Live Performances with Darkness & Stars

Venmo: @JDPboomboom

IG: @jareddavidpaul

Camille Rose Shortridge: May 6th -May18th

Venmo: @Camille-Shortridge-1

IG: @camill_ionaire

Michael Dowling: May 20th – May 28th

Venmo: @ifoundleon (Michael is generously donating all proceeds back to Leon)

IG: @michaeldowlingstudio

*Artwork will be available for purchase on a donation basis through each artists’s Venmo. 100% of donations go towards the artists.⁠

Although we cannot invite people to gather at Leon, or even go out of your way to come by, starting April 22, if you are in the neighborhood, perhaps on the way to or from picking up essentials or taking your daily walk, we will have something beautiful to offer if you glance our way. ⁠

Jared David Paul Anderson

If You Lay in a Bath as it Drains You Will Feel the Weight of the World

It is easy feeling the weight of the world these days. Nothing is black or white, it is all gray. That is the hardest part for me, the unknowing of it all. I do know these microscopic beings are much bigger than all of us and so I have surrendered. In quarantine I have found solace in full throttle art making. No answers here, just pause from a global pandemic painted in black and white, no gray.

Half of this exhibition is donation based art. I do not expect many people to be buying art at a time when jobs are lost and landlords still want to be paid rent. A simple act of appreciation to anybody practicing humanity.

JDP will be collaborating with Stephen Daniel Karpik (@sdk.forsale) for a live performance as Darkness & Stars during random moments of his installation, which you can tune in and view live on IG.⁠ In the spirit of surprise beauty, we may drop a hint when this is happening via Instagram, or you may just have to happen upon on your walk around the block.

Camille Rose Shortridge

It’s a Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

I see many similarities between Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood and my own. I live in Uptown, just two blocks away from Leon. From my windows overlooking the cross streets of 16th and Park Ave., everyday I see my neighbors outside enjoying walks or riding bikes with family and friends. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. And yet, there is juxtaposition in that there is an underlying current trauma at the core that needs to be addressed. We’re not sure how to address it, we’re all trying to understand it.

For my installation as part of “Please Stand By”, I will be setting up my entire art studio inside the front window at Leon, where you can find me working daily. I want to give my neighbors a behind the scenes look inside the artists’ studio. A personal space that few ever get to enter into, and a space where as an artist I create work that is influenced by the realities of everyday. In sharing my space and practice with my neighborhood, I hope to offer a new experience that can perhaps bring us together in healing as we all learn how to adapt to these changing yet opportunistic times.

Michael Dowling

Isolation Collaboration

A series of eight collaborations set in our time of isolation. Each one will be a unique experiment in communicating and creating together with the physical barreir of a window between the artist and the viewer. Inputs will be exchanged from the viewers/collaborators, which will serve as the jumping off point for Michael’s new work and as moments of diversions for the current direction he may be painting in.

PLEASE NOTE – WE DO NOT encourage people to go out of their way, travel outside of their own neighborhoods, or violate the Stay-At-Home orders put in place by Governor Polis or Mayor Hancock. However, if you live in the neighborhood and are out getting exercise or en route to the grocery store, feel free to walk by and have a look. You can stand on the sidewalk outside the gallery and watch. But please remember to adhere to physical distancing guidelines.⁠

An artist at Leon Gallery connects with his audience live despite the limitations of these coronavirus times

Denverite | 05/14/2020

Playwright Brenton Weyi was ready for a change of scene.

Leon’s executive director Eric Nord had lined Weyi up for a performance art series that was to have taken place in the gallery last month. The six-performances series, titled “Was, Is, Will Be,” was shifted online and delayed until May because of the novel coronavirus.

Photo by Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite

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Was, Is, Will Be – Leon’s 3rd Annual Performance Art Series

Was, Is, Will Be is Leon’s 3rd Annual Performance Art Series, broadcasting remotely throughout the month of May, 2020, and during the stay-at-home/safer-at-home orders of Governor Polis and Mayor Hancock.

Artists were provided an honorarium to create a work of pre-recorded video or prepare a performance for live streaming.

As the various works are premiered on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, they will be added to this gallery.

Featured Artists and Broadcast Dates:

Phil Cordelli and Sueyeun Jeliette Lee – TEDDYSNORKEL – May 7th

Brenton Weyi – A Verse for Humanity – Creative Words of Connection and Introspection – May 8th

Joshua Ware – DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! – May 14th

Michael John McKee – Exercising – May 15th

Sarah Touslee and Tyson Bennet – Wait Here – May 21st

Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris – Confined – May 28th

Fike & Harris – 78,267 ft Apart

Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris bring us the fifth performance in Leon’s 3rd Annual Performance Art Series, reuniting again, after their wildly successful “Pop” performance from our first series in 2018.

Their video, “78,267 ft Apart” will be broadcast via Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram.

To make donations or send tips to the artists you can use Venmo: @Tobias-Fike

Statement: Fike and Harris connect through Zoom, and it isn’t always pretty.

Bio:

Collaborating since 2010, Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris have dragged each other across the desert, wrestled each other’s shadows, and tried to catch glass objects while blindfolded. Their work addresses the everyday difficulties of human relationships, often using humor and irony to highlight the real struggles involved in negotiating difficult situations. They have exhibited widely, including at the Fonlad Digital Arts Festival (Coimbra, Portugal), the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder, CO), and the David B. Smith Gallery (Denver,CO). In 2013, they performed live for the opening of Denver’s Biennial of the Americas First Draft exhibition where they tested the collision of beach balls at high speeds.

Their performance video, “Food Fight” is in the Kadist Art Foundations, Video Americas collection and was recently shown in Shanghai, China as part of that collection.

TEDDYSNORKEL – Phil Cordelli and Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Artist Statement – We will manifest and consume messages from other forms of life here on earth to prepare our bodies as channels to the future.

Artist Bios – Phil Cordelli is a poet and farmer just outside the city of Denver.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee grew up three miles from the CIA. Find her at silentbroadcast.com

To make donations to the artists you can send $ via Venmo: @sjuliettelee

A Verse for Humanity: Creative Words of Connection and Introspection – Brenton Weyi

In this video, Brenton shares some poetry, stories, a song from his musical, and ends with improvised verse informed by the audience. Central to all his performances is a sense of building community and human bridges, which is especially vital during this most disjointed time.

To make donations to the artist you can send $ via Venmo: @Brenton-Weyi

DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!!

Joshua Ware is an artist and writer living in Denver, Colorado.

To make donations to the artists you can send $ via Paypal:

buildingthefactory@hotmail.com

DETH LIGHGHT IX: The Illumination of Nothingness

1. During the autumn of 1965, Aram Saroyan composed lighght. An audience, he said, should “see rather than read” the poem—for it is “sculptural” as much as textual.

2. When we say light, we pass through gh silently.

2. When we say lighght, we, too, pass through ghgh silently; but we are aware of silence because silence becomes seen.

3. Silence is the sound of nothing; but ghgh is variation producing pause. DETH LIGHGHT, too, is a kind of pause.

4. If “habit is the great deadener,” then DETH LIGHGHT is the great leveler.

5. Americans do American things: families, houses, careers, and cars; vacations and 401Ks.

6. When we die, our names will be forgotten. No 401K will save us.

7. The dead do not worry about American things.

8. We become nothing in our unnamedness, regardless of our station.

9. Sappho is nothing now but fragments; her contemporaries lost forever.

10. If we are to be forgotten, then dance inside the DETH LIGHGHT. But gracefully so.

11. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! is a dance of insignificance before we disappear.

12. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! sways with the apocalypse.

13. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! says “I am this body who dances horribly in heavy boots.”

14. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! explores public spaces rendered empty by disease.

15. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! explores intimacy in a time of social distancing and PPE.

16. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! partakes in our own decay.

17. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! is a dilettante’s film—and unashamedly so.

18. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! is a love song for everyone.

19. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! is a prayer to no one.

20. DETH LIGHGHT is the illumination of nothingness.

Exercising – by Michael John McKee

Here is the fourth broadcast in Leon’s 3rd Annual Performance Art Series, Was, Is, Will Be.

In “Exercising,” Michael explores the intersection of endurance, minimalism, and indeterminacy through the human body, percussion, and technology, paralleling a daily life during stay-at-home orders.

Bio – Michael John McKee is a musician and sound artist. Under the moniker Helicopter Copter, Michael produces sound-forward mixed media, including projects like experimental music video collaborations, sound design and incidental music for theatre, tongue-in-cheek compositions, wind chime sound installations, and alt music performances.

To make donations or send tips to the artist use Venmo – @micjohmck

How Coronavirus Has Changed the Denver Art Scene

303 Magazine | 05/07/2020

The signs of this are all around. Leon Gallery on 17th Avenue offered three artists the opportunity to showcase whatever they wanted in the windows of the gallery so that passers-by could enjoy the beauty “on the way to or from picking up essentials or taking your daily walk” called Please Stand By. Venmo accounts are displayed so that people can donate directly to the artists.

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Leon Gallery’s directors are in no rush to reopen

Denverite | 05/07/2020

Retail and other businesses that were shuttered during Denver’s coronavirus stay-at-home will start to ease open this weekend as the city transitions to safer-at-home.

Retail is part of their business, so Leon Gallery’s directors believe they can open. But Eric Nord and Eric Dallimore are in no rush. They’re keeping the focus on an installation series that can be viewed from outside the closed gallery and an online performance art festival they developed during the stay-at-home orders. It will be June before they start inviting art lovers back into the nonprofit art and event space at 1112 E. 17th Ave. in City Park West.

Photo by Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite

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