Jayne Butler Goodman

Jayne Butler Goodman (pronounced jay-knee) is an arts administrator, educator, and new media artist based in Denver, CO.

She served as an Arts Program Officer with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation from 2018-2021 where she led grantmaking efforts in cities across the U.S. that connected people to place and to each other through arts & culture. In this role, she managed a portfolio of nearly $8M and over 40 grantees including individual artists and collectives, non-profit organizations, and city and county arts & culture projects. During her tenure, she co-led the transition of the Arts program strategy to focus solely on investments at the intersection of the arts and technology. 

Prior to joining Knight, Jayne received her MFA in Emergent Digital Practices from the University of Denver where she studies art, design, culture, and technology. Her artistic practice blends tech with craft and she works in a variety of mediums including video, digital fabrication, and design. 

Jayne is the Development Manager at Access Gallery, a non-profit arts organization for a community of artists with disabilities that connects them to the public through their artwork. She is also an adjunct faculty member of the University of Denver’s college of continuing and professional studies where she teaches art interpretation and communications courses with a focus on digital culture. In addition to being a board member of Leon, she is also a trustee of Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF).

Heather Link-Bergman

Heather Link-Bergman is an artist, creative communicator, and educator whose art practice includes collage, photography, artist books and zines, and visual communication. She is Affiliate Faculty of Art at the Metropolitan State University of Denver and an Adjunct Instructor of Multimedia Graphic Design at the Community College of Denver. She teaches communication design and typography at both institutions. While she is not in her studio or in the classroom, Link-Bergman has spent the last 10+ years working in public service communications specializing in purpose-driven marketing, behavior change, and public policy. She is currently the Economic Mobility Communications Manager at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, where she leads the Get Ahead Colorado and Hacia Adelante Colorado campaigns to reduce maternal and child poverty and promote financial well-being. Other professional accomplishments include serving as the teaching artist for three semesters (2019-2020) for the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s teen program, POV (Point Of View).

Link-Bergman has exhibited nationally in New York, NY, Baltimore, MD, Chicago, IL, San Francisco, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and, notably, in Denver, CO, in Citizenship: A Practice of Society at MCA Denver. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an MFA candidate at the School of Visual Arts. Her work is held in various public collections, including The Institute of Contemporary Art Baltimore, Baltimore, MD; The Chicago Public Library, Chicago, IL; The Joan M. Flasch Artist Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; The Ron Burnett Library + Learning Commons at Emily Carr University, Vancouver, BC; The University of Denver Special Collections, Denver, CO; The Tutt Library, Colorado College Special Collections and Archives, Colorado Springs, CO; The University of Connecticut Special Collections, Hartford, CT; and private collections. 

Link-Bergman is a Partner of is PRESS, a publishing and design consultancy founded in 2015 with Peter Miles Bergman. is PRESS offers publishing, design, graphic arts, and letterpress printing, specializing in artists’ books, zines, and catalog publishing services. She is also the Director of Intelligence of the Institute of Sociometry, an international artist collective and communications cooperative headquartered in Denver, CO.

Joshua Ware – And You May Find Yourself Becoming Oblique in an Age of Mass Extinction

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December 2nd, 2022 – January 15th, 2023

As a prominent creative force within the local Denver community, Joshua Ware’s work inhabitis numerous spaces, from public scuplture, to intimate literary readings, to published articles on exhibitions and profiles on other local artists. His involvement within the community is both generous and impactful.

Leon is honored to present Ware’s first solo exhibition with our gallery space, which will include a variety of sculptural work that he has been developing and creating over the past several years. “And You May Find Yourself Becoming Oblique In An Age of Mass Extinction”, will showcase the artist’s explorations into form, texture, and color, which collectively create a unique and authentic lexicon of sculptural expression.

Artist Bio:

Joshua Ware is an artist and writer who was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska and lives in Denver, Colorado. His work has shown both nationally and internationally, and his public sculptures are on display in Denver, Colorado Springs, and Grand Junction. Ware regularly writes art reviews—most recently for Southwest Contemporary—and is the author of Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley and Unwanted Invention / Vargtimmen.

Artist Statement:

‘[Objects] are radically mysterious…this thing I can see right here is ungraspable. It’s totally vivid, yet I can’t get a grip on it.

-Timothy Morton, “And You May Find Yourself Living in an Age of Mass Extinction”

Moments of disorientation are vital. They are bodily experiences that throw the world up or throw the body from its ground…Disorientation could be described here as the ‘becoming oblique’ of the world, a becoming that is at once interior and exterior.

-Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

Object-Oriented Ontology argues that objects are unknowable to a subject. An artwork, for instance, is a mystery even to the artist who created it: something ungraspable that fosters an ambiguous space composed of both seduction and repulsion. While uncertain, though, the object opens itself up to the world and asks us to approach it with flexibility and humility, thus producing an ethics of (ecological) attunement toward the world.

Queer Phenomenology suggests that, rather than orienting ourselves to the world and the objects within it, we allow ourselves to become disoriented. In other words, to unsettle ourselves and our bodies in order to approach an object differently. To untether ourselves from our expectations. To lose our place. To fail in our orientations so our interactions with an object become strange. To become oblique in both body and mind.

Looking at the objects in this exhibit—some of which I created years ago, others just weeks ago—I am struck by how strange they appear to me now, when considered retrospectively. What I thought I knew of them, I must concede, was more a projection of my own desires. My own ideology. Rather than offer an overarching statement predicated on certainty or opinion, I present you (and myself) with a challenge: let these objects remain unknown; instead, let us offer them solidarity: a communing through aesthetic and embodied experience. In doing so, I would like that we let ourselves disorient from our old ways of seeing, knowing, critiquing, and experiencing an artwork. Be lost. Be uncertain. Embrace an ecological ethics in the Anthropocene that acknowledges objects’ unknown essence and our own uncertainties. Become oblique.

Photo credit: Amanda Tipton Photography

You can read Ray Rinaldi’s Denver Post review of this exhibition here.