Category: Exhibitions

September 4th through October 16th, 2021 – Opening Reception Saturday, September 4th, 7-11pm.

On Saturday, September 4th, at 7pm, Leon will premiere new work from acclaimed local artist, Matthew Harris, for his second solo exhibition, Watermelon Snowfall. The exhibition will include new paintings and sculptures created throughout the past year. A favorite among other artists in the local community, Harris boldly explores painting techniques from the perspective of an artist who typically works in three dimensions. Unrestrained by the standard rules and techniques of more formally trained painters, Harris is able to breathe new life into the medium through his individualistic vision and playful explorations of composition through mark-making, layering, texture, rhythm, and in particular, his unique and unusual use of color.

Artist Statement:
We currently live within a plethora of immediate information, opinions, and entertainment. This stream of unfettered content is seductive and gives the illusion of easy answers to our problems. Sometimes I feel as if I am slowly and unconsciously being trained to turn to the digital landscape to try to understand my physical existence. While I am easily hypnotized by this endless source of novelty and drama, I desire to intentionally cultivate areas in my life that involve slow attention.
The studio is one place that forces this slow attention from me. I cannot google what color to use next or how to fix my current composition. The knowledge gained is from a physical lived experience that accumulates slowly and doesn’t immediately reveal itself. I have to sit with it, stare at it, make mistakes, and learn from it. The answers, if there is such a thing, often feel tangled, slippery, and elusive. To me this much better reflects my experience of the world than the carefully marketed and algorithmically controlled digital experience in which I frequently lose myself.
My hope is to make work that I do not immediately understand. I want to confuse, surprise and disorientate myself through my work. This can create somewhat of a dilemma when asked to explain it and to be honest, I don’t have the answers at the moment. I could tell you it’s about color and pattern, order and chaos, abstraction and figuration, but I’m not sure that would actually provide you with a greater personal experience of viewing it. I encourage you to stop reading this statement and return to the artwork. Let it reveal itself slowly and don’t try to name it too early. I’ll do the same and maybe in a few years we’ll both have a better idea of what it is.

Artist Bio:
Matthew Harris received his MFA at the University of Colorado Boulder (2011) and is currently the Head of Fine Arts at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver, CO. When he’s not making art or teaching, he enjoys napping and reading books. The exterior of his house is painted grey, his dog won’t stop barking, his wife is amazingly supportive, and his two-year-old daughter enjoys being silly. Further details may be found on his website at http://www.matthewharris.net.

To read Gretchen Marie Schaefer’s essay click here

Below you can view Matthew’s conversation with Donald Fodness, which was originally broadcast via Zoom on Tuesday, October 12th.

or the ambiguity of image destruction in a poison field

Exhibition on view through Friday, August 27th, 2021

photo credit: Amanda Tipton Photography

Artist Statement

I have this on-going side agenda to push creativity beyond the conventional art object and space as a strategy to surprise people into loving art. My first professional art exhibit was a sound piece that took place in an elevator at Art in General,  an alternative space for emerging artists in downtown New York City. Iconoclashgiftsfeld, or the ambiguity of image destruction in a poison field was originally conceived of as a street tourist kiosk to analyze the destruction of monuments and the power of the image. I took the position of an archeologist and hence dug up as many images on the internet regarding modern iconoclasm of the past thirty years. I then reproduced the images and video footage on tourist items (t-shirts, caps, mugs, postcards and key chains) at tourist prices. It’s not the most lucrative art sales model, but completes my commitment to disseminating new perspectives on our contemporary social climate with non-traditional art forms.  

Biography
Angie Eng was born in San Francisco, California and recently relocated from Paris, France to Boulder, Colorado to pursue a Ph.D. on Kosmorganic aesthetics in the intermedia arts program at CU Boulder. Prior to Paris she lived and worked in New York City for 15 years developing a professional art practice on expanded media and installation art. Although known for her experimental video performance and installation, she was trained as a painter at UC Santa Barbara. Light, color, pattern and gesture continue to inform her work that have manifested in many genres such as AV performance, video art, sound art, conceptual art, and new media. Earning her label as a ‘peripatetic artist’, this year she worked on a sound walk, an audiovisual mapping projection, an interactive sound poetry installation, a series of paintings highlighting 36 landmark civil rights cases,  a public art project of recycled materials in conjunction with Iconoclashgiftsfeld for Leon Gallery.  Her work has been presented worldwide in venues such as The Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, Lincoln Center, The Kitchen, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, Roulette Intermedium , Bronx Museum, Artists Space, Anthology Film Archives, Le Cube, CNES, and Cité de la Musique. She has received numerous awards and commissions for her work from New Radio and Performing Arts, Harvestworks, Art In General, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York State Council on the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Alternative Museum, Experimental TV Center Finishing Funds,  Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Boulder Arts Commission. 

You can read an essay written by Jillian Blackwell here

Orders for merchandise can be placed by sending an email to: ifoundleon@gmail.com

Please specify if you would like:

Baseball Cap $34.99

Coffee Mug $19.99

T-shirt $49.99.

For T-shirts please indicate size: S, M, L, or XL.

Please specify which saying you would like printed:

1. Buddha
2. Columbus
3. Franco
4. Gaddafi
5. Gandhi
6. Lenin
7. Leopold
8. Rhodes
9. Robert E Lee
10. Saddam

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MFA Exhibition – One week only

Opening Reception – June 26th, 6 – 11pm.

On view through July 3rd.

Sunday June 27th – Noon – 5pm

Monday & Tuesday June 28th & 29th – by appointment only. To reserve and appointment send request to: julliandyoung@gmail.com

Wednesday – Friday, June 30th thru July 2nd – 10am – 6pm

Saturday July 3rd – Noon – 5pm

Artist Statement:
entangled // embodied investigates the tangible relationships humans share with their immediate natural surroundings mitigated through the intangible lens of memory. The visuals throughout this series of works contemplate the nature of local versus global connections. In particular, the reflection of intimate interconnectedness is derived from the artist’s connection to the trees that once stood in front of her childhood home, the processing of grief when those trees contracted disease and were removed, and the larger global implications of mass deforestation, and how this destruction impacts our ability to breathe comfortably. The show utilizes digitally fabricated ceramics, projection mapped video art, site specific installation, 3D scanning and animation, and augmented reality.

Artist Bio:
Jullian Young is an artist based in Denver, Colorado where she has just completed her MFA in Emergent Digital Practices. She works with various tools including 3D modeling and digital fabrication, data visualization, interactive technologies, algorithmic processes, animation and techniques in video art. Jullian’s work engages with the critical dialogue surrounding networked systems, and our participation as a species with the environment at large. Her artwork seeks to make connections between ecosystems and organisms that often go unnoticed, and challenge the dynamics of care, control, and power in an interwoven network of creatures that ultimately necessitates balance.
Links:
www.jullianyoung.com
IG: @jullianyoung

May 8th through June 19th, 2021. Opening reception, Saturday, May 8th – 6:00 – 10:00 PM

Artist Statement –

The disembodied plaster, clay, and fiber figures in Laura Shill’s sculptural installation, Future Self Storage, reach, tumble, and spill throughout Leon Gallery, resisting the vessels that try to contain them while grasping at something perpetually beyond reach.  As an installation artist, Shill employs repetition of form and accumulation over time to create environments that immerse visitors and engage the sensorial experience of touch.  When these objects are not being activated by the public, they rest in storage.  This exhibition presents new iterations of the current (and future) contents of her storage and unpacks the motivation behind the act of keeping. 

Each new version these objects embody, affords them another chance to fulfill their ideal potential.  To keep them is to keep the hope alive that they will emerge from storage to one day become their fully realized selves, their purpose restored. 

Storage is a liminal space often marking a transition, objects held somewhere between remembering and forgetting. We keep the things that we cannot bear to confront and cannot bear to let go of, inexorably bound in aspiration and burden. We store our responsibility to the past and our ambitions for the future, keeping our objects in an unresolved state of waiting. 

Their condition parallels our own in this pandemic year of confinement and isolation.  As we emerge from a prolonged state of storage, what versions of ourselves will we find? 

Artist Bio –

Laura Shill is an artist based in Denver, CO.  Her work combines sculpture, installation, performance, and photography. Shill creates pronounced absences and addresses ideas of disclosure and concealment, agency and emotional risk, desire and discontent, often oscillating between humor and heartbreak. Her works explore the transformative potential of people and objects through early and experimental forms of image making that pair the sinister and beautiful.  Her sculptural and installation work borrows theatrical conventions to blur boundaries between public and private space to immerse participants. These works employ repetition to create environments that bring thousands of hours of invisible labor into material form. 

Shill has exhibited work nationally and internationally at an official satellite of the 57th Venice Biennale at the European Cultural Center, The Gallery of Contemporary Art, Colorado Springs, David B. Smith Gallery, Denver, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, and Durden and Ray, Los Angeles. She earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2012. Images from her Hidden Mother archive were included in the 2013 Photographers’ Gallery London exhibition, Home Truths, Photography and Motherhood, and were published in the catalog edited by Susan Bright. For her 2016 solo exhibition, Phantom Touch, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Shill developed and relied on a community-based equitable barter system for artistic labor and production to realize an ambitiously soft environment.

To read Jane Burke’s essay of Laura Shill’s exhibition click here

Scott McCormick -ORPHEUS

March 13th – April 24th, 2021

Book an appointment to view the exhibition here

Photo credit: Amanda Tipton

Scott McCormick’s “Orpheus” is an orgy of mythology, dendrology, and geometry. The first piece that jumped out at me was an Esther Williams fever dream of bodies swimming in blackness. Each subsequent piece swims in meaning and technique. Handmade headdresses philander with painted backdrops, digital & analog photography, double exposure, and human models caked in clay. McCormick brings balance to chaos and finds structure in the organic.

Ryan Warner, public radio journalist, Denver, CO

Artist Statement –

“Orpheus” is the culmination of a year and a half of work from artist Scott McCormick. Mining the subject matter, compositional geometry, and visual aesthetic of 19^th century French academic painters like Bouguereau, Cabanel, and Tissot, McCormick’s epic work defines an emerging and innovative photographic style. Utilizing both digital compositing and film photo techniques, combined with his own large, custom-built sets, expansive props, and headdresses, each image is a complex orchestration of divergent elements and techniques. The intricate composite images — sometimes utilizing over 600 photographs immixed together — achieve a sense of silent frenzy. The process of combining digital and film photography has allowed the artist to prospect a “prophecy-of-self” through his time spent learning.

In early stages of the work, McCormick immersed himself in the folklore of Greek, Slavic, and Mayan cultures. This sparked an exploration of the parallel between the art, as it was revealing itself, and the grandiose mythologies emblazoned on the world’s memories and creations. Throughout his process, the connection to these cultures illuminated itself wholly in the revelation that McCormick’s life as a musician, poet, and artist was reflective of the story of Orpheus. In, perhaps a divine sense of fate, each piece had a minimal predetermined direction at inception, and the connection (or purposeful disconnect) was often only discovered or understood after the photograph was finished.

Shedding the established traditions and procedures of his commercial work practice, McCormick limited the amount of preparatory sketching, and planned only the general idea of each photo, allowing each of the photographs to take on a separate life, unfolding in a through-composed storyline. The works in this exhibition explore ascension, disconnection, divergence, and a powerful sense of feeling for the audience all while thoroughly re-telling the story of Greek legend, Orpheus.

Artist Bio –

Scott McCormick was born in Waukegan, Illinois and started playing the piano at the age of 10. At age 13, he began a 21-year music career by playing gospel churches on the southside of Chicago. Since then, he’s performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, written/scored for ESPN and Disney, and led and performed in the internationally-touring band, Boulder Acoustic Society. He has taught music alongside Grammy, Tony, and Academy Award-winning artists at Boys & Girls Club of Greater Washington in tandem with Julliard School of Music. However, in 2011, he drifted from performing music and began a new career — starting his company, McCormick Photos & Design.

Over the past 10 years, McCormick has photographed, designed, and directed over 350 album covers. Among the world-renowned artists he’s worked with are: String Cheese Incident, Railroad Earth, Mandolin Orange, Gregory Alan Isakov, Big Head Todd and The Monsters, and Infamous Stringdusters. Infamous Stringdusters’ “Laws Of Gravity” took home a Grammy in 2017, and the following year, Gregory Alan Isakov’s “Evening Machines” was nominated. In 2016, McCormick won IBMA’s “Best Graphic Designer” for Infamous Stringdusters’ album “Ladies and Gentlemen,” and was nominated again for the award the following year. He also developed branding for the Opera, “Qadar”, produced by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. 

Scott can be found building sets, miniatures, expansive props, backdrops, and elaborate costumes to create a unique photographic vision from real elements. He works with startups and mid-level companies to define brand aesthetic and assists with marketing. His most recent Denver clients include Atomic Cowboy, Clinica Tepeyac, Swallow Hill Music, and Boost Counseling & Consulting. His photos and art have been seen in Rolling Stone, Vogue, The New Yorker, MTV, Vibe, and in Times Square. In 2020, he departed from music photography to pursue a career in fine art photography.

Photo Credit: Amanda Tipton Photography

Leon Gallery is proud to welcome back Raafi Rivero for the first gallery exhibition of his powerful social justice project, Unarmed.

Unarmed is an ongoing series of sport jerseys in memoriam of black victims of police violence. Each jersey is created in the colors of a victim’s local sports team. The number displayed on each jersey represents the person’s age when they were killed. Stars, if present, indicate the number of times the person was shot. The Sean Bell jersey, for instance, is a number 23, in New York Knicks colors, with 50 stars.

The exhibition features the full series of designs, thirteen so far, and images from a series of street installations of Unarmed that were displayed across the country throughout the Fall of 2020. Included in the exhibition will be installations, a documentary video, and a memorial to Elijah McClain, in which visitors will be able to participate. Rivero says, “Unarmed feels more like a calling than a brand, more like a mission than an art project, more like a passion project than activism. It is all three.

Artist Bio: Raafi Rivero has directed numerous short films, advertisements, and music videos in addition to work in design. His directing credits include a suite of promos for HBO’s True Blood, content for Microsoft, Sony, The Rockefeller Foundation, and an Art Directors Club award-winning viral campaign for the Maryland Lottery. Their Eyes Were Watching Gummy Bears, a 2010 short film, played more the 30 film festivals to date, winning honors in multiple cities. Raafi’s music videos for Ghostface Killah and Styles P have aggregated over a million views online. 72 Hours: a Brooklyn Love Story?, Raafi’s first feature film, premiered at the LA Film Festival in 2016 and is currently airing on Starz Network.

Raafi holds and MFA in Film from Howard University, and a BA in Art/Semiotics from Brown University. His writing about new media has appeared in The New York Times.

This exhibition was sponsored in part by The Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Photo Credit: Amanda Tipton Photography

DIEGO RODRIGUEZ-WARNER – HORROR VACUI

Artist Statement

This show is a bit of a mess.

Like many of you, I have spent the last eight months secluded, and didn’t leave the house for the first three. I did what I know how to do, making images with the materials I had at hand, scraps of plywood and drywall, crayons, pencil and spray paint, a diminishing supply of acrylic paint. I quickly gave up on responding to an omnipresent and ever shifting news cycle, an impossible chase. With a singular exception, I found it nigh impossible to summon past grandiosity, instead focusing on smaller, more intimate pieces. Turning inward as a form of respite, working out of a delirious hope to distract, to keep busy, to give myself purpose in a world falling apart.

I feel like we are passing through a collective chrysalis, an upturned caged domesticity. As I paced a rut in my backyard, so too I found myself returning to the same dead ends in my studio. Erudite gestures of casual indifference, airy contentious groups, ruptured single figures, these crumpled anxious odalisques.

I am hesitant to call them studies, as a study insinuates that anything will come of them. Instead, to borrow a term from my friend Artur Pena, I like attempts. Attempts to occupy myself, attempts to find interest, to excite my eye, to fill the space new people and experiences would have inhabited. I can’t let go of the feeling that this is far less than you deserve, and for that I apologize, but it is my hope that you find me as I am, somewhere in the gesture.

Love,

Diego

Photo Credit: Amanda Tipton Photography

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Ray Rinaldi’s review in Hyperallergic:
https://hyperallergic.com/610544/diego-rodriguez-warner-horror-vacui-leon-gallery/

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Joshua Ware in SW Contemporary Magazine:

Diego Rodriguez-Warner: Horror Vacui

Barth Quenzer writes on Horror Vacui:

Horror Vacui – Barth Quenzer

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Our Executive Director, Eric G. Nord, shares some of his thoughts on Diego’s extraordinary artwork here:

The Dynamism of Diego Rodriguez-Warner

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Eric R. Dallimore, Leon’s Artistic Director shares his thoughts here:

Horror Vacui

Photo Credit: Amanda Tipton Photography

Jasmine Abena Colgan

Website: www.photographsbyjazz.com

Opening Reception: July 18th, 2020

On Exhibition: July 18th – August 29th, 2020

Artist Talk: August 15th, 2020

Limited 10 Visitors for 45 minute appointments on opening night.

PLEASE NOTE – We require a face mask for entry into the gallery.

Gallery Hours: Wed-Sunday 10am-6pm

Artist Statement:

Human Currency is a collection of works that confronts institutional racism in the representation of the cowrie seashell. Each piece addresses a contemporary issue that signifies deep rooted historical practices of slavery, racism, fertility, womanhood, birth, and wealth. The cowrie shell is the symbol of life; Jasmine Abena Colgan uses the shell to share her belief that through womanhood, we will develop the change in the world that is needed today. A simplistic form portrays a beautiful depiction as a metaphor, which is vocalized through the African perspective in artistic material.

“The exploration of my culture has influenced my identity to be expressed from life conflicts, as a multi-cultured woman with American nationality, appearance of Black American, but heritage of Irish and Ghanaian. There has always been the constant battle of deciphering where I fit in as a mixed individual. This body of work is shared not only from the lens, but the intellect of a African-American, Fante-Ghanaian, Irish-American, and Black & White woman.

My artwork has developed through the use of natural and found materials; they reference pigmentation, slavery, labor, tribal and bi-nationality. I mold metaphorical structures that represent the similarities between history and culture brought into contemporary conversation. I have developed my understanding of what ​it​ means to be a woman of colors. By painting a mask of makeup, I am embracing my skin condition and expressing the persona of a ​halfrican​.”

– Jasmine Abena Colgan

10% of proceeds from your purchase will be donated to a non-governmental organization in Ghana through Tough Skin. A virtual card will be sent, and your name will be added and shared with the international community.

BIO:

Jasmine Abena Colgan is an Ameri-Ghanaian artist, educator, scholar, entrepreneur and social activist who was born in Colorado. Colgan will complete her masters in Fine Arts from the University of Colorado Boulder in Spring of 2020. Jazz is a master printer with 19th century, historical photographic printing processes including; platinum & palladium, silver and gold.

In 2019, Colgan was a NEST fellow and collaborated with a Ph.D. Candidate in chemistry to successfully develop the Ghanatype; a gold printing method using raw material from Obuasi (Obuasi mine initiated the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade). Her artwork is inspired from the contemporary diaspora of mixed culture in the social world; a woman who is black and white, Irish and Ghanaian, African-American, but declares herself a part of the vitilgan race and a woman of colors.

In 2017, Jazz was awarded the “Face of Vitiligo” at a world conference, highlighting her successful social empowerment while conducting field research for her non-profit organization, Tough Skin. She has been featured in publications such as PEOPLE magazine, was associated with TEDXMileHigh for Wonder: Women in Art Experience. Colgan has developed international relationships with several diverse communities and recently established Tough Skin into an enterprise that sources Shea Butter from Ghana to handcraft protective, organic skincare products.

IG: @the.spotted.zelephant

Website: www.photographsbyjazz.com

Available Works

Artist Bio:

Denver-based photographer, Narkita Gold has been honing her skills in digital photography since 2009. She’s passionate about arts and culture and finds inspiration in the human experience, city life, and architecture. She’s currently profiling the city’s movers, shakers, and every day folks about the Black experience in the Mile High City in her portrait and interview series, Black in Denver. Learn more at www.blackindenver.com.

Artist Statement about Collaboration with Leon:

The Black experience in Denver is unique, complex, and often overlooked. I’ve always believed representation matters, and seeing ourselves on the walls of museums and galleries is impactful, especially to our little ones. I am excited to bring my series to Leon Gallery to continue to celebrate diversity in blackness, shed light on our connectedness, and raise awareness about the power of being oneself.⁣

Originally, these portraits graced our front window, during the pandemic shutdown of the gallery, with plans to create a semi-permanent display on our flags, to bring the many truths of Denver’s Black community through Narkita’s project. We encourage you to learn more and hear the stories of our community members showcased here by visiting @blackindenver on Instagram. You can also follow Narkita @narkitagold⁠⠀

“Blackness is a Spectrum. We are all connected. We are here”. – Narkita Gold