"Dissolving The Frontier: New Colorado Video + Performance Art" is an exhibition that challenges and reconsiders accepted notions of the American West. Curated by Jason Bernagozzi, this exhibition features new and recent works by four artists living and working along the Front Range of Colorado: Adán De La Garza, Fitzgerald, Jenna Maurice, and Kari Treadwell Ruehlen. Read the full exhibition text by Jason Bernagozzi here.

Works in the Exhibition

Adán De La Garza
Giving myself a reason to scream but not cry, 2015, 0:50
Protest Etiquette, 2019, 1:06
My intimate relationship with the men of the TSA, 2019, 1:31

Fitzgerald
They will come for you (prologue/epilogue), 2018, 1:22
Gloom, 2018, 1:05

Jenna Maurice
Integration with the Pond, 2016, 2:05
Interacting With The Lowest Point In North America, 2014, 2:44
Joshua Tree, 2019, 3:18

Kari Treadwell Ruehlen
Fillings, 2017, 6:05

About the Artists

Originally from Tucson, Arizona Adán De La Garza holds a BFA in Photography from the University of Arizona and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has participated in exhibitions at the Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria, Canada), AS220 (Providence, RI), The New School (New York, NY), The Future Gallery (Berlin, DE), The Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson, AZ), Casa Maauad (Mexico City, Mexico), Microscope Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) and festivals such as The Paseo (Taos, NM), PAF Festival of Film Animation (Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic), Currents International New Media Festival (Santa Fe, NM), WNDX Festival of Moving Image (Winnipeg, Canada) and Denver Noise Fest in addition to The Biennial of the Americas (Denver, CO). Adán is also a founding member of the Sound, Video and Performance Art collective  The Flinching Eye, was a co-conspirator of the media arts exhibition series Nothing To See Here and a participant at Collective Misnomer. Adán is currently based in Denver, Colorado.

Fitzgerald is a Filmmaker, visual artist and educator based in Denver, Colorado. His work consist of digital collage and films that explore conceptions of blackness, masculinity, identity as performance and representation. His work is specifically aimed at humanizing and de-commodifying the black body through moving images. His work has shown in the Color of Conversation Film Festival and Unseen Festival in Denver, Colorado, and the Chale Wote Street Arts Festival in Ghana, Africa.

Jenna Maurice is an artist working in photography, video, and performance, who lives and works in Denver, CO. Her work deals with ideas concerning relationships (with herself, others, the past, and the landscape), non-verbal communication, and the language of the complicated human experience. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Material Art Fair in Mexico City, La Générale in Paris France, Satellite Art Show in Miami, Fl, LivingGallery in Lecce Italy, Festival of Moving Images in Winnipeg Canada, Satellite at SXSW in Austin, TX, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, CO.

Kari Treadwell Ruehlen's work lies in between the space of personal history and American iconography. Autobiography becomes an important vehicle for different aspects of everyday life. Through her curiosity for common rituals, deeper meaning behind social behaviors and inherited symbols arise. Rather than relying on digitally fabricated means of production, she constructs objects and environments that are beheld through the camera’s lens. Sometimes the source happens to be re-enactments of activities that play a role in the slight and on-going changes of the self. In recent years she has gravitated towards knots, nest, hair and flesh; evoking networks and the entangled weight of ordinary objects. Her work ultimately aims to portray a momentary window into beauty through uncanny, altered behavior.
Kari Treadwell is originally from Tucson, Arizona. She received her BFA from the University of Arizona with an emphasis of Photography in 2005 and her MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2011. Kari has worked at the Center for Creative Photography archiving some of the masters photographs such as Ansel Adams and processing right and reproduction requests. She has served as an university educator, teaching several different types of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, color theory, performance, video and photography.

About the Curator

Jason Bernagozzi is an artist whose work examines and critiques the codes embedded within the psyche of media culture. His work uses the real-time features of video and
electronic media as a way to engage with interdisciplinary concepts as a dialogical system of emerging languages. He is particularly interested in the potential of non-human agents as collaborators in the artistic endeavor as a way to explore new concepts that exist outside the sphere of human assumption and logic. Bernagozzi’s work has been supported through numerous grants and awards from organizations such as the New York State Council for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts and has been exhibited nationally and internationally at exhibitions such as the European Media Art Festival in Osnabruk, Germany; the Festival Les Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques in Marsaille, France; the Ilman Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea and the Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Jason is also a co-founder of the experimental media art non-profit organization Signal Culture. Since 2014, Signal Culture has given residencies for over 260 artists, toolmakers and researchers from 16 countries and 30 states. Bernagozzi sees Signal Culture as an extension of his practice, facilitating the opportunity to hack, program and reimagine the purpose of various technologies in a fluid, real-time studio that encourages cross disciplinary investigation and a critical relationship to mass media. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Electronic Art at Colorado State University.