re:growth

Featuring the work of Cori Champagne, Jane Gordon, Coral Penelope Lambert, and Kristen Tordella-Williams. Curated by Amy Joy Hosterman

Artworks Loveland
310 N. Railroad Avenue, Loveland, CO
May 12th - June 30th

Opening Reception: Friday May 12th, 5 - 9pm,
Performance Art and Artist Talks at 7pm

Closing Reception: Friday June 30th, 6 -8 pm, with Artist Talk by Coral Penelope Lambert

re:growth is a conversation around the relationship our physical bodies have with our natural world, regarding survival, consciousness, and an intimate and complicated bond with material.

While positing consequences of overconsumption and waste production, these artists also consider their passion for understanding and connecting with natural materials. As manipulators of material, makers of objects, and careful observers of their world, they contemplate their roles in the evolution of their changing environments. Through sculpture, installation, performance and video, they demonstrate these cycles of life, death, upheaval, and regrowth, and considering the parallels between their bodies, their labors, and their environments, they dig deeper toward an understanding of balance, a celebration of growth, and survival in spite of environmental uncertainty.

Cori Champagne creates wearable sculpture, directly relating the body to its environment through garments that transform into living spaces. Her work speaks of self-sustainability and mobility while providing a facetious take on utility and fashion. Using mass-produced artifacts as inspiration, she remakes and assigns new meaning to objects by changing their functionality. Her sculptures are transformed physically and metaphorically by the human activity of their use. Ambit is a temporary structure which is performatively fabricated from the clothing of four participants.

Jane Gordon's creeping, meandering installations of repetitious ceramic forms inundate their surrounding environments and bring to mind the regrowth of new life after the fall of civilization, as the jungle begins to take back the land. This underlying narrative of survival in a time of social and environmental uncertainty is woven throughout her work, blanketed in the subtlety of undulating biological form. Cost of Cotton is inspired by the plight of cotton farmers, the rise of industrial agriculture, and our consumer-based disposable-everything culture. Gordon recreates cotton flowers in ceramic by dipping worn-out clothing into clay slip, and burning the material away in the firing, revealing delicate ceramic casts.

Coral Penelope Lambert's work references natural phenomena such as volcanoes, clouds and meteorites. She explores dynamic forces of nature, addressing the use of resources and associated contamination. Chakras, a series of cast iron and aluminum sculptures, act as an exploration into coexistence, containment, resonance, and metamorphosis. Contemplating the synchronicity of ideas and natural forms, Chakras reference aligned geological bodies, and act as metaphors for points of energy. Layered with a hard outer “crust”,  these bodies have a velvety-soft, exposed interior core, uncovered by a violent upheaval meant to unearth of precious energies contained within.

Kristen Tordella-Williams explores imagery and sculpture generated from the performative process. She investigates her curiosity for labor, memory, material, and use, through physical actions, and interactions with her environment. Possessing an experienced relationship with many materials, from ephemeral to indestructible, she employs a broad range of skills including performance, video, paper making, and iron casting. Tordella-Williams' series of cast iron Wreaths, shaped from roadside trash, thrift store items, and discarded household goods, focus on texture as a way of conveying the fossils we are currently creating. Wreaths will live on indefinitely until being remelted, calling attention to both the waste and the history we are now imprinting on the earth.