{"id":2448380,"date":"2019-09-05T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-05T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=312420"},"modified":"2019-09-05T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-09-05T22:00:00","slug":"odyssey-collective-at-the-red-brick-brings-together-three-roaring-fork-valley-artists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/odyssey-collective-at-the-red-brick-brings-together-three-roaring-fork-valley-artists\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Odyssey Collective\u2019 at the Red Brick brings together three Roaring Fork Valley artists"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Work by artists Andrew Roberts-Gray, John Cohorst, and Chris Erickson hang down the main hallway of the Red Brick Center for the Arts on Wednesday.<\/strong>
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When artist Andrew Roberts-Gray moved his creative home base to Carbondale\u2019s Studio for Arts + Works (SAW) three years ago, two of his new neighbors in the shared space offered to help him lug some heavy equipment.<\/p>\n

The favor from ceramicist John Cohorst and painter Chris Erickson, who loaded Roberts-Gray\u2019s massive table saw on a trailer from Roberts-Gray\u2019s home in Glenwood Springs and helped install it at SAW, marked the beginning of a fruitful creative partnership for this trio of leading Roaring Fork Valley-based artists. It resulted in the summer-long Red Brick Center for the Arts exhibition, \u201cOdyssey Collective,\u201d which showcases some 70 total pieces from the men revolving loosely around their shared interest in science fiction and technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was the beginning,\u201d Roberts-Gray said of the helping hand with his studio move. \u201cOnce we were all there, we talked. And there were things about our work that spoke to each other. There was a lot of energy, a lot of new ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trio didn\u2019t form a collective in any official capacity \u2013 the \u201cOdyssey Collective\u201d title came for the purposes of the Red Brick show \u2013 but they soon felt they were working as a creative team, informally work-shopping ideas and concepts with one another and harnessing the close proximity of their studios to sprout and spread wild new creative growth in each of their practices.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven if it wasn\u2019t conscious, it was happening,\u201d Roberts-Gray said.<\/p>\n

The trio often talked about their shared ideas about science fiction, technology, utopias and dystopias. Those chats, and a mutual affinity for Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d brought them together for the Red Brick show, which opened in July and runs through Sept. 8.<\/p>\n

The threesome didn\u2019t constrict itself with the theme, instead simply encouraging one another to continue exploring the ideas they\u2019ve shared. Viewers will see the literal imprint of technological history in the computer codes screen-printed onto Roberts-Gray\u2019s newest paintings. They may be reminded of Kubrick\u2019s \u201cStar Gate\u201d visuals from \u201c2001\u201d in the color palate of Erickson\u2019s vibrant new abstract acrylic paintings. Or they may note echoes of Kubrick\u2019s \u201c2001\u201d apes in Cohorst\u2019s playful yeti-based iconography on his new ceramic vessels.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought it was interesting how we have these different approaches to the history of technology,\u201d said Roberts-Gray.<\/p>\n

The newest of Erickson\u2019s pieces are large format abstracts in loud colors, layered in heavy body acrylic paint. They\u2019re a departure from more narrative pieces like \u201cEmission Condition,\u201d also included here, filled with his cartoon-like figures in black and white \u2013 mimicking climate change iconography of smoke stacks, medical crosses, skeletal figures and his signature thought bubbles and smoke clouds.<\/p>\n

Roberts-Gray, for nearly three decades now, has been making work that juxtaposes the natural world and the man-made. Most often, he employs his instantly recognizable motif of juxtaposing cold and boldly colored geometric shapes against abstracted natural spaces, like the black mountain forms that populate much of his \u201cOdyssey Collective\u201d works.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s used literal layers of material and intellectual layers of meaning to powerful effect. His newest pieces in the Red Brick show are made on thick plexi-glass \u2013 some sand-blasted and textured, some crystal clear, with paint and printed material on both sides to bring a new depth to his long-established visual vocabulary.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of my work is about layers,\u201d he said. \u201cLayers of cultural reference, paint, printing. This made it so that you can see those layers. With air and light between them, it activated the ideas in this new way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOdyssey Collective\u201d is a noteworthy achievement for the Red Brick as the nonprofit art gallery recovers from an embezzlement scandal for which its former director was convicted of felony theft and, in July, sentenced to 90 days in jail<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Current Red Brick director Sarah Roy over the last year has made small but significant steps to better showcase locally based artists in the space, including a dedicated space for solo exhibitions and a move away from the Red Brick tradition of putting up group shows with a dozen or more artists represented at once. Instead, as in this summer\u2019s \u201cOdyssey Collective\u201d and an upcoming fall photography show, she\u2019s demonstrating a focused curatorial vision, showcasing more work by fewer artists in exhibitions that give viewers the opportunity to take a deeper and more fulfilling dive into the work.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we all feel it was very successful,\u201d Roberts-Gray said of the \u201cOdyssey Collective\u201d show. \u201cWe feel like we were able to transform the space a little differently. So I\u2019m very happy with the show.\u201d<\/p>\n

An artist\u2019s odyssey, he noted, is most often a go-it-alone journey. But as he\u2019s learned in recent years since his move from Glenwood to Carbondale and from an isolated home studio to the humming shared space of SAW, it doesn\u2019t have to be: \u201cOne of the things I learned from coming to SAW and being with all of these artists of different ages is that it\u2019s just better to be on the odyssey with different people.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Roberts-Gray, the Red Brick show is among a plethora of recent collaborations that mark a new turn in his career. He also recently opened \u2013 with his wife, Annette \u2013 the playfully futurist show \u201cIn the Year 2525\u201d at the Carbondale Clay Center, and collaborated with Cate Tallmadge on the R2 Gallery show \u201cLoom,\u201d about the history of computers. And he put together a massive eight-person performance art piece as an Aspen Art Museum Fellow \u2013 a one-time happening that drew an overflow crowd to the museum rooftop in May and became an unexpectedly major art event of the year in Aspen.<\/p>\n

He credits this shift toward collaboration to his experiences at SAW with artists like Cohorst and Erickson.<\/p>\n

\u201cSAW has become such an important part of my practice and not something I would have ever thought I would have in the studio,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve been transformed by it.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Work by artists Andrew Roberts-Gray, John Cohorst, and Chris Erickson hang down the main hallway of the Red Brick Center for the Arts on Wednesday. When artist Andrew Roberts-Gray moved his creative home base to Carbondale\u2019s Studio for Arts + Works (SAW) three years ago, two of his new neighbors in the shared space offered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2448380","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-26 06:25:03","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2448380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2448380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2448380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2448380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}