Artist Bios:

Virginia Folkestad

Virginia Folkestad is a Colorado installation artist/sculptor who works in a variety of materials: forged and welded steel, wood, concrete, wire, wax, fiber etc. She’s a graduate of Metropolitan State College, Denver, Colorado where she received a BFA, with honors. She is a two time recipient of the Colorado Council on the Arts Artist’s Fellowship in Visual Arts and has also received artists’ grants from the United States Department of State.

Her work has been shown nationally in Chicago at ARC Gallery; Montana at the Holter Museum; Texas at the Austin Museum of Art, the Stephen F. Austin State University and the Trammell Crow Center, New Mexico at the Dearing Galleries, Wyoming at the Nicolaysen Art Museum and extensively in Colorado. She is currently serving on the Board of Directors for the DAM Contemporaries, a support organization of the Denver Art Museum and she was a founding member of the Castle Rock, Colorado Art Commission.

Rori Knudtson

Rori Knudtson has had an interest in architecture since the age of six. Since that time she has worked in an around the concept of space through media art. She uses video, digital design and installation as tools to explore her deep interest in the intersection of architecture, media, and the psyche of the city. Her most recent work relates to memory perception and catharsis in individual and collective grieving space.

Rori is the AIGA Colorado Mentorship chair and participates with the Denver Office of Public Art. In addition, she is an adjunct lecturer with the University of Colorado-Denver, College of Arts and Media and the University of Colorado-Boulder, College of Environmental Design. She holds a B.S. in Visual Communication from Ohio University, a Master of Architecture from University of Colorado and is a M.F.A. candidate with Transart Institute in Linz, Austria. She lives in Denver with her partner Ken Renaud and two sons.

Linda Campbell

Linda Campbell began making art quilts in mid-life as a way to bring balance to her life. Quilts appeal to her as a metaphor because they keep you warm and safe in the dark of night. For this reason, her quilts often contain psychological and dream images. She works spontaneously, usually starting with a thought or an idea, allowing the concept to emerge over time. It feels like a great gift, when she finishes a quilt, to figure out something new about herself.

Linda often uses photo transfers on muslin or silk organza. She loves the transparency of organza and uses it to layer images. She also discharges and dyes her own fabric. Most of her quilts include some hand stitching, beading or found objects. Linda is a member of Edge Gallery in Denver (www.edgeart.org) and had her first solo show in January of 2008. She lives in central Denver and is involved with many non-profit organizations in Denver focusing on building strong communities. She has three adult children and enjoys biking and the outdoors.

Caroline Hinkley

Caroline Hinkley was born, raised, and trained in Southern California near Los Angeles. She graduated from Occidental College with a B.A. in Philosophy, received an M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University in Painting and Drawing, and an M.F.A from CalArts in Design. She taught at the University of Colorado full time for six years. She is currently full-time Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Naropa University. Caroline has been the recipient of a WESTAF/NEA award in 1992, the Phelan Award for excellence in Photography from the San Francisco Foundation. Her primary focus and artistic practice is photography, both film and digital mediums.

Travis Egedy

radical mystic. advocate for social collapse/true reality. real earth. fashion misfit. straight queer. post gender binaries. post world. consciousness expander. global independent music/culture nerd obsessive. artist for the new age. main focus of artistic practice and interests include manipulation of existing found mediums and materials as metaphor for evolution of consciousness. this includes but is not limited to the use of performance, painting, and drawing, with an occasional weekend affair with photography.

Sterling Crispin

My art making practice is exploratory in nature and involves me in a wide variety of subject matter. I am currently working in video, digital imaging software, computer programming/data visualization, traditional/non-traditional image making and objects.

The following is a list of my recent interest : perception, new media techniques, emptiness, space-time, humans , existentialism, computing, self narratives, entropy, and post-humanism in relation to a technological singularity. 

I was born in 1985, Maui, Hawaii and lived there until early 2000.  I spent several years in Pittsburgh, PA before continuing to Colorado where I received a BFA from the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design with an emphasis on drawing and painting. I am a recipient of the 2008 Institute for Experimental Studies Grant and was featured in Ruckus, Repeat, Ruckus, at The Lab at Belmar, Denver Colorado as well as exhibited during the 2008 American Association of Museums Expo, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver Colorado.

Steven Read

Steve Or Steven Read is a painter and/or new media artist who works experimentally through an investigation into the forms of waste, inventories, and erotics implicit within the systems and processes of an information economy. Found data is often used and recodified as source material, and when processed with imagined data, custom software, and chance operations a wide variety of form and/or meaning is allowed for. Any datum used or created, is a datum.

He was born in 1972 in the coastal regions of Florida and currently resides in Denver Colorado. He has a bachelor degree in fine art, and another in biological science. In 2006 his solo show entitled "The Color Channel" received a Westword Best of Denver award. That same year his work was included in the "Best of Colorado" show at the Denver International Airport, as well as in the "Decades of Influence: Extended Remix" show at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. He has also shown in New York City, Los Angeles, Europe, and South America. His work has been included in Art in America magazine, as well as on prestigious Internet sites such as rhizome.org, vvork.com, artfagcity.com, neural.it, and artnet.com. stevenread.com

Ian Fisher

Born in Canada in 1984, I was lucky enough to spend the first part of my life growing up in my mother’s art gallery. I moved to Colorado with my mom and sister in the fall of 1996. I had had success in the past painting the sky, but I was worried about the art falling into the whole cliché category of “pretty sunsets.” In order to accomplish the atmospheric concept, I had to change both the typical idea and look of the traditional landscape while executing the scene to the best of my ability. By removing the horizon line and changing the view on the canvas from a horizontal landscape to an undefined section, the atmosphere takes on a whole new appearance. I also paint on canvases that are physically larger than almost any person, literally surrounding the viewer, in order to encompass the magnitude of the subject. I graduated with my BFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2006 and since then have been living in Denver. I am continuing to paint the Atmospheric Series and looking forward to painting them even larger in the future. The only true obstacle in that is getting an even larger canvas through the doorway. ianfisherfineart.com

Alicia Ordal

Alicia Ordal was born in Minnesota in 1984 and moved to Colorado at age five. She spent most of her childhood and teen years preoccupied with creative projects and talking to cats. She has training in different areas of the arts and received her BFA from Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in 2007. Alicia works in several different mediums with an emphasis on painting and drawing. Her creative output is spawned from social anxiety, visual stimulation, boredom, dyslexia, frustration, and a big, giant love for art.

Jeff Page

I am a 29 year old Denver native but have only recently moved back to Denver after living in San Francisco for 8 years. While I was in San Francisco I received my BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in Interdisciplinary Studies and opened a small gallery, Page One Project. I'm a mixed media Artist. My primary source material is paper from books and magazines. I also use acrylics. I like to rock out on my ipod while I work in my studio. I love dogs. I also love egg salad sandwiches on wheat bread. jeffpagestudio.com

Bob Koons

Bob Koons is an artist living in Colorado. Originally from Minnesota, he received his MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2000. Koons has been active in the Denver art community exhibiting at The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Sandy Carson Gallery, and as curator of exhibits such as Comfort Station at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and Gravity/Levity at the Dairy Center for Arts, Boulder. In 2005, Koons was an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, in Omaha, NE.

Jonathan Saiz

Jonathan Saiz is a 25-year-old native of Colorado and is represented as a full-time professional artist by Plus Gallery in Denver. From 2001-2003 he studied painting at Parsons School of Design in Paris, France, Parsons School of Design in New York and at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. After his formal studies he moved to Berlin, Germany to pursue his career abroad and, as of 2004 has been back in Denver developing his gallery work. His debut solo show, Closed for Winter, opened at Plus Gallery in February of 2007 and, most recently, his Piano Project was featured at the gallery through May of 2008.

About his work he writes, My focus is as much or more on the construction and form of my work, instead of the just the 2-d imagery, I consider the definition of my work to be right in between painting and sculpture. With wood as the starting material I construct boxes and forms that are later painted with imagery ranging from the abstract to the photo-realistic representational. Using one box in combination with another ,or many, the relationships between the imagery, the shapes and the scale create singular assemblages with narrative.

In my work the paint itself and the surface it is on can be as communicative as a representational image and together they create something that has become the source of plenty of new ideas to explore. I intend to continue to develop these visual conversations between the two and three dimensions.

Viviane Le Courtois

Viviane Le Courtois has been creating installations for 18 years. Inspired by her surroundings and by consumer culture wherever she lives or travel, she creates installations using collected materials, sounds, videos, clay animation, lights, interactive elements and series of sculptures. Her recent installations have commented on, socio-political, environmental and health issues. Ongoing series of sculptures include collections of useless but precious objects such as single socks fossils, used shoes, ceramics, pickles, iron sculptures and more. She traveled in 39 countries over the last 17 years with her shoes-sculptures to create art with the action of walking. Recent print series include a series of Kombucha etchings and a book of etchings. Her art, which is conceptual and process based, often intrigues visitors by connecting art to everyday life.

Viviane Le Courtois received her DNSEP (MFA) in Sculpture/Installations from the International School of Art and Research in Nice, France in 1992. She moved to the US in 1994 and received an MA in Art History from the University of Denver in 2000. Her exhibitions in France and in the US include numerous exhibits in Denver including solo shows at Pirate, Edge, Studio Aiello, Ironton and RMCAD. She has been the Gallery and Studio Program Manager at Downtown Aurora Visual Arts since 2001. She is a world traveler, a writer, and a contemporary art lover. homepage.mac.com/lecourtoisviviane