This February, Telluride Arts HQ East is featuring Love Is Love, a group show in collaboration with Telluride Gay Ski Week featuring local and regional artists Brooke Einbender, Carly Hodes, Christopher Warren, Cie Hoover, Emma Gerona, Seth Berg, Joanie Schwarz, and Steven Beutler. Telluride Arts and Telluride Gay Ski Week are thrilled to be teaming up to give queer-identifying artists and allies a space to exhibit their work.
Brooke Einbender, known as “Mindbender”, explores portals as vessels for connection. During the Covid-19 lockdown, Brooke began contemplating the deep isolation we experienced as a collective on a global scale. Personal transformations began happening to us all - behind closed doors. As a reaction to the times, she began collecting reclaimed doors from her community in Telluride, CO. This spark ignited The Unknown Zone, an immersive installation project of portals.
Carly Hodes is a non-binary contemporary artist living and working in Telluride, Colorado. Their work explores the politics of the queer identity and its give-and-take within a relentlessly anti-queer society. Hodes’ saturated, character-oriented images evoke the intimacy and struggle of confronting one’s gender and sexuality while weighing the potential consequences of queer expression.
Cie Hoover lives and creates his unique and captivating wood-based art in Ouray, Colorado. In addition to performing alongside his wife Karisa in the nationally touring folk-rock duo You Knew Me When, Cie has always had a passion for the visual arts since the days of his youth. After working in the Nashville music industry for nearly a decade, and then touring full-time for six and a half years throughout North America with You Knew Me When, Cie immersed himself in his love of the visual arts amongst the San Juan Mountains. Through the employment of wood as his primary medium, Cie's art aims to pay homage to nature and to the natural world around us. His artwork is primarily based in utilizing various types of wood to create both wall-mounted works with depth and texture, as well as large sculptural work that beg to be reflected on from all angles. His public art installations can be seen throughout Colorado and his work is represented by the Slate Gray Gallery in Telluride.
Joanie Schwarz has been known in the publishing world for over 25 years for her dreamlike imagery, and her endless patience with children and chaos. Creating images that show unconditional love is what Joanie was born to do. She is fascinated with, and has studied advanced natural lighting techniques with numerous artists, including Joyce Tenneson at The Maine Media Workshops and Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. Her work has been on the covers of Time, Us News and World Report, NY Times Magazine, and the LA Times.
Christopher Warren is a gay artist living in the San Juan Mountains in Durango, Colorado. His artistic resume includes private and public commissions from fortune 500 companies, city governments, and non-profits alike. He has exhibited in multiple solo and group shows in Colorado, as well as having his own solo museum exhibition at 31 years old. His works often feature topographic recreations of elements found in nature. This series of magazine collages represent a departure from most of Warren's work. Through these pieces, Warren is exploring both his queer and comedic sides in ways that past bodies of work have not touched on.