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2024

Love Is Love: A Telluride Gay Ski Week Collaboration Exhibit

Love Is Love: A Telluride Gay Ski Week Collaboration Exhibit

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.

Magnum Opus: Britt Bradford x Katy Parnello

Magnum Opus: Britt Bradford x Katy Parnello

Telluride Arts HQ West

224 W Colorado

February 1 - February 29, 2024

Magnum Opus, or “The Great Work” refers to the alchemical process of transmutation of the primal material into the philosopher’s stone. The philosopher stone, or gold in traditional alchemy, is the most refined and valuable substance which through the alchemical process emerges from the crudest. Later, in the Gnostic tradition, this was interpreted not as the transmutation of metal, but of the soul or psyche of the alchemist himself.

This transformative process happens through the integration of the conscious and unconscious aspects of the alchemist’s psychology through the four stages of transmutation:  Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas and Rubedo. It is the process whereby an individual realizes a state of spiritual and psychological wholeness. Through this process, that, which was previously fragmented and broken, is restored and synthesized so that a whole and unique individual emerges; an individual who is fully authentic and embraces their destiny. 

Negredo is the first stage which is called “shadow work” in Jungian psychology. This is the “Maya” in other traditions. The stage in which we are in the illusion, but cannot see that we are in it.

Albedo is the stage in which communication between the unconscious and conscious begins to happen. It is the lunar or mirroring phase, which brings illumination. This stage builds relationship to the Self.

Citronitas is the solar stage, the moment of Grace entering to help heal and transform the awareness from the previous stages. At this level of transformation, one is able to start consciously relating to others and the world at large with a new wisdom and empowerment. 

Rubedo is the final stage and one embodies and lives their unique truth. The journey has now lead to living your personal myth and discovering how to incorporate meaning and consciousness through living a purpose filled life. In a way, you have discovered what it is to be immortal and infinite. 

About Britt Bradford

Britt received an undergraduate degree in art at the University of Colorado and has trained extensively at the Barcelona Academy of Art and Grand Central Atelier where she learned under master painters in the classical tradition.

About Katy Parnello

Katy Parnello is a self-taught woodworker and elementary electrician. Her latest body of work is inspired by animals and the energy exhibited in old comic books. Combining these two entities, her work strives to depict the power and force that exists in the moment of creation.