Robischon Gallery is pleased to present five, concurrent solo exhibitions by Colorado artists Ian Fisher, Gary Emrich and Kevin O’Connell alongside New York artist William Lamson and Rhode Island artist Brandon Bultman. While each of the individual artists reveal their own unique expression and personal search within new bodies of work, the connecting themes of the exhibition investigate and reflect a kind of quest for equilibrium within an atmosphere of the aspirational. The current psychological mood within the United States leading up to the final selection of its highly controversial 2016 presidential candidates, points to both a cultural complexity and a human desire for balance in the face of upheaval – political or otherwise. Mercurial Nature plays an important thematic visual role in the exhibition as sea and sky mirror and echo the rhythms of the world. Each artist bridges to the next artist either through symbol or tone; their shared edges alluding to an aspect of the human condition or the state of the planet itself. From the dark and contemplative cloud-filled skies of painter Ian Fisher; the unexpected gravity test of video artist William Lamson; the psychologically-charged sociopolitical investigations of video artist Gary Emrich and sculptor Brandon Bultman; to the tumultuous waters of photographer Kevin O’Connell, the dynamic visual vocabularies of the five artists signal a sense of change in the world where the climate of culture parallels the nature of all things.

The signature large-scale cloud forms of Ian Fisher’s paintings inherently possess a dark/light dichotomy. Few images are as universally understood across time and culture as an obsidian-clouded sky further ignited by the presence of light and promise. While clouds bring many forms of destruction, they are also necessary for essential, life-giving water. Equally understood and anticipated is the inevitable break in the clouds which heralds the welcome return of the sun. While Fisher often captures both open and cloud-filled skies in paint, it is within the obscured, clouded moments where the potentiality resides and the artist alludes to a kind of continuum or a shared sky for all of humanity. Fisher’s choice of a unifying range of deep blue and grey in his palette in this latest series, suggests a sense of vast mystery in the darkness even in the most diminutive paintings. Yet, Fisher’s exhibition title makes clear his thinking that darkness is only temporary; that light has always returned – a welcome metaphor in a world’s challenging times. Intended not only as sublime representations of what clouds actually are – formations as a result of amassed water droplets – but as well, the paintings are also an expression of the timelessness of ever-changing forms and creativity itself. Carrying equal value are the imaginative responses from both Fisher and the viewer when interpreting the artful cloudscapes as the artist deftly sets the stage for psychological investigations between the wondrous and sublime.

For Fisher, it is in the possibilities inherent in his subject, his medium and in abstraction where the artist’s interest lies – what is found in the layered mark-making of paint; the accumulated brushstrokes of the elemental and the subtle shifts in color and orientation which result in his ongoing examination of the act of painting. To each viewer of this exhibition, the cloud formations through the artist’s hand may recall a personal observation and/or the direct sense of Nature’s cyclical remarkability. For Fisher, it is also thorough evidence of his commitment and submersion into a demanding realm for a painter – one both highly subjective and nature-bound.

Ian Fisher has a BFA from the University of Colorado and his paintings have been featured in solo museum exhibitions including Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Denver Botanic Gardens, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Outdoor Arts, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design’s Rude Gallery and the Buell Theater. His work has been part of group exhibitions at the New Mexico Museum of Art biennial exhibition of 2015, First Draft: Biennial of the Americas at McNichols Civic Center Park and Colorado State University’s Curfman Gallery. His work will be featured at the Arvada Center’s 40th anniversary exhibition later this year. Fisher was most recently the recipient of a Richard Estes painting residency and earlier, a two-year residency at Redline, Denver where his work has also been frequently exhibited as part of the program’s non-profit outreach to all parts of Denver’s art community. Fisher’s paintings are in the public collections of Denver’s Colorado Convention Center, and the Children’s Hospital of Colorado and as well as in numerous corporate and private collections.

In the second installation of his Apollo trilogy, Gary Emrich’s Splashdown video marks an auspicious moment in American history by focusing on the profound events of July 18, 1969. The most-reported event of the day marked the midpoint of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon; a journey symbolic of unparalleled American ingenuity and scientific superiority that ultimately fulfilled the soaring vision of America’s earlier beloved President John F. Kennedy. On this day while the nation’s populace sat mesmerized in front of their television sets receiving updates from space, presidential hopeful and famous brother Senator Edward Kennedy was involved in a suspicious automobile crash on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts that ignited scandal in myriad ways. Tragically, the crash took the life of Mary Jo Kopechne, an accomplished young woman who worked for Senator Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign prior to his assassination in 1968. With the backdrop of the anguished Kennedy family legacy, Emrich’s rich visual imagery posits searing questions about privilege, the quest for excellence and the value of individual lives. Through poetic abstraction, the artist examines an unsettled psychological mood prompted by a disparity of fairness and its unforeseen consequence. Offering deep introspection into a particular moment of American culture, Splashdown’s thoroughly relevant qualities amidst the tense 2016 Presidential election-year climate, echoes both the hopeful yearning and cynicism dividing many citizens.

With a haunting score and a title that invokes a shudder in contemplating whether the splash in Splashdown is the triumphant Apollo lunar module returning to earth or Kennedy’s 1967 Oldsmobile hitting the water, Emrich gives measured and equal weight to these events. By conflating one journey consisting of 238,000 miles which ended in world-wide acclaim with another infamous journey that covered a mere four miles that ended in disgrace and senseless death, the artist makes clear how unforeseen alterations of assumed life-trajectories can occur. The video’s recurrent figure of St. Christopher, a Catholic icon invoked for safe transport, is a talisman against the associated risks of travel. In agreeing to carry the Christ child across a river, St. Christopher also inadvertently agreed to carry the weight of the world since he could not know the heaviness that was the Christ child’s burden. Emrich’s use of this saint-like figure makes known that the risks and rewards of action are not always able to be fully calculated – just as sending men to the moon seemed far more perilous than a car ride with a wealthy notable politician. In utilizing acquired imagery and filming miniature objects scaled to monumental size coupled with keenly masterful observational interpretation, Emrich states that he creates metaphors for the dynamic of unpredictable rewards and consequences; scenarios that redefine the notion of risk. Of equal value to Emrich in exploring the past, such investigations also soundly resonate in the present.

Gary Emrich has a BA from the University of Colorado and an MFA from the Art Institute, Chicago. His photography and video work has been shown in museums and art centers such as Denver Art Museum, Bemis Art Center, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Mizel Center for Arts and Culture, Singer Gallery, Mizel Arts Center, Dallas Museum of Art, Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA, Phinney Art Center, Seattle, WA, and more. In addition to exhibitions, Emrich has received numerous grants and awards including: COvisions Fellowship in Media Arts, Colorado Council on the Arts, Creative Fellowship in Media Arts, Colorado Council on the Arts, two Production Grants, Western States Regional Media Arts, Showcase Video Award, 14th Atlanta Film and Video Festival, Director’s Grant, Colorado Council on the Arts and a Collaboration Grant, Colorado Council on the Arts. Emrich’s works are part of the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Film Arts Anthology, New York, Denver Art Museum, Belger Museum, Kansas City, MO, City of Denver, Detroit Zoological Society, State of Colorado, Continental Illinois National Bank of Chicago, and University of Colorado Art Museum.

With his new Inundation series, Kevin O’Connell shifts his signature photographic views of the expansive Western landscape toward the contrasting tumultuous seas which in their vastness push the edge of the artist’s picture plane. O’Connell’s previously exhibited landscape views included series of stately energy wind turbines, transmission towers and oil separators as seen through a formal lens. O’Connell’s Inundation series brims with an emotive visual energy. While the theme of water, or the lack of it, has often been conceptually pivotal throughout previous O’Connell series, this is his first body of work devoted to water for its shape-shifting emotional content; its very fury a potential source of contemplation. Without his customary centric compositions and anchoring horizon line, O’Connell’s precipitous, nearly abstracted views in a muted palette instead explore a psychologically-charged and philosophically-influenced view of water and in doing so, the artist acknowledges humanity’s universal connection to the sea. For O’Connell, the sea is tempestuous in nature, but simultaneously, there is also a kind of surrender; a release to the inundating waves even as the sea’s allure might prove to be emanating a siren song. The video’s random abstraction, activated by the ocean’s ebb and flow, possesses both recognizable bubbling sounds and mysterious pressure noises that are an intentional juxtaposition to the sweeping romantic sound of waves crashing on the shore.

With the eloquent accompanying text as poetic as his photographic imagery, O’Connell shares the personal within the exhibition:

Kevin O’Connell is a graduate of Purdue University and the University of Denver. He has twice been a Ucross Fellowship recipient and has exhibited in solo shows at MCA Denver and the Aspen Art Museum, Nicolaysen Art Museum, Casper, Wyoming, and in groups shows at the Arvada Center and Denver Art Museum, among others. His work is included in the permanent museum collections of Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Museum of Fine Art Houston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris, Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Ross Art Museum, Wesleyan University along with Qwest Communications, Inc., Kaiser Permanente, Inc., Fidelity Investments, Inc., Captiva Resources, Inc. and many other corporate and private collections such as the Denver Convention Center Hotel. O’Connell’s work will be included in of an upcoming exhibition at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona.

As a continuation of his remarkable In the Roaring Garden video which ingeniously re-envisioned Henry David Thoreau’s iconic cabin and the watery landscape on Walden Pond, William Lamson offers In the Roaring Garden (Rotation), a video which turns and transforms his previous work upside down – literally and figuratively. To place the new work in context, the first In the Roaring Garden (previously exhibited at Robischon Gallery), was originally commissioned for the deCordova Museum’s introspective Walden Revisited exhibition which examined Thoreau’s experiment of living a life of self-reliance in concert with, not against, nature – a notion with thoroughly contemporary and even life-altering implications today. In the Roaring Garden involved the creation of a floating camera obscura, in this case, a cabin-like room that served as an optical device where light passed through an opening to illuminate an interior surface as it projected an exterior image, upside-down in color and in perspective to record a video of the landscape as it moved over the 1:5 scale model walls of Thoreau’s cabin reimagined by Lamson as an artist’s studio. In the resulting previous video, the projected image of the Waldon Pond landscape moved ceaselessly over the interior of the one-room cabin illuminating the walls, furniture and tools within the space. Lamson captured mesmerizing sparkling sunlight reflected off water, meditative clouds and swaying green trees as they crept across his imagined interior; all to the sound of lapping waves, rushing water and birdsong over the course of the peaceful eighteen-minute video.

In contrast to the sublime stillness of watching the projected images of the changing landscape move across the static objects of the imagined artist studio of the first video, In the Roaring Garden (Rotation) disrupts Lamson’s illusionistic space by closing off the aperture to the natural world outside and physically rotating the model upside down. The forces of Nature are seen through a different lens, one of disruption and gravity, as they play out in characteristic poetic Lamson fashion where overwhelming physical forces meet a kind of objectness symbolic of human endeavor. In contrast to the languorous passing of virtual days and nights of the In the Roaring Garden video, an uncanny choreography of In the Roaring Garden (Rotation) offers a tumbled view, one disconnected from an ordered nature to something at odds with it as furniture slides up walls in non-conforming disarray. Shafts of light pierce the windowless, rotating interior through the narrow cracks between the floor, walls and ceiling in a strangely different presentation from the clear, expansive landscape of illumination which manifested in the earlier work. The entire set, model, props and rotating armature floated upon a raft on the Hutchinson River in the Bronx, New York, located at the edge of the northernmost borough where numerous transportation networks and a massive public housing infrastructure reside. The landscape remains entirely invisible in the video, yet its undercurrent is felt through the drone-like sound of passing cars and the chaos of the never-ceasing urban activity. By exploring two videos through a singular inspiration and more broadly moving into the investigation of equilibrium itself, Lamson makes clear the contrast between the condition of being in harmony or in direct opposition to it. As in most all of Lamson’s work, what is explored is the pursuit of the everyman to harness Nature, but what is ultimately revealed is something wholly uncertain.

A 2014 recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, William Lamson has an MFA from Bard College and a BA from Dartmouth College. His work has been shown widely throughout the US and Europe including the Brooklyn Museum, MOMA PS1, Kunsthalle Erfut, Moscow Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver and many others. He has created site-specific installations for the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Storm King Art Center, Indianapolis Museum of Art and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. His work is in permanent museum collections including Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and numerous private collections. A MacDowell Fellow, he has also received honors from Shifting Foundation and the Experimental Television Center.

Emerging artist Brandon Bultman’s large-scale sculptures prompt investigation as they often provoke a variety of responses ranging from an initial playful engagement to a much deeper psychological inquiry. In his first ambitions 2012 Robischon Gallery solo exhibition, Bultman created a sculpture made from a decaying, overturned 1959 Buick station wagon. The upturned rusted vehicle was planted with native grasses which symbolized the inevitable cyclical renewal and the acknowledgment that growth often follows even the most catastrophic, upending events. For Aphelion, Bultman expands on such universal themes of humanity’s place within the larger order and humankind’s quest for essential meaning. The four imposing sculptures of the exhibition are actual water buoys that the artist altered and designed. The large grey and black forms, one seemingly weightless and hovering, are placed together so that considered movement must be undertaken within the gallery space to take in or meet each work. The discovery of the text on the forms shifts the focus into a consideration of the compelling prompts posed by the artist. In their original incarnation, Bultman’s inflated conical forms serve as directional sailboat race lane-makers directing order where the sky meets the water. In the confines of the gallery, the sculptures serve to impose a directive or attention toward a more expansive path – one that is philosophically vast.

As research for the series, Bultman examined author Eugene Thacker’s assertions from In the Dust of This Planet including the three ways of interpreting the world: 1) the world-for-us, or the world in which we live; 2) the world-in-itself, or the inaccessible world that we then turn into the world-for-us; and 3) the world-without-us, or the spectral and speculative world. Thacker notes, The world-without-us allows us to think the world-in-itself may co-exist with the world-for-us—indeed the human being is defined for its impressive capacity for not recognizing this distinction. By contrast the world-without-us is the subtraction of the human from the world. Moved by these ideas, Bultman was further inspired by the definitions to the words APHELION and APOGEE. Respectively defined as the farthest away from the sun and the farthest away from the earth, aphelion and apogee primarily derive their meaning from the proximity of celestial or man-made objects in space. In Bultman’s order, the same terms are amplified in meaning when considering the charged pronoun we along with the accompanying sculptures in relationship such as, the forms labeled APATHY, a word connoting a blind eye to humanity’s problems and MORTAL AGONY, a moment filled with suffering in contrast to the perceived stillness of death. Signaling a kind of ultimate in human experience, perhaps as its wake-up, Bultman calls to the personal within reality. He states, Pain is a reminder that we are very much alive; it is body consciousness in its most urgent form. In a unique position, the APATHY sculpture is the only unmoored work, able to move with the currents around it, as much of the world might at times be forced to follow other psychological paths including those of fear. Bultman states further, Our inability to comprehend the finitude of our own existence within the black seas of the infinite universe is a constant source of cosmic dread; as a fear of the unknown. In offering the associative words and phrases on objects used as directional markers, Bultman ignites inquiry into the heart of the human condition as he acknowledges a shared dilemma. His directional objects possess a kind of admonition to balance nihilist and pessimistic thinking with intervention and correction. It is the persistent buoyancy of Bultman sculptures that in the end affirm optimism; a metaphor for an insistent belief in the human ability to shift back into balance after disequilibrium, once its course location is realized and the larger truths are revealed.

Brandon Bultman has a BFA from Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and an MFA, Summa Cum Laude, from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. A RISD Fellowship Award recipient and a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson Vermont, Bultman has exhibited at the Kingston Sculpture Biennial, Kingston, NY, Flux Factory, NY, NY, RISD Sculpture Triennial, the Biennial of the Americas, McNichols Civic Center Park, along with numerous exhibitions at his respective alma maters and several galleries throughout Denver and Rhode Island.