Robischon Gallery presents four dynamic concurrent exhibitions linking tangential themes on the subject of water. Colorado artists, Stephen Batura and Sami Al Karim, along with California-based artist Elena Dorfman and Quebec’s Isabelle Hayeur, powerfully express their unique reflections on water’s indivisible connection to all things. Each artist’s varied practice and approach, via painting, photography or video sensitively conveys an experience of water through the lens of memory, identity, place and scale. As water universally reflects its local circumstance of geology, politics, economics and more, the four exhibitions on view equally pursue a range of psychological currents; communicating a sense of the potency of restless floodwaters, the confounding beauty of a forgotten, urban riverbank and the intimacy of water’s ability to bring about renewal while it manifests the light of the world around. The considerable works of Batura, Al Karim, Dorfman and Hayeur each allow for the eye to drift freely while finding a bridge between water’s troubled pathways and those which are also serene.

Stephen Batura
Robischon Gallery is pleased to present “Floodplain,” the fourth solo exhibition for Colorado artist Stephen Batura. Recognized for his previous painting series of large and small-scale abstracted landscape and figurative works inspired by circa 1900s photography, Batura’s loose and light-filled ethereal mark served his past exploration well, as he delved deeply into the photographic monochromatic views of early 20thC Western life. Through his layered casein brushwork, the artist’s handling of his wide-ranging and often wildly dramatic subject matter, such as train wrecks or the aftermath of a collapsing mine, Batura captured a kind of dreamlike, yet specific memory of the West. Most notable of this previous work is Batura’s decade-long project reinterpreting in the aliveness of paint, the entire photographic archive of turn-of-the-century Colorado recluse and photographer Charles Lillybridge.

While incorporating Lillybridge in part for the “Floodplain” exhibition, Stephen Batura also circles round to present a parallel, non-historical exploration of his mark-making to include, along with new paintings, an earlier massive-scale work by the same title. The painting impressively anchors the large gallery space and overtly conveys another aspect of the artist’s work in which Batura pursues a different direction away from abstracting historical images and toward referencing his own manipulated photographs. Batura’s original photograph of the Colorado River further engaged the artist’s commitment to abstraction and as a result the singular, large-scale twelve-foot tall by forty-foot wide painting was achieved. Inhabiting the gallery’s expansive fifty-foot wall, the massive work is one of several paintings which explore in varying scale the nuanced shifts of light as refracted on the river’s surface. True of all of the artist’s water or surrounding landscape subjects is that they take shape through abstraction with Batura’s masterful, revealing brushwork of unexpected form and subtle hues, actively translating the feeling of flowing water within changing environments. In this way, the major scale, multi-paneled Floodplain painting hints at the encompassing volume of water that might ensue during or following a flood, while simultaneously offering a close up view of the nature of water itself. And while a flood typically represents a disaster, like the artist’s previous and spectacular train-wreck subjects of the West, Batura’s lens and sensitive expression presents another way of seeing – a point of view which is in equal measure immersive and contemplative as it considers the potent mark of water on the land and the constant presence of light revealed on an ever-shifting surface.

Stephen Batura is a Denver painter who received his B.F.A. from the University of Colorado. His work has been shown at the Denver Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Arvada Center for the Arts, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, Denmark, Denver Public Library, Mizel Arts Center, Sangre de Cristo Arts Center and more. A recipient of numerous grants and awards, Batura has been recognized through several public commissions including a 30 by 25 foot lobby mural at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House in the historic Auditorium Theater. The Denver Art Museum has a Batura painting in its permanent collection and in addition to the opera house mural, the artist’s public art projects include a Red Rocks Amphitheater Visitor’s Center mural and the Lowry Trios, a 12-panel installation at the Schlessman branch of the Denver Public Library, 3 Paintings for the James Walsh United States Courthouse, Tucson, Arizona and an beloved 8 by 24 foot mural in LoDo’s Union Station. Stephen Batura is currently painting toward a solo exhibition in 2016 at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

Sami Al Karim
In his third Robischon Gallery showing Iraqi born, Denver artist Sami Al Karim explores a transcendent view of Nature and the nature of self in his on-going photographic “Dream” series. As a political exile from his Iraqi homeland along with his brother and fellow Robischon Gallery artist Halim Al Karim, Sami Al Karim’s artistic mark is passionate, meaningful and hard won. Al Karim directly experienced what it is to be disconnected from family, friends and country over many years of his life, as well as being profoundly challenged by the question of what defines a personal identity. This soul-searching quest was put to the test many times, but no more dramatically than as a citizen under the military rule of Iraq’s brutal Suddam Hussein regime. Those in authority attempted to strip away all dignity from the artist, just as ruthlessly as they did many of their countrymen and women. Mindfully acknowledged by the artist, the statement that Sami Al Karim endured extreme incarceration under a death sentence as a political prisoner at the notorious Baghdad Abu Ghraib prison is one of the many pivotal points in the artist’s life. Remarkably, Al Karim not only survived, but his spirit did not succumb to the prison’s incomprehensible confines.

Equally inconceivable, is the fact that Al Karim had been imprisoned for the so-called crime of displaying a heartfelt “Peace for All” sign outside his window, which by some twisted view, was offensive to the authorities. Despite all, the indomitable impulse of Al Karim’s soul to create was kept kindled by sheer will and imagination and his stunning mark-making became a life line for him. The idea for the artist’s “Dream” series was first born in prison, when Al Karim came to feel that if he could somehow envision all of the vast skies, bodies of water and varying terrains of the world that he would be able to access something far more powerful than the oppression he was forced to endure. His sincerest belief held that since each individual was part of Nature, each human being was then Nature itself; with all of its tumult and breathtaking beauty. Nature could endure all and renew itself - so therefore it was possible that each individual could do the same.

From Al Karim’s imagination to its first mark made, the artist’s “Dream” series was manifested through impossible means and humble mark-making within the walls of the prison. Al Karim states, "There was a small layer of salt on the cement walls and each night, surrounded by many sleeping cell mates, I used a piece of wood to make the outline of my “Dream” paintings. I had to erase the whole drawing before each morning came when the guards visited the cells." The artist conveyed that for anyone to even see Al Karim’s mark on the walls was potentially a very dangerous situation in and of itself. Having survived his unspeakable incarceration and over the many years later, these clandestine drawings coalesced with Al Karim’s memories of what it was like to be outdoors in nature prior to his imprisonment and then finally free. This full breath expression now resides at the heart of the artist’s “Dream” photographs. Comprised of multiple images from select locations from Europe, the Middle East and the US, Al Karim imbues the layered imagery with a passionate intensity informed by his past perilous experiences; ineffable in their origin and palpably felt.

While his works may reflect personal losses, they reflect humanity’s resilience even more. What is truest for Sami Al Karim, now as a proud American citizen living in Denver, is that each work speaks to a profound understanding that Nature, for the artist, stands for the highest in humanity, a potency and a transcendent force, the singular constant in the world. The artist states, "Art can present an alternative to what people think they realize or to what they expect to know which might otherwise be too painful or too extreme to experience. I try to capture a single moment when home and exile do not seem opposed to each other, but are parts of the single process of our existence. Through my work, I recognize the possibility that there are no true boundaries in our lives.”

Sami Al Karim attended the Baghdad Academy of Fine Art in Baghdad, Iraq, Metropolitan State College and has a BFA with honors from the University of Colorado. Al Karim’s photography is in the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum and the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce. He has exhibited across the world in solo exhibitions in New York, USA, Dubai, UAE, Casablanca, Morocco, Istanbul, Turkey and Bologna, Italy, Sharjah, UAE among others, and was invited to participate in the Florence Biennale, Italy, and the Lampemusa, Museo Archeologico Lampedusa, Italy. Al Karim was recognized with an award at the Rocky Mountain Biennial at the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art and his work is currently on view at the Yinchuan MOCA near Beijing, China through December 6, 2015.

Elena Dorfman
Robischon Gallery proudly presents “Sublime: L. A. River,” the second solo exhibition of Los Angeles based artist Elena Dorfman. In Dorfman’s previous exhibition entitled “Empire Falling,” the artist’s initial intent was to explore the secretive communities of Midwest rock jumpers who risk their lives leaping off hidden precipices into the pools created from quarried excavations. But as Dorfman began her investigation, it was the jumpers’ remote terrain which inspired the artist toward a shift in concept and her project underwent a radical transformation. Deeply intrigued and moved by the vast rock landscapes, Dorfman created, at the time, her first series of landscape-based photography as she pursued the strangely beautiful, isolated and abandoned rocky terrains that once were the sites of great industry.

Continuing on a similar landscape-based focus of the earlier “Empire Falling” series, for the artist’s newest, “Sublime: L.A. River,” Dorfman utilizes her signature, painstakingly-complex process of compiling her photographs into multilayered works to chronicle a kind of visual passage of the Los Angeles River. Home to the early settlers, the banks of the river and the exponentially expanding L. A. metropolis were at odds. In 1938, the city elected to encase the river in concrete in an effort to tame the devastating floods of the early 20th C – and ever since then, the river has largely been ignored. Walking and photographing the fifty-two mile-long riverbank and then sifting through twenty-two thousand of these photographs as well as historic wet-plate images, Dorfman references an ongoing landscape tradition, including the Hudson River School, a mid-19th C American art movement whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. As both the Hudson River School and the Los Angeles River were established in 1825, Dorfman’s painterly photographs offer allegorical references to the cyclical ebb and flow between the civilized and the callous, the cycle through social and cultural development, and the descent into ruin and back again. This newest compelling series by the artist stands as a timely consideration – in particular, for a part of the West which continues to struggle with a protracted drought – but also as a highly-illuminated expression of the universal truth which offers that the precious commodity of water continues to be at the mercy of both the whims of man and Nature itself.

Elena Dorfman has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and attended the University of Vienna, Austria. A finalist for the BMW Prize, Paris Photo, Elena Dorfman’s photographs and video installations have been exhibited in both the US and worldwide at venues including the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, the Triennale di Milano, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 21c Museum, Louisville, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art while acclaimed in various publications including Art News, and Aperture, among others, and is included in numerous collections including the Denver Art Museum. Her work is the subject of three previous monographs, Empire Falling (2013) Fandomania: Characters & Cosplay (Aperture, 2007), Still Lovers (Channel Photographics, 2005) and the catalog The Pleasure Park (Modernism, 2009).

Isabelle Hayeur
Robischon Gallery offers its second solo exhibition of Canadian artist Isabelle Hayeur’s powerfully poetic and environmentally provocative video installation. With intent to illuminate both environmental and human rights issues, Hayeur’s photography and video works typically shed light on contentious, ongoing societal debates such as the consequences of gentrifying city infrastructures or the aftermath of watery disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. In her previously exhibited video at Robischon Gallery entitled Flow, the viewer entered a vast and comforting, pristine natural world – though eventually, as is signature for the artist, a kind of submersion takes place where environments shift to those which are purposefully disorienting followed by hyper-focused images of industry at work.

Also known for bravely projecting her videos in unusual or even forbidding venues such as long-abandoned industrial sites, Hayeur has endured calls to ban her work for its political content. One such site-specific video entitled Fire with Fire, which incited protests, utilized projections of flame in an abandoned building as a way to call attention to social inequities of urban decay. Each night that the artist’s piece was projected firefighters consequently discovered that they had been unnecessarily summoned to a fake fire. It was an enthralling, if provocative and passionate work intended to sincerely communicate through symbol that something larger was amiss within the city.

Presented in this current exhibition, the artist’s new and many layered Solastalgia video evolved as a response to the concept created by the Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht. The concept, termed solastalgia, defines a feeling of unease tied to the upheavals and mutations experienced due to environmental changes. This universal feeling or condition of homesickness felt when still at home, or when familiar surroundings have been altered or grown strange, can perhaps be further described as a loss of bearings – a concept which marries well with Hayeur’s identifiable visual vocabulary. The artist’s recognized technique of filming just below or at the surface of water, as in her previously shown video entitled Flow makes visible, within its defined environmentally charged footage, a kind of disequilibrium or imbalance. In Solastalgia, the sensation is heightened yet gracefully interwoven with variations; from the specificity of a seemingly active flooding of a home’s interior to a painterly treatment of far off silhouetted figures in boats. Such haunting imagery within the video measures both the distress and the dream while the artist creates a sense of “holding reality in suspension” by positioning imagery of a human presence, side by side with Nature’s inevitable potential. As in all of her series, Isabelle Hayeur reveals her dedication toward illuminating, through artistic means, the reflection and influence of humankind on earth, as it continues to affect the planet with its rising world population and industrial, technological, societal appetites. In keeping, Hayeur’s Solastalgia is a deeply layered and complex work, intended to not only spark a dialogue surrounding ongoing environmental concerns, but at its core, through the experiential vehicle of video, Hayeur means to inhabit the personal along the way.

With both a BFA and MFA from Univesité du Québec á Montréal, Isabelle Hayeur’s work has been widely exhibited in numerous international museums, galleries and film festivals including: Today Art Museum, Beijing, the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, the Tampa Museum of Art, Akbank Sanat in Istanbul and Kassell Documentary Film and Video Festival. A retrospective exhibition was devoted to Hayeur by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and Oakville Galleries. Featuring a monograph, her “Flow” exhibition has been shown in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Alberta. She took part in the Arles Rencontres internationales de la photographie’s Découverte Prize. A recipient of fellowships, awards and residencies, Hayeur’s works are part of many permanent collections such as: the National Gallery of Canada, the Fonds national d'art contemporain in Paris, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. In 2012, Denver’s public art program at Denver International Airport commissioned a Hayeur video entitled Rising, a projection of an illusory and seemingly endless airport hallway at the Jeppesen Terminal located on the fifth level.