Other Backgrounds
Colby Deal, Gustav Hamilton, Aitor Lajarin-Encina, Leslie Macklin, Juliette Lee, and Joo Yeon Woo prominently embed, expand landscape, and unwind through entry points to common cultural place. Each of these artist’s works explore crucial and overlooked ideas of displacement, identity, social inclusion, criticized immigration, and patterned assimilation. The exhibition presents continuous evolving conversations pertinent to a wide variety of regions that include the metropolitan, rural, and urban areas alike. The year 2020 has boiled into turmoil and introspection - an index of necessary belonging that lasts and doesn’t tend to be ignored is expanding into a sense of our relations to one another. Other Backgrounds is a place to go and a place beyond familiar views.
Curators: Sammy Lee, George P Perez, Derrick Velazquez
Aitor Lajarin-Encina "My Shadow Is My Shade" Acrylic on canvas, 2020
Aitor Lajarin-Enncina "Windows #2" Acrylic on canvas, 2020
Aitor Lajarin-Encina "Windows #1" Acrylic on canvas, 2020
Gustav Hamilton "For what it's worth" Glazed ceramic, 2020
Gustav Hamilton "The view" Glazed Ceramic, 2019
Gustav Hamilton "Now and Forever" Glazed ceramic, 2019
Leslie Macklin "In-Tension" (Lantern Series) Porcelain mining lamp, wheat pasted image, found objects, 2019
Leslie Macklin "Sacred" (Lantern Series) Porcelain mining lamp, wheat pasted image, found objects, 2019
Leslie Macklin "Volititle" (Lantern Series) Porcelain mining lamp, wheat pasted image, found objects, 2019
Leslie Macklin "Without Constraint" (Lantern Series) Porcelain mining lamp, wheat pasted image, found objects, 2019
Joo Yeon Woo "Gyopo Portraits" Embossing on paper, 2018
Joo Yeon Woo "Gyopo Portraits" Embossing on paper, 2018
Colby Deal "Bushwacker" Gelatin silver print, 2017
Colby Deal "Ethereal" Gelatin silver print, 2017
Colby Deal "Henry II & Henry III" Gelatin silver print, 2017
Juliette Lee "To Be Alive, The Softest Splendor" Installation and video, 2018
A Zoom Conversation with the artists and curators.
About the Curators
Sammy Lee is an artist based in Denver, Colorado. Lee was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to Southern California at the age of sixteen. She studied fine art and media art at UCLA and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Among her many accomplishments is a performative collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma during the Bach project tour in 2018. Lee is recently a resident artist at Redline, serves as an ambassador for Asian Art at Denver Art Museum, and operates a contemporary art project and residency space, called Collective SML | k in Santa Fe Art District, Denver.
Lee's work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in collections at the Getty Research Institute, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Spencer Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, and the Spanish National Library in Madrid.
Derrick Velasquez is an artist and exhibition organizer who lives and works in Denver, CO. He is on the board of Tilt West and Minerva Projects and runs Yes Ma’am Projects, an artist run gallery in the basement of his Athmar Park home.
Velasquez’s work has been shown nationally and internationally with solo shows at The MCA Denver, Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia), Robischon Gallery, Galerie Robertson Arés (Montreal) and recent group exhibitions at Carvahlo Park (New York), Flowers Gallery (New York) University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a 2017 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors and 2019 MacDowell Fellow.
George P. Perez (b. OCT 7 1987) received a BFA (Cum Laude) in 2014 from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Perez is an artist whose work explores mundane situations and scenarios that he interacts with on a day-to-day basis. He is a Redline artist alum (2014-2016), was an Artist-in Residence at The Denver Children's Museum in 2018, and a recent recipient of the Octopus Initiative MCA Denver Grant. He currently is a Photo-Facilitator with Working Assumptions based out of Berkeley, CA and an artist in M12, an award winning artist collective that specializes in rural aesthetics and landscape.
Perez has shown up and down the Front Range and outside of the state that include: (Un)Clothed, Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO, 2013; Archetype Drift: New Methods of Photography Making, Johalla Projects, Chicago, IL, 2013; 2014; BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS,GOCA121, Colorado Springs, CO, 2015; Monumental: RedLine’s Annual Resident Artist Exhibition, Redline Gallery, Denver, CO, 2016; Visitation, grayDuck Gallery, Austin, TX, 2016; and Liminal Space/Espacio Liminal, Museo De Las Americas, Denver, CO, 2019. He has participated as a CCI presenter on topics of "Increasing Exclusivity in the Arts Community and "The Importance of Youth Voice in the Arts" with PlatteForum, an innovative arts, youth-development, and artist-in-residence program in Denver.