Rainbow Above The Ruins

LOCATION: Dateline - 3004 Larimer St

CATEGORY: Art Events

PAST DATE AND TIME:

• Fri, Jun 4, 2021 - Sat, Jun 26, 2021  

Dateline is ecstatic to announce Rainbow Above The Ruins, the newest exhibition of collaborative works by artist duo Jennifer Lord and Noah Travis Phillips.

For more than a decade, Jennifer Lord and Noah Travis Phillips (née The Secret Third) have been making and exhibiting work. Initially, they worked together in Salt Lake City, where they met, creating numerous artists' books. More recently, they have exhibited across the Front Range (Nalanda Gallery and Dead Leaf Gallery) and beyond (Sluice in London and virtually on reality beach).

The central thread of Lord’s practice is an expression of the aliveness and harmony of the natural world. They present simultaneity as a visual method and theoretical philosophy. Combining representation and abstraction through vigorous gestures, small marks, staining, monoprinting, and masking, Lord’s work activates spacious alternatives.

Phillips is an exceptional hunter-gatherer of personal arcana, collecting and remediating, their work grows from their private media archive. Their appropriative practice is one of “utopian plagiarism” (Ricardo Dominguez via Zach Blas). Made, found, and modified media are remixed in ways that help us to see and illuminate the present.

For this iteration of their collaboration, the colorful, concomitant paintings of Lord are remixed through the nuanced collage and montage strategies practiced by Phillips. Rainbow Above the Ruins presents these collaborative pieces alongside the solo work of each artist creating speculative ecologies.

Simultaneity and multi-centering is a shared aesthetic and political goal between the artists. Simultaneity suggests the multiplicitous, creating and containing realities that are both/and, and, and. In the work, each image, scene or perspectival shift, in the case of Phillips and Lord respectively, has its own voice. The images in combination or “affective proximity” (John Akomfrah via Arthur Jafa) create other meaning(s), and the piece as a whole composition offers yet another interpretation. These intra-contextual works in relationship to one another deeply layer and amplify meaning(s). Anarchistic and romantic, full of fragility and force, Rainbow Above the Ruins opens alternatives, finding (new/old) ways to be wild in a world that is (al)so wild.