Fan Mail 2.0
February 3rd – April 1st, 2023
Co-Curated by Hyperlink Collective
The internet has become a hotbed for communication, collaboration, and connection in ways that no one could have imagined. With the rise of social media, artists and creators around the world are able to disseminate imagery and gain exposure to other artists and institutions in the blink of an eye. While this has greatly increased a sense of global participation, the internet and social media often hinders one’s ability to make the same meaningful connections that are cultivated when co-existing in proximity.
Hyperlink, formed in 2014, is a nebulous artist collective dedicated to alternative artistic experiences, practices, opportunities, and expanding community. With Fan Mail 2.0, Hyperlink aims to straddle the boundary between virtual connection and physical action by asking each of its members to select an artist they are interested in, inspired by, and a fan of and then inviting them to show their work in the context of our community.
Purposely, Fan Mail 2.0, doesn’t privilege the buddy-system but seeks a new paradigm. We ask each other how we, as artists, may create new connections and present artworks we desire to share and voices that we long to hear. Through collaboration with distant communities, we can form lasting relationships that continue to influence the creative practices of those involved and those who come to view it. We envision that through thoughtful conversations and shared efforts, the divisions created by time, space, and geography collapse.
Featured Artists: Holly Berg, Kathryn Cameron, Roger Allan Cleaves, Marina Eckler, Philippe Hyojung Kim, Christopher Lin, London Matthews, Aida Lizalde, Ricardo iamuuri Robinson, and Claire Simpson
Public Programming
Local Theater Company Local Listens: Queer Lineage play readings
May 1 @ 7:30 pm
Free – $57.50
Join us for staged readings of two new short plays inspired by the stories of LGBTQ+ Coloradans across generations. This event marks the culmination of our season-long project, Local Listens: Queer Lineage. Tickets are pay-what-you-will. All are welcome!
Throughout the season, Local Theater Company brought together LGBTQ+ community members, ages 19 to 92, in facilitated story circles. These stories inspired the two 45-minute plays written by Steven J. Burge, Julie Rada and Miriam Suzanne.
Following the performances, we invite you to stay for a facilitated conversation about the plays — an opportunity to reflect, respond, and continue the dialogue together.
Learn more about the project and hear selected stories on our website.
Local Listens: Queer Lineage is supported in part by the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation, the Alex Wilson Fund and Cassandra Simon.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Local Listens is a community-inspired new play initiative that focuses on a single social issue for one year. In an increasingly-digital world, Local Listens intentionally gathers community members in a room, face-to-face, for important, informative, and illuminating conversations. These story circles, held at the beginning of every season, inspire short plays that are presented at the conclusion of the season. In order to enrich the experience for you, our audience, throughout the season we showcase a traveling portrait gallery featuring story circle participants. Each portrait is accompanied with an audio recording of a story the subject shared. Listen to these stories and discover the humans behind these complex issues. A resource guide is provided, offering unbiased context.
Research shows that people understand, remember, and act on complex social issues more effectively when they are conveyed through lived experience rather than abstract data. Stories increase empathy, reduce resistance to difficult topics, and foster shared understanding across differences making them a powerful tool for civic dialogue and social change.
Local Listens seeks to build bridges across the chasm of community divides.
Exhibition Documentation
Featured Artist Profiles
Holly Berg is a Milwaukee, WI. based ceramic artist. She earned her BFA in Ceramics from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2007 and Masters in Art Therapy with concentration in Counseling from Mt Mary University in 2014. In the fall of 2022 she relocated her studio to a shared storefront where she operates both her studio practice and small shop of ceramic work open to the public. Her work is influenced by time spent near the shores of Lake Michigan, gaining inspiration from the relationship of land and water. Aiming to capture the temporal elements of nature as a way to reflect our relatedness in the living process as human beings. She utilizes handbuilding and wheel thrown techniques in clay as a way to capture subtle occurrences found in the natural world. It is her intention that her work reflects an emphasis on momentary occurrences in effort to capture impermanence.
Kathryn Cameron is an American artist living and working in New York. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kutztown University in cinema, photography, and television production and has been trained in art at several institutions in New York since 1990. She studied sculpture, painting, and printmaking at The National Academy Museum and School in New York. She also studied sculpture and painting at the School of Visual Arts and the New York Academy of Arts, and paper making at Carriage House Paper in Brooklyn, NY. She is the exhibition curator and a faculty member at the New York School of the Arts in New York City where she teaches courses and workshops in Sculpture, Working with Paper and Working with Paper Clay.
Her work explores the fragility of the mind, body, and spirit, using a variety of materials: papers, pure pigments, paper clay and wood are the sources for an organized world of
poetry and sound. Using what the earth has to offer, she attempts to work in total harmony and connection with the environment. The interaction of these elements becomes a way to interpret and observe the relationship between man and nature.
Kathryn Cameron has exhibited nationally and internationally through solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums and Centers for the Arts. She created several site-specific indoor and outdoor works in the USA, Europe, and New Zealand. Her work is included in private and public collections in the United States, Europe, and New Zealand.
Roger Allan Cleaves was born in Memphis, TN where he currently lives and works. He received his Bachelors of Fine Art at the University of Memphis. During his tenure at the University of Memphis he was one of fifteen undergraduate students selected from across the country to participate in the Yale Norfolk Summer program for the arts. Cleaves went on to study at the University of Wisconsin- Madison where he received his MFA.
Marina Eckler is an interdisciplinary artist and art educator who has lived and worked in Colorado since the early 2000’s. She was born in Connecticut and grew up in an ice rink in Southern California. She received a BA in Studio Art from San Francisco State University in 1999 and an MFA from Maine College of Art and Design in 2013. Her broad artistic practice includes painting, drawing, zines, performance, objects, co-founding a conceptual bookstore, and creating works on paper inspired by the overlap between written and pictorial meaning. She lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado with her family and teaches Visual Art at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.
Philippe Hyojung Kim grew up in a small town outside of Nashville, TN, and moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2013. He experiments with materials and mediums in response to his immediate surroundings, making objects and environments that exist in the space between painting and sculpture. His work often references queer identity, artificiality, and language. He has shown nationally at galleries, museums, and alternative art spaces in Denver, Dallas, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, and Seattle.
Kim is a current member of SOIL and a co-founder/curator at Specialist, an experimental art gallery in downtown Seattle. He also teaches art and design courses at Seattle Central College and serves as one of the curators for the Washington State Arts Commission (ARTSWA). Kim received his MFA in Painting from Central Washington University and lives and works in Seattle with his husband, Drew, and their dog, Jack.
Christopher Lin is a Brooklyn-based artist and educator with a background in research science. Fueled by a lifelong obsession with fossils, his experimental installations, sculptures, and performances question the world we inhabit and envision the one we will leave behind. Often collaborating with non-human organisms or wider ecologies, his time-based works synthesize elements of environmental ecology with meditative practices to explore the interconnected nature of our material world. After receiving a BA from Yale University and an MFA from Hunter College, Lin was awarded the C12 Emerging Artist Fellowship in 2016. He has shown work and performed throughout New York City, including at: SVA Curatorial Practice, ABC No Rio, Recess Art, Flux Factory, Wave Hill, the United Nations, and the Queens Museum. He was a 2020 Bronx Museum AIM Emerging Artist Fellow and a 2022 Wave Hill Winter Workspace Artist-in-Residence. He currently teaches at Hunter College and Parsons, The New School and is co-director of the research-based artist collective, Sprechgesang Institute.
As an interdisciplinary artist, London Matthews’ figurative narratives explore the micro and macro impact of the relationship between body and self. Inspired by abstraction and expressionism, she leans into specific and obsessive color palettes which ground and evolve her work in time and place. Her artistic practice, rooted in painting and complemented by sculpture, textiles, and photography, inspires a personal and collective rebalancing of self and skin through evocative mark-making.
Born and raised in Eagle, Idaho, London received her Bachelors in Fine Arts with an emphasis in Drawing and Painting from the University of Utah. She currently lives and works in Salt Lake City.
Aida Lizalde (b. 1990) grew up in Aguascalientes Mx. until the age of fifteen when her immediate family migrated to the Central Valley of California. She obtained a bachelor’s in Studio Art and a minor in Art History from the University of California, Davis. She is currently an MFA Candidate in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond until 2023.
Lizalde has been awarded the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, the Young Space Grant, the Hopkins Endowment for Studio Art Students, the Crocker Kingsley Art Award, and the Herb Alpert Scholarship for Emerging Young Artists. She was a resident at Vermont Studio Center in 2017 and Casa Lu in 2020.
Lizalde’s work has been exhibited at Axis Gallery in Sacramento, Galeria 54 and Casa Lu in Mexico City, The School of Visual Arts Curatorial Project Space in New York, the Sierra Nevada University Gallery in Tahoe, Holland Project Gallery in Reno, CCA Hubbell Street Galleries, Southern Exposure, and SOMArts in San Francisco, Chandra Cerrito Contemporary in Oakland, the Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato, among others.
Ricardo iamuuri Robinson is a composer, sound recordist and audiovisual artist. His work explores the ancestry of sound born from object and space. He is founder and owner of SONARCHEOLOGY STUDIOS, a field recording service dedicated to the production of all things related to sound. The work of SONARCHEOLOGY STUDIOS has been featured in live performances and films including Sustainability Pioneers, funded by the Heinz Foundations; and Translations, part of the CSA Series at the New Hazlett Theater. His newest works, THE STEEL-FONICS is temporary site-based sound installation at The Carrie Furnaces Nation Historic Landmark. Mars is Underwater, is an audiovisual performance. A silent film accompanied by an original improvisational score. Mars is Underwater has been performed at the Pittsburgh Gallery Crawl and Afronaut(a) 2.0 at Wagman Observatory, with more performances slated for 2015-2016.
Robinson’s work has been funded by Heinz Endowments, The Pittsburgh Foundation and the Lyman Fund, and was featured in the Emmy Award-winning documentaries In Country: Vietnam and Jim Crow Pennsylvania. He was named the 2013 RAW Artist of the Year, and was a 2014 Flight School Fellow.
Before dedicating a lot of his energy to sound recording and audiovisual art, Robinson established himself a vibrant career as a musician, recording and releasing two full albums: Conversations with Shepherds, Sheep, Guinea Pigs and Monkeys: Nursery Rhymes for the Underfed Minds, Vol. 1 and Conversations w/ Aliens, Automatons, Paper Kings and Plastic Dreams: Nursery Rhymes for the Unfettered Minds, Vol. 2. He has performed with bands and as a solo act in scores of venues around the country.
A lifelong resident of Pittsburgh, Robinson has been an active member of the city’s art and music scene for two decades, collaborating with dozens of local artists and working at some of the city’s premier venues.
Claire Simpson is a multidisciplinary artist active in the Denver Arts Community. Her focus is in human connections with the Earth through simulated reality and employs a variety of mediums including painting, ceramics, photography, and video. She earned her BFA at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, and has been awarded a residency at Anderson Ranch. She has exhibited in group exhibitions at TAXI AIR, the Phillip J. Steele Gallery, and Frist Art Museum among other venues. Her work has also been featured with the Sierra Club environmental organization.
Opening Reception
About Hyperlink
Hyperlink, formed in 2014, is a nebulous artist collective dedicated to alternative artistic experiences, practices, opportunities, and expanding community.
Initially Hyperlink formed as an alternative space in Chicago’s Zhou B Art Center, the links created through that experiment grew like roots sprouting new tendrils and has since moved from a brick and mortar space, electing instead, to work with various institutions and exhibition spaces in different regions. Hyperlink has arranged exhibitions in Los Angeles, Nashville, Denver, Chicago, and China, among others.
Hyperlink artists connect to artists in their home page/city via critical dialogue, curated exhibitions, and collaboration. Hyperlink also works with emerging figures in the art world such as writers, curators and critics. We are open to exploring new territory and the unknown.