The Horizon and Everything Within It

Artworks Center for Contemporary Art

310 N. Railroad Avenue, Loveland, CO 80537

Curated by Hamidah Glasgow

Jan. 14-March 26, 2022

Admission: $5 suggested donation

Review by Danielle Cunningham

Every year, the Center for Fine Art Photography (C4FAP) in Fort Collins and Loveland's Artworks Center for Contemporary Art (ACCA) collaborate on a lens-based exhibition. As the C4FAP and exhibition curator Hamidah Glasgow notes, the significance of such exhibitions to the art community is that they counter the notion that successful art can only be made in a competitive vacuum. [1] This year's offering is a double testament to this sentiment, as it highlights the collaborative spirit between C4FAP and ACCA while exhibiting several collaborations among artists.

An installation view of works by Lorenzo Triburgo and Sarah Van Dyck in the exhibition *The Horizon and Everything Within It* at Artworks Center for Contemporary Art in Loveland. Image courtesy of the Center for Fine Art Photography.

Visitors can expect to be confronted by the contemporary theme of identity, but what sets the exhibition apart are the processes of identity exploration these artists are willing to share, including visceral representations of the intimate steps they have taken to know themselves better. From manipulating mediums to manipulating their own bodies, each artist questions their physical and psychological limits, the constructed boundaries of the world, and even the fluidity of art media. The exhibition features Alicia Rodriguez Alvisa and Lidzie Alvisa, Kristianne Riddle, Rafael Soldi, and Lorenzo Triburgo and Sara Van Dyck.

Works by Kristianne Riddle in the exhibition *The Horizon and Everything Within It*. Image courtesy of the Center for Fine Art Photography.

Kristianne Riddle’s series of photographs-turned-sculptures inspired this exhibition, capturing Glasgow’s attention with their exploration of what she observes is our constant making and remaking of ourselves. Glasgow aptly summarizes Riddle’s process as “bringing all the pieces of herself back together.” For Riddle, this process has involved a battle with her psyche, as she has struggled to transition from an adventurous sailor who spent weeks alone at sea to conventional roles as a wife and mother. [2] She mirrors this battle in her sculptures, breaking down photographed seascapes by crumpling and tearing the printed images, and then arduously sewing them into sculptures using techniques she honed as a sailor. She may be an artist in her moments of constructing these works, but her process reminds the viewer that she is also always a sailor.

Kristianne Riddle, *Consequence of the Sea*, 2021, photo-based sculpture with rope, 14 x 73 x 15 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

Alternating between photography and sculpture, Riddle suggests that art is fluid, just as her and our identities are. Especially in Consequences of the Sea, which is noticeably a boat and larger than her other abstract works, Riddle tethers her identity firmly to seafaring vessels. Since she once spent days alone in a boat, this work seemingly draws her back to the place where she feels most herself and to which she will always want to return.

Rafael Soldi, *Remember Forgetting*, 2013, personal snapshots mounted backwards, 16 x 60 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

Trained as a photographer, Rafael Soldi makes minimalistic conceptual work that at first glance appears to be the least photographic of the exhibition. These works resemble drawings, embossed paper, or even blank slips of paper. They are photographs though, despite collapsing the threshold of traditional photography in both presentation and style, calling attention to what is clearly Soldi’s respect for materiality. In Remember Forgetting, Soldi mounts a series of curiously blank personal snapshots with their faces backwards in a horizontal line.

Meaning is malleable, Soldi suggests, and a photograph's subject can be found in locations other than its face. These tidy works read as worn, heavy paper, torn in places so that their agedness is more apparent than their medium—an aspect that overpowers any need for a subject and that evokes nostalgia. On top of this and in the absence of a subject, Soldi relinquishes to the viewer his role as the sole conveyor of artistic meaning, allowing them to ascertain meaning on their own. This exhibition is about introspection, Glasgow notes, which Soldi highlights as he calls on viewers to determine meaning for themselves, to self-reflect, and to add to his resistance to fixed photographic conventions and artist-viewer power dynamics.

Rafael Soldi, *Untitled (XIV)* , 2012, archival pigment print, 20 x 16 inches. Image by Danielle Cunningham.

Soldi’s other works are similarly quiet and meaning-filled, though conceptually and physically darker. Several of these are black-on-black prints and implement a process that makes them seem three-dimensional or etched. Untitled (XIV) presents a figure who, like the smaller snapshots, faces away from the viewer, their features obscured by darkness. Hidden from view, it's as if revealing themself to others is too much to bear. A powerful diptych, All Day I Hear the Noise of Waters, exhibits an ambiguous, grainy surface—an optical illusion since it isn’t grainy at all but a two-dimensional depiction of water. Glasgow explains that it is the ocean and represents a comfortable time prior to the beginning of Soldi’s struggles with being simultaneously queer and Latino. The presentation of the artist’s own childhood EKG as an artwork also hearkens to this time period, pointing to the exhibition’s theme of return as well.

Rafael Soldi, *All Day I Hear the Noise of Waters*, 2014, archival pigment prints, 24 x 72 inches (24 x 36 inches each panel). Image courtesy of the artist.

Unlike the other artists in the exhibition, who mostly explore personal transformation by transforming their media, Lorenzo Triburgo uses their body as a medium, transforming it and documenting the transformation. As Glasgow tells it, Triburgo—a trans man—stopped taking testosterone as a performative aspect of this series, using it as an opportunity to explore their identity and public reaction to their body. Working with Sara Van Dyck to foreground their fluctuating body in each portrait, the artist also adopts art historical poses, situating their nude, queer body within a narrative that has excluded queerness.

Lorenzo Triburgo and Sarah Van Dyck, *Terra*, 2020, archival pigment print, 24 x 36 inches. Image courtesy of the artists.

In Terra, for instance, Triburgo poses contrapposto—an asymmetrical pose in which the upper body is angled opposite to the lower body, seen most often in Greco-Roman sculpture. The stance is also emblematic of beauty ideals assigned to cisgender female or male bodies. Triburgo’s body is adorned with glitter in most portraits, calling attention to their queerness while elevating their status as worthy of adornment. Because Triburgo is trans and trans bodies have not been historically regarded as ideal—but rather as abnormal—the artist’s decision to pose nude situates their body in front of viewers, allowing them to see Triburgo’s developed muscles as well as their returning breast tissue. With these portraits, Triburgo and Van Dyck create a new space and narrative in which trans bodies are equally as beautiful as cisgender bodies and gender appearances can be changed.

A still image from Alicia Rodriguez Alvisa and Lidzie Alvisa’s *Womb*, 2020, video. Image courtesy of the Center for Fine Art Photography.

Mother-daughter duo Alicia Rodriguez Alvisa and Lidzie Alvisa also appear in the exhibition with Womb—a video work made when the younger Rodriguez Alvisa returned to Cuba from the United States during the pandemic. In it, the daughter rests on her mother’s belly. The rise and fall as the mother breathes is soothing, though the consistent rhythm and the back-and-forth motion eventually leads to a slight sense of anxiety. There is a chance the consistency may end. As Rodriguez Alvisa demonstrates in the film and as she experienced in real life, a special kind of self-awareness comes from leaving what is familiar and returning to it. She may have left her mother’s womb at birth, but because of global tragedy she returned to it in adulthood. Calling to mind the tension that can be present in parent-child relationships, the artists also hint at the younger generation’s awareness of their parents’ mortality and that we will always be tied to our birthing parents’ womb.

These themes of crossing and recrossing boundaries and borders or making and re-making the self that appear throughout the exhibition connect to pandemic life in a way that’s hard to miss. In the last two years, many people have been forced into self-exploration because of isolation, reinventing themselves, finding new occupations, and sometimes strengthening or leaving relationships. These ideas aren’t lost on Glasgow, who notes the role of pandemic-caused isolation on her shaping of this exhibition. “I feel like a lot of people are dealing with having the time to stop,” she says. “That’s a privileged place people are reevaluating. People are reconsidering.” After reconsideration, many people, including the artists in Glasgow’s exhibition, are realizing that dividing lines are permeable. We may need to traverse these lines a number of times to find ourselves, only to someday learn we don’t know ourselves at all.

Danielle Cunningham is an artist, scholar, and independent curator. She writes about science fiction, gender, sexuality, and disability, with an emphasis on mental illness. The co-founder of chant cooperative, an artist co-op, she holds a master’s degree in Art History and Museum Studies from the University of Denver.

[1] This and all subsequent statements attributed to Hamidah Glasgow are from my conversation with her on January 13, 2022.

[2] From Riddle’s artist statement for the series The Tension of Flow, 2021, https://kristianneriddleart.com/statements.