Meet the 2023 Artists
Each year, artists apply to have their cinematic work projected on buildings in the heart of RiNo. Learn about 2023’s artists and their What Moves You themed films below.
Larimer Street, 2900 Block
Alejandra Abad
Born in Venezuela, Alejandra Abad is an interdisciplinary visual artist and educator who explores belonging and mutual compassion as key parts of collective wellness. Her style is informed by architectural studies at Florida Atlantic University, Film/Video/New Media/Animation at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Integrated Media Art Practices at CU Boulder. Her work connects the histories of anticolonial movements, international surrealism and magical realism to her own experiences. Alejandra uses both analog and digital processes to draw, paint, collage, print and experiment with the moving image. Her site-specific installations are centered on community, collaboration, shared oral histories and the intersections of ecology, sustainability and environmental futures.
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Beyond Sound
This animation captures the joy of movement from the community at Feel the Beat dance studio. Feel the Beat promotes music and dance access for all. They inclusively work with folks of various abilities, including deaf and people that are hard of hearing. They have developed bone-conducting dance floors that allow students to feel the vibrations of music. This animation visualizes this experience by documenting and then expressing their movements through drawing and collage. The film synesthetically interprets music beyond just the realm of sound. My brother and one of his daughters are both deaf, which inspires me to pursue a theme of inclusion in how we think about the relationship between art and the senses. This project connects storytelling to the moving image and the promotion of collective wellness by working with the community to create art.
Audio Tour: Larimer Street, 2900 Block
25th & Larimer
Andi Todaro
Andi Todaro is a versatile, multi-disciplinary, craftsman and award-winning creative professional, best known for their broad scale and range of practical and impractical knowledge and eccentric dress. Todaro pursues an ever-evolving skill set, fueled by perpetual desire for self-astonishment, be it mastery of a new computer program, mechanical know-how, scale, or experimental process. Todaro does a crossword a day and plays lots of video games.
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Art of Us Artifice
The technological reality that we routinely participate in, is defined by a logarithmically divided attention span and the inability to trust one’s own intuition in discerning the validity (accuracy against reality) of an entity or idea’s existence as seemingly laid bare in the digital world. The idea for ‘Art of Us Artifice’ came from scrolling and feeling a kind of schizophrenic change in my mood; from entertained-to heart-broken-to angry- to turned on, all within milliseconds of seeing a cute dog video, to a old friend that had suddenly passed, to a human rights violation, to a person doing yoga, back to a cute dog video. These acute shifts in mood often make me suspicious of the content rather than question myself and my inability to shift so quickly and feel each of these things so deeply. Then, should I feel duped when I realize the person does not look that way without that filter? That the news should have fact checked before making that meme? Is it wrong? With dramatic improvements for what one can create with just a computer got me thinking that it would be incredible to make just that – one full farse that would be convincing enough that the viewer would feel for the people they were seeing – but none of the people would be real, none of those moments have never actually happened, their pain does not actually exist – and yet, how you feel watching it is real. I like the contrast – we create to feel, to be moved and to cause movements (revolutionary or otherwise) so in what case does it matter where it comes from or how it is made, or if it is actually ‘real’?
My goal in this process art/ film experiment is to use as much open-source/AI generated and computer aided and engineered design as possible. Not only do I absolutely know that I could not create this without these leaps in technology on my personal computer, I am excited that I can and get to discover how. With all the controversy about AI, I want to remind everyone how much we as digital artists already rely on ‘the algorithm’ and the existing work of other artists; anything with code behind it was made by an artist (called a programmer) created that digital brush (based on the thousands of real brush strokes) or live trace or hard drive for us, or wrote the software we create or share the art on so others can see it. I’ve never really been sure exactly what art is except for an idea and an execution. Sometimes I don’t know if I really own what I make because I know there are things that are similar that have absolutely come before me. So this piece is about provenance and ownership, empathy and intuition in a digital age, and pushing the limit away from being human while still being the same soup.
Audio Tour: 25th & Larimer
27th Street, between Larimer & Walnut
Jank Films
Ben, Matt and Adam of Jank Films are all full-time creators of video, in one form or another. In their spare time, they like to collaborate to push boundaries with experimental videos, music videos and other visual projects.
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Forms
“Forms” is a Denver-centric experimental skate film. It’s a quiet, abstract meditation that explores the places we grew up around the city and the potential they hold. Forms explores our relationship to the landscape and how creativity and movement can transform the most mundane into something spectacular.
Audio Tour: 27th Street, between Larimer & Walnut
29th Street, between Larimer & Walnut
Payson Wick
Payson Wick is a Denver based photographer, filmmaker and environmentalist. He has been exploring the world around him for the last decade, and has always brought his camera with him. His work has been inspired most by time spent in the great outdoors.
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Snowcapped
Every year, the earth tilts the northern hemisphere away from the sun. This shift shortens the days & chills the air. The absence of thermal energy alters a mountainous landscape drastically with a blanket of white snow. Layer after layer is piled on, blowing, whipping and packing into crevices between the rock. This traps moisture as ice, which stores water even as the tilting back to summer lengthens and warms the days. This water slowly trickles down the mountains and into Colorado’s major rivers.
Viewing landscapes can change a perspective. It can inspire action. It can open the mind to new paths forward, paths never explored before. A simple truth is that this world can never have enough open minds and new perspectives. Mountains are a place where these can be discovered.
Snowcapped mountains play a special, impermanent role in Colorado.
Audio Tour: 29th Street, between Larimer & Walnut
Walnut Street, 2600 Block
Waveform Experiential
WAVEFORM.exp is the collective effort of Sam Moritz and Pat Higgins, two passionate digital projection artists who bonded over their love for the creative freedom allowed by this medium and how impactful it can be on a monumental scale. With a focus on original digital content, 3D projection mapping and interactive installations, their work allows them to activate and illuminate objects and surfaces to distort reality with illusory animations that create depth and motion across everyday surfaces.
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Prismatic Kinesthesia
Imagination allows us the ability to think beyond the constraints of the physical world around us; to transcend timelines and dissolve into the subconscious realm of infinite possibilities.
Our concept for Side Stories is to explore how we can experience a heightened sense of imagination through movement that tells a story. Using state of the art motion capture technologies with curated dancers, each dancer will have a story to tell through their own unique movements.
Audio Tour:
Walnut Street, 2600 Block
