Meet the Artists
Each year, artists apply to have their cinematic work projected on buildings in the heart of RiNo. Learn about 2022’s artists and their Love Story themed films below.
28th & Walnut
Travis Vermilye
Travis Vermilye (ver-MIL-yuh) is a digital and mixed media artist who creates imagery inspired by the natural world. His abstract digital imagery and animated short films invite you to gaze into a dream-like microscopic realm and find a sense of joyous calm within the organic forms on display. Travis’s work grows from an award-winning 18-year career as a medical illustrator and animator with work shown on Dateline NBC, The Oprah Winfrey Show, in the New York Times, National Geographic, and via numerous medical organizations.
Travis is an Associate Professor in the Digital Design and Illustration Areas in Visual Arts, College of Arts & Media, University of Colorado Denver. He teaches courses in 3D motion design, motion graphics, digital design, anatomical drawing, and illustration.
Read the Artist's Statement
Love comes in many forms from affection to emotional connection, from romantic to physical, and everything in-between. I have a deep affection for tiny organisms that live and die – mostly unnoticed by human eyes. Lichen, fungi, slime molds, and other miniature life forms take shape in fantastical surreal landscapes across the forest floor, in wetland habitats, and along the mountain tundra. Love in Blue is an expression of my personal love for these tiny organisms and the wondrous forms they inhabit, particularly in their reproductive stages. Through this digitally animated short film, I invite you to join me in the wondrous joy of childlike discovery and exploration of the natural world as it might be seen through the magnification lens of my dreams.
29th & Walnut
Natalie Einterz
Because of its many elements (graphics, footage, audio, color), video has always been Natalie Einterz’s favorite artistic medium, but she’s taken a windy road toward animation. When getting her master’s degree specializing in documentary production, Natalie was fascinated by the attempt to represent something objectively through inherently subjective media, which largely led to her explorations in philosophy and meditation.
Now, her regular meditation practice guides her in life and in her artistic pursuits. As she started learning animation, a whole new world of creativity opened up. She finds a lot of satisfaction in helping to share the benefits of mindset practice through the videos she creates, and she finds that animation affords even more opportunity to do so. Lately, Natalie has been increasingly intrigued by immersive art and its ability to take the video medium’s elements even further. Side Stories allows her to continue to explore video projection with the added component of playing with elements on the wall’s surface.
When not playing with personal animation and video projects, Natalie works as a freelance motion designer, illustrator and video editor, creating animated graphics for promotional videos, commercials and documentaries for a variety of clients.
Read the Artist's Statement
We probably haven’t met yet. I’m not trying to make it awkward, but you’re fantastic and more than enough and damn, look at how radiant you are! My name’s Natalie Einterz, and I’m wondering–
Have you taken a moment to love yourself today? To love how extraordinary and downright miraculous you are?! I know that might sound cheesy, but our minds are more powerful than we sometimes recognize and ultimately our internal thoughts create our reality. My animation, “Presents of Mind”, nods to the idea of the present being a present, or gift, and offers reminders of how magical you are.
I love exploring meditation, mindfulness, mental health and the idea of manifestation in my art. I find that the present moment is also where love exists most strongly. Love is in the tiny, ordinary moments, in simple acts of kindness, and in the thoughts we think about ourselves.
The vignettes throughout my animation explore the way these small bits of love grow and expand.
Great thinkers have delved into this topic for centuries, so I’ll let one of them sum it up much better than I can—
From Rumi, a 13th century poet: “Love is not an emotion, it’s your very existence.”
30th & Walnut
Xadie James
Xadie James (they/them) is a queer and non-binary, Denver based musician, composer, songwriter, animator, and director. They are a multi instrumentalist that specializes in double bass, electric bass, and drums but also plays piano, keys, cello, strings, guitar, and brass.
Their most recent musical performance act titled ‘meek’, is a subversive queer performance that uses sensors attached to drums to trigger samples of synthesizers and drum machines, while simultaneously singing distorted and effected vocals.
Xadie also performs double bass with the Denver Philharmonic Orchestra. They have been with the DPO since 2014. They teach strings at the afterschool music program El Sistema.
Xadie is a stop animation and rotoscope animation artist. They make music videos for their musical projects as well as others. They create nostalgic scenes using magazines, clay, dolls, paper, and other found materials.
You can find them in their home studio building sets, cutting up old magazines, playing piano, and staying up too late drinking tea.
Read the Artist's Statement
“Transmuting City” uses paper and magazine cutouts of cityscapes and buildings. The image of a cityscape represents community and all the tiny ways and paths in which we are connected, how these paths veer and change to create a completely different place made of the same elements.
The use of colorful tissue and construction paper represents fragility, how things can change quickly and permanently. Gentrification is the displacement of long-time residents in urban areas with wealthier residents. This separates and causes deep harm to our community as a whole. As cities change, how can we fight for a better way to create and hold space for the people in our communities?
Vintage images from magazines elicit feelings of nostalgia and longing, while repurposing them gives them new life, much like how we take our skills and do something different when the unexpected happens. This living breathing transmuting cityscape projected onto concrete walls serves as a window to what happens behind walls of mortar and brick, the organism of community. This web of communities is ever changing and ever growing. Love is community interacting with itself.
32nd & Larimer
Ella Vance
Ella Vance is an Australian-American filmmaker, writer and interactive media-maker living and working in Denver, CO. With a background in art film and interactive museum media, Ella’s creative practice is rooted in the use of film and media as an oneiric conduit for self discovery. Her 12 short films take on a variety of structures and themes that explore the inner worlds of each subject, whether real or fictional. Ella uses a variety of mediums to enhance the stories she tells, including: digital video, 16mm, Super8, web-based interactive experiences and audiovisual installations. Ella graduated with a BFA in Filmmaking from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and has had her film work featured in Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and Side Stories 2019. Ella is currently in progress on an interactive installation and experimental film hybrid project inspired by Rilke’s “Repository of Unlived Things”; an analog and digital compendium of lost moments and dreams.
Read the Artist's Statement
I’ve always been drawn to film and its inherent ability to transform individuals by immersing them in an illusion that surpasses the “here and now”. Over the course of the last two years, the pandemic has had a profound effect on the lens through which we view the world. Now more than ever, life is lived in vignettes. There is a liminality at present that creates an even stronger desire for a different world people can lose themselves in; an escape. Many of the recurring themes in my work are focused on the reflective nature of the human experience and the complex interplay between our outer and inner worlds. I want to use film to help people uncover hidden parts of themselves and create deeper connections to the world around them.
Film is a medium that allows us to transcend reality both as viewers and creators. In my work I try to take advantage of the omniscient quality of film, making visual space for thoughts, dreams, and feelings. To further emphasize the abstract, I frequently play with contrasting mediums and editing styles to create more complex experiences that require a deeper dive to digest. My creative process starts with a feeling that transforms into an image and develops into a story. I try to embrace the fluidity of creative energy to make room for spontaneity and experimentation, but my loyalty is always to the original feeling: a blueprint for each film to blossom from and a guidepost for each phase of development.
We are living in a world where digital communication is the backbone for human connection. It is also our escape. During these times of collective isolation, I want to create work that marries film and interactive media, with the goal of inspiring and challenging the public audience to use this liminal space as a platform for self-discovery.
33rd & 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.
Read the Artist's Statement
‘The Nearly Neglected Ecstasy of Laughter’ is at its most basic, a visual feast of the sensual. The many physical experiences (smelling, hugging, touching, hearing) that became so few and far between during our (now continued) separation from one another, took on an almost heroic role in my life. These moments of absolute LOVE saved me the monotony of my thoughts, of bad news and repeated days…of not seeing the miracle that is to just ‘be’ here. When you know ‘how’ to really look and feel (with the gift of corporeal sensuality) you are able to meander through the ways it arises in everyday moments and experience what a pleasure it is to exist. Being playful, light, and enjoying something as simple as the color of something or hearing someone laugh, have just as much merit as being worrisome, considerate and serious. My hope is that this work makes someone smile, brings them pleasure and reminds them to love and receive love, to be gentle with themselves and with the world, and to continue to seek out all the ways that it is beautiful even when it may feel like there is nothing left to be found.
