Collection: Capturing Essence

Capturing Essence
A collaborative body of work by Jasmine Dillavou, Clark Valentine and Tyler Hays.
Jasmine Dillavou is a Boricua mixed-media artist from Colorado Springs. Dillavou received her BA in Visual and Performing Arts from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and has since shown in numerous exhibitions across the Front Range. Her work often explores themes of visibility within Caribbean Diaspora identities. From intimate performance pieces to immersive installations, Dillavou investigates liberation, decolonization and femininity through a personal lens.

A memory, a relic, an icon. A shadow pulled from its object-home to honor the story it was devised from. Each sculpture has been cast from objects of the artist’s upbringing- cultural indicators of a life lived, a coming-of-age story captured in time. The essence of these everyday items act as delicate memories of a girl growing into herself, finding her ancestral roots and reaching towards a decolonized future self. Hoop earrings, cooking utensils and religious artifacts become a semiotic tradition as a way for the artist to explore her own story.

Clark Valentine's artwork explores topics of mysticism through process-based drawing and printmaking. Inspired by Taoism, Hermetic traditions, Zen Buddhism and German Pietism, Valentine's artwork serves as an opportunity for mystical experience. Utilizing these processes, Valentine creates work through a private performance of devotional, laborious mark making techniques. The final image is a relic of the performance. Rather than depicting religious practices, Valentine has allowed his work to become a meditation itself. He seeks to find a place of Taoist "no-action" in his work, responding naturally to the materials and the marks which have come before. In this contemplative practice, Valentine's work references the accumulation of small marks to create an ephemeral image of spiritual energy. The transcendence of the human soul and the imminence of Divine energy coincide in these works, revealing the Unio Mystica - the unification of a mystics soul with the heart of the Sacred.

Tyler Hays is a ceramic artist, born and raised in Colorado Springs. He uses voluminous vessels and modern weaponry to capture and display their highly energetic interactions. The work is set against a backdrop of political turmoil where two opposing ideologies clash around the ownership of guns. The process is marked by a certain lack of control and yet, the outcome is predictable. Impact recorded in its most literal sense.