Timely and Timeless: Fike and Fodness
showing | JANUARY 28 - April 2nd, 2021
virtual Opening | THU. JANUARY 28, 2021 at 6:30pm on zoom: https://ucdenver.zoom.us/j/94518180294
This exhibition explores experimentation and confluence, a laboratory where Donald Fodness and Tobias Fike encourage ideas to collide, dance, and wrestle. The resulting display is a journey in the landscape of the West, exploring notions of geography, humor, work, detachment, anxiety, whimsy, tumult, and stillness.
Powerful art is both timely and timeless. It has the capacity to resonate with us through contemporary issues but can dialogue with the art historical past while maintaining relevance to the future. Through their experiences and practice, Fike and Fodness prompt viewers with critical questions: how do we meaningfully navigate the physical, cultural, and political spaces we inhabit? Why am I here, what am I doing, and how can these ideas affect and change “me?” In a world increasingly fraught with division and extremism, how can we be inspired by art to create new and see ourselves in new ways?
While Fike and Fodness are long-time friends and collaborators, this is their first cooperative exhibition. Approaching the gallery space as a laboratory, the artists brought ideas and let them mingle, collide, and foment until a theme emerged. Both artists have agrarian roots, having spent childhoods in and around farms. Fodness grew up splitting his time between Colorado and Minnesota, and Fike spent the beginning of his life on the plains of Nebraska and Kansas. Both moved to the Mountain West over twenty years ago and have been influenced by the imagery of the plains abruptly impacting the Rocky Mountains.
Tobias Fike’s exploration of the western plains through tumbleweeds, wind, and the effects of time are echoed in his playful plastic bag blown about by carefully placed fans, dancing wildly but trapped by air currents. A tumbleweed performatively adorned with bright clown noses sits on the floor, bursting with potential energy as it eagerly awaits a gust of wind. The large canvas, The Incredible Aging Man, utilizes a magician or medicine show poster aesthetic, alluding to peddlers and performers of the old west. Fike’s self-portraits examine the passing of time and our relationship to the environment.
Fodness’ works at first appear perhaps contrary to Fodness—carefully penciled landscapes formed by headlines from newspapers since the beginning of the pandemic. “Trump” and “Covid,” dot his landscapes influenced by the undulating text-play of 60s psychedelic rock posters. Hunting for phrases in the jumbled landscapes is playful yet discouraging. Tracking letters to discover hidden phrases reveals media’s fixation on our turbulent times. These become a self-portrait of the artist, mirroring the doomscrolling so many of us engage in at night on our devices, browsing through headline after troubled headline. In his junk drawer sculptures, Fodness captures the objects we carry. He says, “these pieces are about letting go of the things you think you may need, but signify starting over.”
The ideas explored in this exhibition are pointed towards Coloradoans but can apply to anyone who has thought about our relationship with time and how we navigate the spaces and relationships around us. In his seven-volume work Remembrance of Things Past, published in 1923, Marcel Proust wrote in the Prisoner:
The only true voyage of discovery…consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another; …with men like these we do really fly from star to star.
About the artists
Donald Fodness
Donald Fodness earned a BA degree in Art History from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and an MFA in Painting from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Fodness has an interdisciplinary practice that includes drawing, sculpture, furniture, and installation. His drawings have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Regionally he has created site-specific installations for the Denver Art Museum, The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, The Gallery of Contemporary Art in Colorado Springs, two Biennial of the Americas, and Harmony Hammond's Material Engagements at Redline. His work has been published in New American Paintings, Sculpture Magazine, Yahoo home page, Found Magazine, The Creators Project, and art LTD.
Fodness is an active community member, curator, and collaborator with The Flying OHNO Twins and The DMB Collective. He co-founded Showpen Residency, is a founding member of Hyperlink, he is an Artnaut, and a member of Tank Studios. He served as an educator at the university level for nearly seven years at various institutions including University of Denver, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, and Metro State University of Denver. He currently lives and works in Denver, Colorado.
Tobias Fike
Tobias Fike lives and works in Arvada, CO, as an interdisciplinary artist. The form of his work is incredibly varied, and he approaches a range of concepts, from his personal experiences of family, place, and grief, to humankind’s’ temporal relationship with the universe and observations of time.
Fike was born in Lincoln, NE, and moved to Kansas City when he was ten, he then later returned to Lincoln to attend the University of Nebraska, where he earned a BFA in 2000. He received his MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2011. Fike's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with exhibitions in many cities, including Berlin, Germany; Coimbra, Portugal; Shanghai, China; Houston, TX; Tucson, AZ; and Chicago, IL, to name a few.
Additionally, one of Fike’s collaborative works with Matthew Harris, a longtime colleague, is in the Kadist Art Foundation, Video Americas Collection, now housed in San Francisco, CA.
A Look Inside The gallery
Press
Artists Tobias Fike and Donald Fodness Meet in the Middle
Westword - Susan Froyd