“Springs Surreal” is an exhibit at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in its final weekend of exhibition displaying the surrealist work of four Colorado Springs-based artists. The Fine Arts Center describes “Spring Surreal” as “working within the realms of dreamscape, fantasy, ready-made, and chance, the landscape of the subconscious psyche and natural conflicts between order, chaos, and chance via unexpected materials and subjects, questioning long standing beliefs about art, ourselves, and the world around us.”
Surrealism bridges the tangible world and our imaginations, re-rooting us in the place where we live, in the beauty of the shadows of the mountains, and in the soft nightglow of the desert. Here in Colorado, we are who we are because of what is around us. The art of Lorelei Beckstrom, Aaron Graces, Kay Williams Johnson, and Chris Sedgwick reminds us that our potential to create lies deep in our dreams, triggered by the natural world.
Lorelei Beckstrom, originally from Minnesota, moved to Colorado in 1994 and has since focused on what she describes as “narrative figurative oil painting.” Painting is a form of storytelling, as seen in her piece, “The Stormbringers,” which depicts nine replications of the same bearded man, dressed in orange, pulling rain clouds with rope over a barren plain. To the left hang her two oil paintings, “Foxfire (The Creation of the Aurora),” and “Folkesagn (Moving the Moon),” illustrating people running through the dark of the desert, disguised in masks of foxes and rabbits. There is an air of freedom and purity in the painting, with rabbit-people running, arms in the air, through the grey sky, and the hunched-over foxes dancing under the northern lights.
These artists show what it means to be of a place: to lose oneself in the color, motion, and intricacy of the southwest. And in this place, we can be wild animals, summoning the northern lights, pulling the clouds to grace us with rain, because why wouldn’t we be able to? We are not limited to this concrete reality. Art gives us the access to explore the spirituality of a place, and the way our dreams expose our imaginations.
Only open until this Sunday, Feb. 7, “Springs Surreal” exposes the unique complexity of living in Colorado Springs, and allows you to see far beyond Colorado College’s two blocks on Cascade Avenue.