Salt Lake Artists Collaborate for Arts Festival Event at Leonardo
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – June 24, 2015 (Gephardt Daily) – Nearly a dozen artists will come together this weekend for a collaborative art project at the Leonardo museum downtown.
ColLABorART is running for it’s third consecutive year in the Studio @ The Leonardo, 209 E. 500 South. This year ten artists have been asked to participate, working in pairs to create a work of art across a range of mediums. Game designers will create a game in a weekend. There will be a painter/potter couple, a street artist and professor of art working with a filmmaker and a U. of U. professor working with his former student.
For the four days of the Utah Arts Festival, the project will focus on invited artist teams as they create their works in front of the Arts Festival crowd. Visitors coming over the four day span will be able to witness the progression of the work, from initial sketches to the finished products.
ColLABorART aims to achieve community building and aesthetic exploration through collaborative art projects.
Artist Alex Johnstone said he has never taken part in the project before, but witnessing the energy surrounding previous years, it seemed like something exciting to be involved in.
He will be working with Matthew Anderson, fellow U. of U. professor and game designer. “We’ve worked worked professionally and on personal game and film projects together in the past,” he said. “We’ve met several times to form our plan of attack. With short creative ‘jams’ like this, whether it’s the 48 Hour Film Project or Global Game Jam, I’ve found it’s best to make as many of your creative decisions early, so you can spend the most time working, engaging in the process and having fun!
“Game projects typically take months or years, and have large teams, it’s always fun to flip that around and produce something small in a short amount of time. We’re both pretty excited to engage with the visitors to the fest, whether it’s in level design, gameplay balancing, or just general feedback. Working on a game you’re typically hiding in some dark office somewhere, not on public display, so adding that dynamic is going to make the process really different and exciting!”
ColLABorART, a play on collaborate, with Lab and Art thrown in as an homage to the Art Lab at The Leonardo, grew out of a March 2013 residency when resident artist Shawn Rossiter invited David Habben to work with him on a large-scale pastel piece during Gallery Stroll night.
The positive response to the project encouraged The Art Lab to expand the idea. Partnering with Artists of Utah, The Lab staged the first ColLABorART during the four days of the 2013 Utah Arts Festival, during which The Leonardo was open to the festival audience. As the artists explored ways to blend their individual artistic vocabulary, they came up with new forms of visual language that they wouldn’t have developed alone.
For more information go to theleonardo.org
