STARS OF SUPERNOVA
Sept 15 - Nov 11, 2017
STARS OF SUPERNOVA is a new-media art exhibition taking place September 15th through November 11th, 2017 at the NXT STG Collaborative Gallery in the DPAC Galleria, located across from the Buell Theatre. This student run operation, a collaboration between CU Denver’s College of Arts & Media and the Next Stage NOW! teams up with Plus Gallery and Denver Digerati for a fun and forward thinking exhibition that brings some of the leading assets of SUPERNOVA Outdoor Digital Animation Festival forward into a gallery context for greater contemplation and thoughtful experience.
SUPERNOVA STARS will weave a dynamic mix of works by the festival’s three guest jurors Faiyaz Jafri (NYC), Raquel Meyers (Madrid, Spain) and Peter Burr (NYC), as well as solo spotlight artist Jeremy Couillard, alongside a major interactive new media work by CU Denver alum Robert Fikes IV. SUPERNOVA’s guest jurors are celebrated worldwide for their pioneering work within the fields of new media, contemporary art, performance and digital motion graphics. This is a rare opportunity to experience a deeper side to their art, including multiple looping animations, an interactive video-game experience, 2d artworks including lenticular graphics, and some of the most exquisite 3d printed forms that show off this popular new modeling technique. Fikes’ digital experience allows viewers to conduct their own Cuban ensemble by triggering audio clips on a MIDI interface, correlating with CU Denver’s relationship with music producers in Cuba.
SUPERNOVA is the ultimate international showcase for digital motion art and one of Denver’s most singular and innovative cultural projects. STARS of SUPERNOVA was curated by Plus Gallery owner and Denver Digerati Director Ivar Zeile. Jeremy Couillard works supported by Yours Mine & Ours Gallery, NYC.
Find out more about SUPERNOVA at supernovadenver.com
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Faiyaz Jafri (1968) was born and raised in rural Holland of Dutch and Pakistani descent. He studied at the Technical University of Delft (MS) and is self-taught as an animation artist and music composer.
His work has been exhibited in the form of print, paintings, video installations, animations and life size sculptures all over the world. Jafri’s award winning films have screened at prestigious festivals and museums. He has worked for international advertising clients and magazines, and on corporate and broadcast projects, in charge of motion graphics and post-production in the USA and Hong Kong. In recent years he has given workshops and lectures on his art and theories at universities, conferences, and festivals. He is the founder and curator of the Third Culture Film Festival in Hong Kong and is a part-time lecturer at Parsons School of Design in New York.
Jafri’s art explores Jungian archetypes in the modern world, distilling the pop references of mass media and global popular culture into a visual shorthand of neo-archetypes. Realizing early on that a computer could draw a straighter line than he ever could, Jafri started using computers as soon as the technology became more readily available. In 1987 he began making his first illustrations on an Apple computer using basic vector imaging software. Cumbersome and limited as these programs may seem now, they were perfect for Jafri’s already pictographic style. As the technology evolved, his work developed from flat line art into a stripped-down 3D computer graphics style he calls hyper-unrealism. Despite the endless possibilities offered by computers today, he stays close to his subject, leaving out unnecessary frills and extras until he’s left with an image that is unambiguous and almost obscene in its blunt power.
Supernova 2017 winners:
ARCHITECTURE SHOW
Presented in the gallery space was a selection of drawings depicting towers created by the undergraduate seminar students at the University of Colorado Denver College of Architecture and Planning. Each student was encouraged to express a cultural optimism through the designs of their tower. Using advanced techniques for constructing the architectural form, each student used this optimistic viewpoint to forward a vision for the city that is both inclusive of diversity and open-ended in its outcome. Varying from the solitary to the exuberant, each tower is a reflection of the student that designed it and thus, speak to one another through contrast.
Each of the Architecture student's designs were then incorporated into a virtual reality program created by students from the University of Colorado Denver College of Arts and Media. The program took the models and made them into virtual skyscrapers. Once the viewer put on the goggles, they were transported to a virtual city where the student's skyscrapers towered over them. They were free to wander the virtual city and encouraged to look at the buildings from every angle. The program was concieved as a way for architects to actually interact and look at their work in scale while designing them.
THE INAGURAL SHOW
This exhibition was produced by students and faculty from CU Denver's College of Arts and media digital design program. Installations features include How the Heart Works, a program developed by faculty associate professors Bryan Leister and Travis Vermilye, which uses virtual reality headsets to show the inner workings of the heart using 3D modeling, enhanced by computer-generated sounds, images and graphics.
Associate professor Bryan Leister, of the Digital Design at CU Denver, was also showing a recently developed work for the Oculus Rift - A dwelling for the New Man. Leister developed a software that read the capacitive resistance of a plant, allowing the computer to differentiate between ways in which a plant is touched. the plant becomes an interface to the digital world allowing the person wearing the VR Headset to interact with the virtual environment. Onlookers could have participated by using a MIDI controller to alter the virtual world and assist the participant. The resulting drama plays out in the VR Headset and on screen as a potential future where physical location blends with a digital experience.
Also on view were augmented reality artworks. While virtual reality projects use headsets and headphones to create immersive environments, Augmented reality has viewers enhance two dimensional posters by viewing them through smartphones and tablets loaded with special software. This software brings the posters to life with animation. These posters were developed by students of the Digital Design program at CU Denver along side some virtual reality experiences played on phones to give the illusion of virtual reality.