Red Brick features Lara Whitley’s ‘Field Signs’

ArtWeek might be behind us, but that doesn’t mean there is a lack of local art and activities for the community to enjoy before the end of summer.

In partnership with Aspen Chamber Resort Association, Red Brick Center of the Arts is hosting its third annual Summer Arts & Culture Celebration on Thursday from 4-6 p.m.

“It’s a chance for us to highlight the artists that have studio space at the Red Brick, the nonprofits that have office space at the Red Brick, and feature the work in our gallery,” said Executive Director Sarah Roy.

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The event will include art activations, demos, and short performances by Red Brick resident artists, and local nonprofits will be staged in various locations and occurring throughout the evening. Guests are invited to interact with the artists, join in artmaking, and experience the vibrant arts and cultural scene in Aspen. Festive drinks, appetizers, music, mingling, and art viewing in the gallery will add to the celebration.

One Aspen-based artist currently showing work at Red Brick is Lara Whitley. “Field Signs” is an installation that she constructed from camping tents crowd-sourced from the community, a continuation of her practice of making art from discarded antique materials.

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“For the last almost decade, I’ve worked with century-old trash, hauled out of dumping grounds,” she explained. “The material this time is camping tents. With each material, I try to ask, ‘What does this want to be? What is the life that’s still in this material to create a new narrative?’ In this case, it was flags.”

The installation consists of 60 flags that are designed with patterns and forms from the nature that surrounds us. The community in essence decided the palette based on what was donated.

“I started by taking an inventory of what patterns I see in the upper Roaring Fork Valley,” she said. “They were very specific things like a lenticular cloud, a split rail fence, a snowflake, a glacial erratic, an icicle, a river meander, certain constellations, and then some more obvious things, or more universal things, like sky and mountain, etc.”

She said she was drawn to making flags out of the discarded tents for a couple of reasons.

“Part of it was a subconscious wish to work with a material that was lighter and cleaner after super-dense and dirty materials out of the old the pre landfills,” she said. “But specifically, a couple of years ago when I was working with Ajax on the Aspen Space Station, as we were designing installations, I just had this bolt, ‘I would like to make flags.’ I had never made flags before. I do have a background. I grew up sewing, so it wasn’t so out of the blue. But it was born from there, following my curiosity, ‘What that would be like?'”

“Field Signs” will be up at the Red Brick through Labor Day and, according to Whitley, only the beginning of a series she is working on. Because the location changes, so, too, does the work shapeshift and evolve to create something site-specific. She also looks at the architecture and natural surroundings to create something cohesive with the space.

“These flags represent joy to me,” she said. “I think of my work as transforming waste into contemplative space. Most recently, the Forest Spiral, an open-air meditation temple up at Beyul, which was a very specific type of contemplation. But the flags on display on the lawn at the Red Brick are more playful and create a setting for joy, which is its own form of contemplation.”

Sarah Girgis is the Arts and Entertainment Editor for The Aspen Times. She can be reached at 970-429-9151 or sgirgis@aspentimes.com.