Tethered Mountains

In Spring, 2020, The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center announced it would be teaming up with Colorado College to fund seven projects. They put out the invitation to all artists in the Rocky Mountain West and American Southwest: pitch a collaborative, multidisciplinary project to premiere that summer.

The pitch? It must adhere to certain particulars:

• Involve three or more individuals, each working in different creative arenas

• Draw inspiration from or tell a story about our region (Rocky Mountain West and Southwest)

• Culminate in a digital/virutual experience lasting between 5-10 minutes

• Be completed before Summer 2020

Two artists and friends, Su Kaiden Cho, a South Korean-American installation and performance artist, and Jasmine Dillavou, a Boricua mixed-media artist, reached out. We had our team.

They purposed a layered performance with contemporary dance and recorded poem spoken from two different cultural perspectives, in three languages.

Some weeks later, we got the email. Our pitch had been one of the seven selected. Gratitude and disbelief. They wrote their poems.

A week or so later, I went out to record them in person at Jas’s studio downtown. I pulled out my microphone, and they recited their poetry. On the first take, I got chills. Their piece was a powerful, personal inquiry: Is there a place in this iconic landscape for those born outside of it? We recorded another take just to be safe, but we didn’t need to.

Su and Jas took the recording and conjured choreography. They pieced together wigs and fabrics with a sewing machine, and worked long hours to finish it all.

With the pieces in hand, all we had to do was film it. We scouted, and settled on a location: Victor, CO, a ghost town in a sanguine spot south-west of Pikes Peak.

With the help of Isan Monfort, we shot the performance under the morning sun. The day wore on and clouds formed, we moved inside and shot take after take, until we were out of breath. The sun dipped behind the mountains, we packed up and left.

The sight of the valley, dry and beautiful; the sheer, demanding Wild West, those two things—those two drastically different sides of the same place—left an impression, which guided the piece in the edit.

At SNEAKYBOY we’ve done a lot of retro-inspired projects, but I wanted the look of this video to be fresh—to feel forward-facing instead of backward-facing. This inspired the mirror, its straight lines, and refracted edges, are like a lens through which we can examine all.

You can watch the piece below, and catch the write up on the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center website.

It’s always nice getting work, but in this era of quarantine, it feels particularly great to have another one in the books.

-Jungle