Artist Biography
Tallon VanNoy is a multimedia artist who was born and practices in Denver, Colorado. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art Practices at the University of Colorado Denver in 2020 with a concentration in Painting and Drawing and a secondary concentration in Transmedia Sculpture. Her creative practice includes painting, video, sculpture, tattoo, and performance. Through the associations of shared experience, trauma, and memory she hopes to bring people together through her work.
VanNoy’s work has shown at galleries throughout Colorado, including an outdoor installation at Auraria Campus in 2019. She recently exhibited work at Pirate Contemporary Art. She has exhibited her work in the Tennyson Art District for First Fridays throughout 2018 and 2019. Additionally, she was a finalist in the Supernova digital video competition, juried by Ivar Zeile [founder and Creative Director of Denver Digerati] and displayed on the LED screen at Skyline Park on the 16th Street Mall in Denver. Her most recent body of work will be exhibited at Redline Contemporary Art Center in the spring of 2020.
VanNoy aims to connect people through personal stories and to exhibit human-ness in her work. Often she utilizes experiences of struggle, familiar imagery or complex emotion. Her artworks sometimes radiate cold and latent violence. Moments are depicted in order to clarify our existence and to find poetic meaning in everyday life. Other works have a call to action for the viewer to invoke social change. She is interested in topics of feminism, environmentalism, and LGBTQIA rights. She wants the viewer to become part of the art as an added component, and in this way, every work is a performance. The artist acts as a conduit to bring about social change by using art as a form of narration for disenfranchised and underserved peoples.
Artist Statement
Rumors, pollution, advertisements, politics, and tabloids surround us in a chaotic world that can often feel quite negative. I believe that art aims to make sense of the world around us and synthesize the good, the bad, and the ugly. My artistic practice is driven by taking my external stimuli, processing it, and creating work that invokes social change. These changes can be on a macro level, by looking at restructuring systems that support inequality, or the micro-level, by evaluating everyday interactions and micro-aggressions.
My work is about the human experience, specifically about trauma and how it shapes who we are. I aim to show different perspectives of life to instill introspection and empathy. Sometimes the work radiates cold and latent violence because of the themes of injustice and can be dark. I specifically work with feminism, LGBTQIA rights, and environmentalism, but as I change and grow, my work evolves too. I create these works using a variety of media. I use a variety of media in all of my work, including paint, metal, found object, wood, video, performance, and installation. Color is utilized as an emotive tool. Reds evoke intense and sharp emotions of love and pain, as blue works to emote nostalgia, history, and soothing feelings.
Art does not exist in a vacuum. It feeds on the world it lives in and has no impact without people to view it. The audience is just as much a part of my work as the canvas. I aim to make work that has the viewer thinking about their choices, how they treat others, and the legacy they will leave. In this way, my legacy is theirs.