CoLabART
MORE ABOUT US + OUR WORK

 

CoLabART is a forty-year collaboration of the painter, Lynn Small and her husband, photographic process, new media artist, Dennis Paul. Exhibiting under, CoLabART - LynnSmall+DennisPaul and the moniker, D. PAUL/SMALL, they have fused their art practices and processes's, seamlessly layered the aesthetics of painting, drawing, photography, machine art and printmaking.

Always at the intersection of art and technology,
in the early 1990s the couple birthed viewart.com,
one of the first artist websites.

 

Having thematically intersected at various stages of our careers, the idea of collaborating to build upon our individual endeavors struck a responsive chord. Initial dual-fellowships in painting and photography to Yaddo in 1978 allowed us the opportunity to birth CoLabART in an ideal setting. During the ensuing years we have opened this further to include writers, musicians and visual artists of our own time as well as those from previous generations. This has helped us in our efforts to blend varied disciplines and has also brought us an additional gift—a fuller understanding of the creative spirit within us all.

Our mixed-media efforts have always incorporated contemporary modalities as well as 19th-century non-silver processes with painting, drawing and printmaking. Always at the intersection of art and technology, in the early 1990s the couple birthed viewart.com, one of the first artist websites. While integrating the new digital dialectic, their work began to incorporate additional processes as they created multimedia, site-specific installations, often accompanied by performance aspects, that feature digital video, original, holosonic SoundScapes and varied evolving new media conceptualizations.

Beginning in the 1990s, we have used audio components to add new dimensions to our work as we have always wanted the art to have a voice. Now the new frontiers of the digital dialectic have allowed us to change forever our artmaking boundaries. During our fall 2003 joint-residency Yaddo fellowships in painting, photography and multimedia, we further developed our Voice Of The Landscape: Earth Elegies III project —an interdisciplinary, immersive work-in-progress. Utilizing the technical resources of Skidmore College and the New York State Library's Special Collections and Archives division, original source material from Thomas Cole's sketchbooks and writings among others were digitized and afterward integrated into a four-channel transmedia project. The Voice concept video, a 4-channel demo version as well as the documentation video of the multimedia installation, InTheBeginning: Earth Elegies II may be seen on YouTube [see selected exhibitions].

With the inclusion of naturally-occurring elements from specific sites, sculptural elements have begun to play an expanded role in our overall concerns. and more recent works—influenced by L.A.'s techno-cine-cyberwaves and 21st-century modalities—are exploring the computer and video's unique sense of place to further the ongoing narrative of the sublime in American landscape tradition and the spirtual realm.

Our art celebrates the spirit of the land – the colors, textures, forms – of both the real and imagined. Exploring the myths, codas of ancient civilizations, the cosmos, and the capacity of the human mind and spirit to dream, imagine and create. Our art practice draws upon our travels, life experiences, world issues, the wealth of new tools and brushes of our time, as well as the emergence of new media in the 21st century.

Individually and collaboratively, the couple's artwork in the Earth Stains, Landsat, Love Canal, and LightScape portfolios has embraced the spirituality and preciousness of the land and the concept of the vanishing landscape, as well as the individual’s responsibility for its well being. This reverence for all Creation has produced an intriguing, diverse and often-mysterious pathway as manifested in seemingly diverse bodies of work such as the Sufi Cosmic Mass Celebration, the , Spirit Guides of the Southwest, and the mystical religious iconography of the kabbalah and the powers of the Hebrew alphabet - The Letters of Foundation.



SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

 

INSTALLATIONS

Current
Work-In-Progress

 

Videos
&
Media
Presentations



WEB SECTIONS

Lynn Small


Dennis Paul

CoLabART


SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Public & Private

 

Grants & Awards
Lectures & Artist Talks
Reviews & Essays

C o L a b A R T



1978 — PRESENT

Everything is two things that converge.
This range of convergence is really the great area of speculation.
—Robert Smithson

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  ©1993-2024 CoLabART • D. Paul/Small - Lynn Small + Dennis Paul
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