Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident (AIA) 2019
Chandler Romeo is an artist living and working in Denver, Colorado. She has a B.F.A. in ceramics from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. Romeo has created permanent and temporary installations (including public art) in a diverse array of media including steel, concrete, ceramics, wood, found objects, earthworks, and drawing. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, art centers and museums, and is in many public and private collections throughout the US. Her work is represented by 203 Fine Arts in Taos, New Mexico. She currently is Co-Chair of the River North Art District Board and Executive Board and has served on the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs, Denver International Airport Public Art Committee, Mayor’s Task Force on Creative Spaces, and has served on many public art and grant selection panels. Ms. Romeo and her husband, Reed Weimer, received the Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and the AFKEY Award from the Denver Art Museum. Together, they are part owners in the World’s Wonder View Tower in Genoa, Colorado.
At different times in my art career, I have created installations, drawings and small earthworks as an integral part of my art. Through my wanderings around Colorado and the West I’ve found the landscape to be filled with vernacular earthworks — earthworks not made by artists nor possessing the intent of being fine art, but of necessity. These earthworks serve the purpose to fence in livestock, gather and hold water, lay roads, create demarcation of ownership. The traces of human intervention are evident everywhere. Patterns, laid out by surveyors in varying geometric shapes, have greatly influenced our view of the Western landscape. My recent work explores vernacular earthworks and methods of demarcation from the quilt-like grid of the Public Land Survey System to the flowing vara strips or lineas laid out by Spanish settlers in Colorado and Northern New Mexico. They have provided me the opportunity to make works of art that celebrate, question, and meditate on the confounding and emotional issues of how humans occupy and alter the landscape.