ASCENSION

38°41'42.0"N 104°59'09.6"W, Colorado, USA, 2026

 

An exhibition during Elk Glade’s annual barn dance, where a group of riders traveled on horseback, ATVs and Jeeps to see the artworks installed at an outlook overlooking the surrounding mountains and a hunter’s tent camp.

 

With work by:

Kyler Garrison

Gitte Maria Möller

Fritz Østeb

Joeri Woudstra

 

Curated by Lauren Johnson and Clara Donadoni in collaboration with Elk Glade Artist Residency.

 

Poster by Clara Donadoni and Ryan Appleton

Pictures by Clara Donadoni

 

A Spell for Ascension

 

Axis Mundi come to me. Axis Mundi set me free. Let me find the key.

Above the birds, between the roots, below the bones, the current moves.

Cast a circle; one, two, three l stand between the worlds.

I have the power to open that can never be broken.

When two unite as one. Warmth of the sun. Home from on the run.

I name the path, a new chance, the axis turns - and turns through me.

So let it be.

 

Fritz Østeb (b. 1989, Toulouse, France) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.

 

A graduate of Konstfack University of Arts and the Royal Institute of Art of Stockholm, Østeb’s practice engages with the tensions between nature and industry, drawing from histories of overconsumption and environmental degradation. His work often emerges from personal or collective memory, using found materials, organic matter, and sculptural assemblage to evoke speculative ruins. Recent investigations have centered around the symbolic architecture of the farmhouse, a space where cycles of control, care, extraction, and belief collide.

 

For Ascension Østeb has created What’s the Path? a site-specific artwork inspired by the Catholic tradition of the Via Crucis, or Stations of the Cross. Drawing from the rich iconography of medieval European devotional art, Østeb reimagines the fourteen stations as a series of abstract episodes. In many European towns, these images were placed along rural paths leading up to mountain shrines, becoming markers for an annual Good Friday pilgrimage, a communal reenactment of sacrifice and suffering, an active tradition to this day. Østeb transposes this tradition into his artistic language, distilling its symbolic essence to reflect on the broader notion of pilgrimage: as both a physical journey and a metaphysical ordeal. The resulting work meditates on how places become charged with meaning, how sacrifice is inscribed into landscapes, and how myth and memory shape collective belief beyond religious doctrine.

 

Kyler Garrison (b. 2001, Northern Colorado) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

 

A self-taught artist, Garrison’s practice is grounded in airbrush painting and shaped by the aesthetics of the post-internet era, graffiti and skateboarding subculture. Recent exhibitions include Carl Kostyal (London), Plan X Gallery (Milan and Capri), CAN Art Ibiza (Ibiza), Art Dubai (Dubai), Screw Gallery (Manchester), and Lorin Gallery (Los Angeles).

 

In guardian angel protect me we see a silver necklace and devotional pendant delicately resting on a striped green cushion patterned with soft florals. It’s a scene from your Catholic grandmother’s house. Here, the soft and hazy airbrush effect—reminiscent of sfumato, a technique developed by Leonardo da Vinci and named after the Italian word for “smoke”—stirs the ephemeral quality of memory and nostalgia. In a world saturated with digital distraction, Garrison’s paintings reflect a post-internet perspective on how broken timelines and constant stimulation, hallmarks of online life, disrupt presence and connection.

 

At the exhibition’s core is the idea of a lost axis mundi; a sacred center where the heavens, earth and underworld once converged, now fractured by modern techniques of alienation: digital-feudalism, commodification, and the cult of acceleration. Capturing still moments and intimate details, Garrison’s paintings evoke a sense of rediscovery, fragments of memory and presence reclaimed from the noise of digital life.

 

Gitte Maria Möller (b. 1991, Cape Town, South Africa) is a painter and multidisciplinary artist working between Cape Town and New York City.

 

A graduate of the Michaelis School of Fine Art (BAFA, 2015), she has an extensive list of exhibitions including Blade Study (New York), Project Gallery (New York), Rachel Uffner Gallery (New York and Los Angeles), Alice Black (London), Unitarian Church (Cape Town), WAF Galerie (Vienna). She is represented by Chozic Family Art Gallery (New York).

 

Möller’s practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, and assemblage, navigating the space between personal memory, cultural symbolism, and speculative world-building. Drawing from a broad visual lexicon including dream symbology, early video games, urban signage, religious iconography, and art historical motifs—her work operates as a devotional space where archetypes are held in suspension. The characters, objects, and signs featured in her compositions act as emotional proxies, mapping the terrain between vulnerability and strength, intimacy and alienation, the sacred and the synthetic.

 

In recent works, Möller has collaborated with Al Nardo to produce semi-transparent frames and sculptural extensions to her drawings using wire and plexiglass. These lightweight structures, reminiscent of both suncatchers and stained glass windows, evoke a portable, playful spirituality imbued with childhood memories, craft traditions, and a desire to create porous, open-ended icons. From delicate charms to dense painterly panels, Möller constructs a layered visual language that mirrors the complexity of inner life and the surreal contradictions of contemporary existence.

 

Joeri Woudstra (b. 1993, The Hague, Netherlands) lives and works in The Hague.

 

Woudstra is a multidisciplinary visual artist and composer. He’s seeking the residue of nostalgia and melancholy in an age of relentless progress and technological change. As Torus, he performs as a DJ and has released music on the label YEAR0001 among others. He graduated from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in 2016. Recent exhibitions include Nest (The Hague), Nest at Down The Rabbit Hole Festival (Beuningen), Josilda da Conceição Gallery (AMS), number1mainroad (Berlin), Unseen (AMS), Art Rotterdam (Rotterdam), and Stigter Van Doesburg (AMS).

 

The installation Radiate IV is a monumental cross made of speakers playing a blend of echoes, pop-music, samples, and loops. The cross, an iconic symbol of sacred space, intersection, and direction is reimagined here as a site of emotional mapping, where spirituality, hedonism, and sincerity converge. Radiate IV is a conceptual center, a spiritual spine, where fragmented symbols and cultural relics meet.

 

From the cliffs where Radiate IV rests, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (Spanish for “Blood of Christ”) stretch across the horizon. Nearby stands Pikes Peak, or Tavá Kaa‑vi, “Sun Mountain” to the Tabeguache Ute. Both mountains pulse with spiritual weight, but Sun Mountain holds a rare quality: it is a thin place. A thin place is where the boundary between worlds wears thin, where the physical and the spiritual brush close. Sun Mountain stands apart from the surrounding Rockies, lifted skyward by tectonic forces some 70 million years ago, then slowly carved by erosion to expose its ancient granite core; a glimpse into the Earth’s interior. It rises where mountains meet plains, occupying a liminal space between geographies. The rose-colored granite, subtly magnetic, lends the landscape a quiet charge. The natural springs at the base of the peak were once filled with colorful offering beads, red cloth, and knives—gifts to the Great Spirit, whose breath was believed to rise through the constant eruption of bubbles in the mineral water.