anakainosis
FEBRUARY 26-MARCH 22, 2026
Opening reception | February 26, 2026 - 4:00-7:00 pm
This exhibition brings together Denver-based Hyperlink - curators Tobias Fike, Donald Fodness - along with artists Ethan Cherry, Andrea Caretto, and Shayna Cohn in dialogue with Todd Molinari (Portland, OR), Marcus Sendlinger (Berlin) and Isaac McKenna (Seattle) - all associated with Portland, Oregon-based after / time gallery to explore possible exits from the exhaustion and impasses of contemporary art. Situated at CU Denver Experience Gallery in Denver, Colorado, the exhibition creates the conditions for the possibility of deviation from the current median of contemporary art by pressing together the practices of artists whose work is deeply concerned with the conditions of aesthetic meaning, material intelligence, and philosophical form. Loosely guided by the practice of speaking in order that the truth might come forth through the fissures and cracks, the exhibition proposes a metaphysics of art that faces down the current temptations of retreating into nostalgia through repetition of exhausted forms and being lulled into the grey riverbanks of ideology. It instead seeks renewed modes of artistic seriousness, joy, risk, and affirmation.
Art as a site where form and excess collide, not to resolve contradiction, but to intensify it. Let us artists have discussion instead of declarations: artists meet not to illustrate theory, but to test it materially. Artists must daily face limitations, not as an endpoint, but as an opportunity to have the courage to look directly at the limits of meaning. Artists love limits and locality and see local practices as philosophical engines rather than regional footnotes. In this time of upheaval and continuous claims on attention and affirmation, this exhibition is a refusal of both market cynicism and moralized critique in favor of aesthetic necessity. This is the revaluation of the materials, images, and gestures as carriers of metaphysical weight. This exhibition is a thinking space rather than a thematic container that proof-texts curatorial theses. Thus new pathways emerge not from novelty, but from intensified attention to form.
This exhibition proposes a shared investigation into what art can still be when it takes its own metaphysical stakes seriously. By placing Hyperlink and Denver-area artists in active dialogue with after / time, the exhibition resists both academic enclosure and market spectacle, offering instead a space of encounter, risk, and renewed aesthetic inquiry. The exhibition affirms art as a living practice capable of generating meaning, intensity, and new horizons of thought through form itself.
Artist bios
Andrea Caretto is an American Artist based in Lakewood, Colorado. She received her BFA from the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design and completed her MFA at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2025, where she continues as professor of record. Caretto has exhibited in museums, university galleries, and contemporary art spaces across Colorado and the United States, with recent exhibitions at RULE Gallery (Marfa, TX), the CU Art Museum (Boulder, CO), East Window (Boulder, CO), and Emmanuel Gallery (Denver, CO). In 2025, Caretto traveled to London through a research grant funded by the Center for Humanities and the Arts.
Ethan Cherry (b. 1996) is a Midwest-born artist whose creative practice is rooted in oil painting. He received his BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 and is currently an MFA candidate in Drawing & Painting at the University of Colorado Boulder. Cherry’s art explores ambiguity, materiality, and devotion through small- to medium-scale works that hover between representation and abstraction. He often depicts imagery of plastic toys, animation cells and video game stills. Rendered with meticulous care, these pop culture references—typically overlooked or discarded—are transformed into sites of reverence, queerness, and imaginative refuge. His practice places particular emphasis on surface preparation and substrate, working across stretched linen, burlap, and panel to foreground the objecthood of painting itself. Through slow accumulation and close looking, Cherry’s paintings cultivate a sense of seclusion and oddity. Cherry’s work is informed by his experiences living and working internationally, including study in Italy through RISD’s European Honors Program and extended time in India and New Mexico. These experiences continue to shape his interest in spiritual materiality and devotional aesthetics. Recent exhibitions include Aspects of Touch at East Window (Boulder, 2025), Archive Fever Dream at Space Space (Boulder, 2025), the King Award Exhibition at the Visual Arts Complex (Boulder, 2025), and Selected Works on Paper at CU Boulder’s Goldstein Gallery (2023).
Shayna Cohn is a Denver-based artist whose mixed-media practice spans sculpture, installation, and multi-media. Referencing natural phenomena, Cohn conjures visual moments that are both organic and otherworldly. Her heightened visual language - where ecstatic color, opalescent shine, and illumination converge - sparks surreal visual moments that shimmer with wonder.
Cohn’s evolving sculptural language has been shaped by years of exploration, intuitive mark-making, and unexpected material pairings. Her work embraces dualities, luminous and murky, delicate and haphazard, dense and airy, with welcomed complexity and shapeshifting. Cohn holds a BFA from the College of Wooster in Ohio and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has participated in residencies including Byrdcliffe in Woodstock, NY; Cité des Arts in Paris, France; and Failure Lab at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Her immersive permanent installation, Sparkle Cave, can be experienced at Meow Wolf, Denver. She is an Associate Professor at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.
Isaac McKenna is a photographer, sculptor, and artist based in Seattle, WA. They graduated with honors in Visual Art from Brown University. Isaac’s work spans a variety of photographic and sculptural mediums, and focuses on a conceptual relationship between subject matter and the photographic (or sculptural) object. With the use of experimental and alternative photographic processes, the medium becomes inseparable from the picture, a combined whole which questions the place of photographs in an image-saturated environment. McKenna nearly always employs hand-made and 3D-printed tools and cameras in their studio, and their insistence on having a hand in every step of the process reflects their interest in deeply laborious image-making. They have exhibited in Rhode Island, Washington, at after / time gallery in Portland, OR, and recently at the CLAVO 8 Art Fair in Mexico City.
Todd Molinari is an artist, curator, filmmaker and writer living and working in Portland, Oregon. He is a new media artist whose artistic practice is expressed in painting, photography, experimental video, film, sculpture, metalsmithing and printmaking, arte util as well as installations and performance art. He is a co-founder of after/time gallery, an artist-run gallery and experimental curatorial platform located in downtown Portland, Oregon, that exhibits emerging regional, national and international artists and to provide a space for the development of artistic practices commensurate to the challenges and opportunities of the early 21st century and for the reconceptualization of future possibilities for the public art space as contemporary art as a form passes from the scene. He has curated a number of exhibitions in Philadelphia, Reykjavik, Iceland, Nantes, France and Portland, OR. Molinari’s works have been shown in exhibitions in Berlin, Nantes, France, Reykjavik, Iceland, Los Angeles, CA, Brooklyn, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Portland, OR, and Pont-Aven, France; He is the recipient of the Patricia and Richard Henkels Award in the Fine Arts, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Todd Molinari received his MFA at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA and continued studies at San Francisco Art Institute.
Marcus Sendlinger is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, abstract painter, drawer, mechanic and musician concerned with the recontextualization of product materials in painting, sculpture and installation in response to social and cultural phenomena, history and the environment. He is represented by after / time gallery, Portland, OR. He has exhibited extensively in Berlin, Slovenia, Los Angeles, New York and Portland, OR. He received his degree in fine art from the State Academy of Art & Design, Offenbach, Germany / HFG, Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, Kunsthochschule Hessen, Germany.