Thorn Collaborative

Puzzled Blue is a game of collage played by long distance friends and collaborators Colleen Marie Foley and Erin Ethridge. Stitching together pieces of the landscapes in which they live, they construct a composite vision of a place in between. The gesture renders space and time as malleable, shaped by the power of longing for a loved one from afar. The clocktower projection is in concert with four other video compositions on display throughout the Denver Theatre District. Together, the five works constitute a patchwork poem that can be read in any order as one navigates the city.

Puzzled Blue is part of Monumomentum: A TAD Project.

Monumomentum: Scale shifts in space/time.

Curator Statement: With Monumomentum, we play with scale shifts in size, distance, duration, and perspective in ways that rethink routine experiences and the everyday.

About TAD:

TAD stands for Temporary Alternative Duty (often used in reference to labor), but also an acronym for Toby And Don, the two curators behind TAD Projects: Tobias Fike and Donald Fodness. Formed in 2022, to generate exhibitions and art related experiences. With a DIY spirit and desire to experiment curatorially, TAD sets out to strengthen, bridge and build community through art. We emphasize the alternative.

Artist Bios:

Interdisciplinary artists Erin Ethridge and Colleen Marie Foley have been working together under the pseudonym Thorn since 2015. As a collaborative, they work to unravel paradoxes in intimacy and identity. Reckoning with distance/closeness, pleasure/pain, and self/other, Thorn imagines the utopian (and catastrophic) effects of dissolved selfhood, hybrid beings, and composite memory.

Their solo and collaborative work has been shown in venues such as MANA Contemporary, Grounds for Sculpture, the Denison Museum, The Mint Museum, and Sunday Sessions at MoMA Ps1. Jointly, they’ve been awarded residences at Tides Institute and Museum of Art (Maine), Fjuk Arts Center (Iceland), Chulitna Research Institute (Alaska), Elsewhere Museum (North Carolina), and Rhizome DC (Washington DC).