'Bardo': Art by Nichole Montanez

Ephemera welcomes our newest displaying artist, Nichole Montanez!

Montanez lives and works in Colorado. She is a versatile artist whose repertoire includes painting, photography, graphic art, drawing and pottery. She holds a degree in Fine Arts and went to work in a newsroom straight out of college, where she developed the mindset of a journalist while maintaining the heart of an artist. The journalist is fact-based and deals in hard truths; the artist is always looking to blur the boundaries between the real and the surreal. That tension and duality is evident in the body of her work. Nichole spent nearly a decade documenting the severely ill children whose desperate families made the pilgrimage to Colorado beginning in 2013, hoping that newly-legal medical cannabis would help them. This was a movement
that changed the legalization debate and landscape nationally.

Nichole has always been interested in faces and they make up the majority of her work. She more recently began exploring flowers and their fleeting nature. She is always trying to find ways to combine realism and abstraction to give visual representation to the in-between of the physical world and the spiritual — the imagined space where time is sped up and then slowed way down in the exact moment a life leaves the physical realm.