Meet 2022-2024 RedLine Resident Artist Laura Conway!

Laura Conway is a Denver-based interdisciplinary artist. She started making art in the Denver DIY scenes, booking underground music shows, hosting art galleries in her punk house, and embarking on “film tours.”

Conway carries the ethos and esthetics she took from underground music into her current practice. Currently she creates politically grounded works that span genre and medium, using surrealism and a sense of play to contemplate life in late stage capitalism.

While she primarily identifies as a filmmaker, her work hybridizes performance art, animation, documentary, music, and dance. Her main preoccupation is systems of power and wondering how art especially the erotic, and the absurd can resist domination. What is the impact of the surveillance state on bodies? Can the erotic and sensual be modes of resistance?

In her work she finds herself trying to escape a catch 22 where her very tool of creation, the camera, is one of the tools of power and domination. Conway’s characters are often part of untold or overlooked histories, whether it is her communist grandparent’s in the McCarthy Era, a queer woman botanist, or a black woman computer programmer in the 1980s.

Her films have shown at film festivals nationally and internationally such as Slamdance, The Chicago Underground Film Festival, The Lucca Film Festival, and Antimatter Media Arts festival among others.

Watch the video of Laura in her RedLine studio to learn more about her and her practice!

Hi, I'm Laura Conway. I am a filmmaker and I have mostly worked making films for people to watch in movie theaters and music videos.

Here at RedLine, I'm really interested in exploring video art and what it would mean to show a movie where people might come in and leave at any point during the film. So you can't do certain things when someone's going to enter halfway through the movie. Like suspense is going to be different. So that's something I'm really interested in exploring.

I’m really interested in cameras and systems of power within filmmaking. So what is the male gaze and how can we fight that, or what might a female gaze look like?

Surveillance is another interest of mine, so I work with surveillance cameras sometimes trying to kind of combat the way cameras have been used as weapons with absurdity and humor and comedy and eroticism as tools to kind of work against the way cameras have harmed bodies.

I'm really interested and excited about getting involved in the community here and sharing skills and ways of thinking with community members in Five Points and Whittier and Coal, which is a neighborhood I've lived in for a long time. And then also working with the other artists and getting perspectives from people in other mediums is something I'm really looking forward to, and then working in video art and installation.