Gallery 81435 in Telluride, Colorado presents The Unknown Zone, a solo exhibition by Brooke Einbender during the months of March-June  2020. 

Brooke Einbender,  aka "Mindbender Art",  approaches her virtual reality and oil paintings as experiments. When starting a painting, she has no vision of what the end result should look like. Letting her intuition be her only guide, Brooke begins with disorderly, random acts, embracing mistakes and the unknown. Her painting practice shifts between chaos and order, organic and geometric shapes, and irregularity and symmetry.

Brooke’s process involves translating and transmuting her oil paintings into virtual reality. Using her paintings as her initial construct, she no longer has to create an illusion of space on a 2D surface. Virtual reality enables Brooke to expand the layers of her physical paintings, which in turn, allows her audience to fully immerse themselves inside the artwork.  Each of Brooke’s original oil paintings evolves into having a soulful counterpart within a virtual plane of existence, taking on a new digital identity.

Brooke Einbender is a multidisciplinary artist whose work blends several practices including painting, virtual reality, augmented reality, installation, and video, to form altogether an Unknown Zone of Art. She is a leading pioneer in the exploration of virtual reality, establishing new frontiers at the intersection of art and technology in the context of its impact on human consciousness. Brooke creates mind-bending experiences and paintings that are designed to transport the viewer to different inter-spatial dimensions. 

In 2017, she graduated from Wake Forest University as a Presidential Scholar for Visual Arts with a concentration in painting. In 2019, she was awarded a Telluride Arts Small Arts Grant to purchase her own virtual reality equipment. Brooke’s digital portfolio of immersive experiences has established her reputation as a “VJ” or Visual Jockey. She has collaborated with numerous festivals - including the Telluride Fire Festival, Original Thinkers, The Hemp Expo in San Diego, and Ranetas Festival in Alcañiz, Spain - creating one-of-a-kind virtual reality projections that completely transform a space for hundreds of people to experience.