Dans Les Rêves
Leon Gallery March 7th 6-10pm
1112 E 17th Ave Denver
Sandi Calistro is a Denver-based artist working across painting, tattooing, and murals. Born in New Britain, Connecticut, and raised in the wooded landscapes of western Maine, her relationship with art has unfolded over a lifetime. At fifteen, she painted signs for local businesses and began exploring tattooing-early gestures toward a practice rooted in both craft and storytelling.
Years later, after establishing a well-known tattooing career, her focus turned more fully toward painting and the exhibition of fine art. Her work centers on the female figure as vessel and symbol, weaving themes of the sacred feminine and humanity's enduring bond with the natural world. These figures inhabit dreamlike realms where tattoo iconography, religious imagery, and pop culture converge, forming intimate narratives that exist somewhere between memory, myth and reverie.
"Beauty is never simple in the work of Sandi Calistro, and for all the strength she infuses her usually-female subjects with there is also danger, vulnerability, and pain beneath the alluring veneer. Her examination of femininity is fearless, a sharp contrast to the false positivism found in some circles, and incorporates a galaxy of open symbols and metaphors to contrast and heighten the assured linework. Calistro works tendrils of paint and ink into the growing chasms between expectation and reality, and in addition to her explorations of gender she exposes the disconnect between the modern consciousness and the natural world, where living creatures and the earth itself are but afterthoughts to trivial things we imbue with absurd importance. Somewhere between the menaced and the menacing, the tragic and the wonderful, the art of Sandi Calistro presents itself to the viewer as both open-ended riddle and self-contained fairy tale. That, and it fucking rocks." -Jesse Bullington author of Tale of the Brothers Grossbart and The Enterprise of Death