ABOUT THIS EXHIBITION

Better Out Than Around is a two-person exhibition featuring RMCAD Alumni, Alicia Ordal and Vinni Alfonso. Through sculpture, installation, painting, and mixed media, both artists explore the relationship between the body, perception, and lived experience. Their work invites viewers to consider how we see, feel, and move through the world, revealing the ways our understanding of reality is shaped by personal experience and connection.

Ordal's sculptural works explore the subjective nature of sensory processing, constructing what she describes as "spatial puzzles" that blur distinctions between two and three dimensions, foreground and background, certainty and illusion. Drawing from neurodivergent experiences of perception, her installations disrupt familiar ways of seeing, creating environments where visual information becomes unstable and new cognitive possibilities emerge. Alfonso similarly approaches experience as fluid and relational, using painting and installation to investigate embodiment as a porous condition shaped by contact, memory, trauma, and exchange. Dense accumulations of marks expand into immersive fields that suggest both intimate interior landscapes and larger systems of connection.

Though their visual languages differ, both artists are interested in what happens when familiar structures begin to shift. Ordal bends space, perspective, and perception, while Alfonso builds layered fields that speak to the porous nature of the body and its connection to the world. Together, their works suggest that understanding is never fixed, but constantly formed through experience, contact, and change. Better Out Than Around invites viewers into spaces where uncertainty becomes productive and where new ways of seeing and feeling can emerge.

Alicia ordal’s BIO

Alicia Ordal is a multidisciplinary artist born in Minnesota and raised in Colorado. The artist received her BFA from the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design under the guidance of esteemed artists Clark Richert, Bruce Price and Rebecca Vaughan. Denver’s DIY community of the early aughts also shaped her sensibilities and creative collaborations. Ordal was a resident artist of RedLine Contemporary Art Center from 2008-2011 and a current member of Tank Studios. Ordal has exhibited locally and nationally at museums and galleries including MCA Denver, BMoCA, Arvada Center for the Arts and Nick Ryan Gallery. Ordal has art in the collection of the Hyatt House Denver/Lakewood at Belmar. The artist will obtaining her MFA in Sculpture at the University of New Mexico beginning the fall of 2026.

Vinni Alfonso’s Bio

Vinni Alfonso (B. 1990 in Aurora, Co.) is a mixed media artists living and working in Denver, Co. Although he specializes in painting, his work tends to cross the lines between most mediums. Through installation, video, drawing, painting,  and whatever means necessary, he is creating a language which, from piece to piece, unfolds its’ own unique narrative and agency.

Alfonso is Influenced stylistically by anything from the modern masters of impressionism and abstract expressionism to the contemporary wizards of animation and cinema, While being influenced Emotionally by the human experience;  the uncanny plight of existence itself, both beautiful and strange, is at the forefront of Vinni’s work. 

EXHIBITION RUN

• June 8 - September 4, 2026

RECEPTION

• June 18, 2026 4-7pm

GALLERY HOURS

• Monday through Friday, 11 am - 4 pm.

The Rotunda Gallery is located on RMCAD’s campus at 1600 Pierce Street, Denver, CO 80214.

June 8 - September 4, 2026

ABOUT THE ROTUNDA GALLERY

The Rotunda Gallery focuses on exhibitions featuring work by the RMCAD faculty, alumni, and local artists and designers in one of the college’s most unique buildings.