“What We Hold On To” has the feel of a landmark Colorado art show, one of those exhibitions people will remember and talk about long after it closes its public run.
That is not just because the exhibition itself is meant to commemorate a milestone, the tenth anniversary of Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum, or because it features many artists that the locally based, but globally busy, organization has featured in its highly successful offerings over the past decade.
It is more because “What We Hold On To” looks unlike any other exhibition you’ve seen here before. Just the setup is dazzling.
The work of the 18 artists on display is arranged mostly on white shelving units — the kind you find in an industrial warehouse meant to hold pallets of goods loaded by a forklift truck — arranged into the shape of a 12-foot cube.
And that gleaming white cube, shrouded in transparent, gauzy fabric and lit from within, is set up in a vast, entirely black warehouse in Englewood that Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum now calls its Headquarters.
The entire exhibition feels like a glowing illusion, something dropped down by aliens into a light industrial neighborhood located in Denver’s inner suburbs.
Then there are some larger-than-life sideshows, including an installation by artist Martin Creed, titled “Work No. 1782,” that consists of 17,000 rolls of toilet paper stacked into a perfect pyramid.
Or Cristóbal Gracia’s “La Absoluta,” a three-dimensional work, shaped into an irregular pearl, that stands 8 feet high on the floor. The sculpture is a blob of sorts with tens of thousands of tiny things attached to its outer surface — plastic toys, metal tools, cigarette lighters, puzzle pieces, seashells, pull tabs, belt buckles — that make it a mesmerizing mystery.
There is a curatorial logic behind all of it. The show, in a nod to its building, takes on the concept of storage. All of the works are a study of what we decide to keep as humans in a world that is constantly in flux.
“We are in this dynamic growth moment, and it seems like a really healthy meditation to ask yourself what you want to hold on to and what you don’t,” said Black Cube Executive Director Cortney Lane Stell, who organized the exhibit.
Each artist comes at the idea in a different way. Some focus on our relationships to objects we possess and treasure, and are sometimes bogged down by, both physically and psychologically.
That includes Amber Cobb’s “Negotiating the Rations.” The work is made from pieces of jewelry, handed down from her grandmother — necklaces, pendants, charms, baubles — that she took apart piece by piece and suspended by delicate strings. It comes together into a hanging mobile.
By deconstructing the jewelry and transforming it into something entirely new and valuable on its own merits, Cobb’s work explores how we can honor the memory of a thing we own but not be bound by the emotional baggage of its past.
Other objects explore how we hold on to memories of our own bodies. Viviane Le Courtois’ “Half a Century: Memory Lines” is simply a set of bronze and iron casts of her own hands and feet she created when she was 50 years old. They serve as an archive of sorts, freezing in time the moment of a personal milestone.
Still others look at how we might hold our recollections of the dead. The duo of Phillip Andrew Lewis and Heather Dewey-Hagborg present their work, titled “Spirit Molecule IV,” which proposes the idea of “memorial plants” — living flora that has been altered to include the DNA of deceased loved ones.
The piece includes petri dishes the pair used to develop these plants — there are actually specimens developing under a grow light — as well as six video monitors simultaneously showing their process of collecting human samples and grafting plants.
“The idea is that people can consume these plants as a way to mourn,” curator Stell explained.
“What We Hold On To” is full of big, complicated gestures like that, and showy ones, too, including Marek Wolfryd’s “Content in the Age of Globalized Reproduction,” which looks at how we hold onto the ideas of people past and reinterpret them in our own time.
The piece extracts a section of words from a 1935 essay by philosopher Walter Benjamin and deconstructs them into individual letters, which are then rendered in silver mylar balloons. The letters — and there are more than 2,000 of them — float about the floor of the entire exhibition. The work is Wolfryd’s way of expressing “the tension between permanence and ephemerality, authenticity and replication.” It’s as highly conceptual as it is comical.
That level of duality defines “What We Hold On To.” On one hand, it’s a very theatrical exhibition. With its high-contrast lighting and curtain walls made from sheer fabric (yards and yards of it, hand-sewn by artist Anise Aiello), it feels like a set piece for a film or stage show.
But the individual objects, displayed on both sides of the industrial shelving, tend to have a genuine, intimate feel. It is impossible to explore memory and not get personal, no matter how hard you mine it for universal ideas on how humans behave.
The exhibit also points to a new duality for Black Cube itself as it enters its second decade. The nonprofit organization has never had a permanent home, preferring to produce site-specific exhibits in places near and far. That is how it got its name: “nomadic.”
Going forward, it will continue that road show, but it will also program regularly at this new space in Englewood, and that opens up a good deal of possibilities for both curators and the general public. There is, quite frankly, not a lot going on in this part of Englewood — great area, good people, but an art desert.
The Headquarters should go a long way toward bringing interesting visual art offerings to the suburbs. They may not all be landmark moments like this opener, but the future appears promising.
Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelance writer specializing in fine arts.
If you go
“What We Hold On To” continues through Dec. 12 at Black Cube Headquarters, 2925 S. Umatilla St., Englewood. It’s free. Hours vary, so check the website or make an appointment before going. Info: blackcube.art.