The Fantasy Show
The Fantasy Show
Museum of Outdoor Arts, Englewood Civic Center
1000 Englewood Parkway 2-230, Englewood, CO 80110
September 24-December 17, 2021
Admission: Free
Review by Madeleine Boyson
I adore fantasy. Years of rereading my worn copy of Ella Enchanted forged a love for speculative fiction that’s only strengthened with time. [1] Often inspired by folklore or mythology, fantasy features magical elements that don’t conform to real-world history or natural laws, and the genre demands that I suspend my disbelief even as I join in imagining a different world. [2] Fantasy requires make believe—the childlike, pretend play that’s been proven essential to human growth. [3] And after visiting The Fantasy Show in the Museum of Outdoor Arts’ (MOA) indoor galleries, I’m more convinced than ever that play is one of the prerequisites to good art, no matter the level of craft.
An installation view of The Fantasy Show group exhibition at the Museum of Outdoor Arts. Featured here: works by the Design and Build Emerging Artists, including The Human Garden, Botanical Realism, and Venus Fly Trap in the foreground; Storybook Illustration Come to Life in the middle ground; and The Dream Dragon and Fantasyville Apartments in the background. Image by DARIA.
The Fantasy Show is a group exhibition of eleven participants, on view through December 17. Six “Design and Build Emerging Artists” join five 2021 Artists in Residence in a curious blend of styles and materials under a generalized “fantasy” theme. By inviting viewers to reignite their relationship with play, The Fantasy Show asserts that great art depends upon good make believe. Moreover, the works demonstrate that art is a playground to indulge the senses, a medium to contact our inner children, and a carte blanche to imagine the world we want, even as we try to escape the one we don’t.
Design and Build is MOA’s signature, thirty-year-old education program: an eight week internship for new artists led this year by Artist Fellow (and program alumna) Tiffany Matheson. Over the course of two months, participants learn how to create cohesive bodies of work while co-producing an exhibition and gaining experience in public art and commissions.
In the main gallery, Design and Build participants Macey Boren, Emma Coleman, Sarah English, Molly Robinson, Arianna Sapp, and Jenna Wilusz each present individual works that introduce the fantasy theme. But nowhere is the Design and Build program mission to “[motivate] invention through collaborative creativity” more evident than in their imaginative, cooperative installations, which appeal to the senses via curiosities, riddles, cultural references, and interactive elements. [4]
The Design and Build Emerging Artists collaborative, Fun-gi Forest, 2021, papier mâché, acrylic paint, moss, and various media. Image by Madeleine Boyson.
I’m immediately drawn to Fun-gi Forest, featuring a grove of giant papier mâché mushrooms, brightly painted walls, and a mossy door that opens onto a chaotic Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole. Museum of Magical Beings lurks around the corner, displaying a range of specimens taken from mystical creatures like Medusa and Bigfoot, and elsewhere, against a backdrop of thick ivy, another multi-walled installation features four works that read as one. Little blue bells ring and tulips stick out their kissy lips in Botanical Realism, a literal take on plants’ common names. In The Human Garden, Barbie legs kick out of “Can-Can Lilies,” and corals from Wonderful Wall of Coral hint at the aquatic inspiration behind this installation’s actual centerpiece, Venus Fly Trap: here Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus becomes a lip-headed mannequin emerging from a crushed velvet carnivorous plant.
A detail image of the Design and Build Emerging Artists’ collaborative Botanical Realism, 2021, mixed media. Image by DARIA.
The Design and Build collaborative pieces also tug at my inner child, as in the palette-cleansing expanse of a parchment-colored, black line mural titled Storybook Illustration Come to Life. Coupled with The Dream Dragon—a shimmery pink and purple chicken wire serpent—and Fantasyville Apartments at the back wall, this portion of the gallery feels like a child’s ideal bedroom, and I find myself six years old again, awash in wonder.
Entering the ancillary galleries, I feel pulled from childhood back into the adult present. The works of the five Artists in Residence—who created in MOA’s studio spaces from late April to late September—are no less playful than the youthful Design and Build installations, but they are markedly more mature in both craft and presentation. These fantasies are rooted deeper in reality, however, by drawing inspiration for make believe from the lived present.
Annette Isham, Dim Descension, 2021, photograph from a performance video. Image by DARIA.
Annette Isham’s performance and video Dim Descension takes me through a kaleidoscope forest to an isolated beach, with only a black and white swirl umbrella as a guide. She hypnotizes with a manipulated, yet real, landscape, making me believe that somewhere, the ocean really can open up on itself like a mouth.
Scottie Burgess, Soft Static, 2021, fiber and mixed media. Image by Madeleine Boyson.
Scottie Burgess similarly draws upon reality, but takes his cues from technology instead of the land. Soft Static is a glitchy piece with strings of analog noise hanging off of and heaped underneath a huge television-shaped form. In concert with his Signal Booster’s gargantuan TV antennae, the fiber work suggests the presence of a cosmic giant intent on receiving signals of her own.
Jodi Stuart, Form Futura, 2021, 3-D pen-formed ABS plastic and silicone adhesive. Image by Madeleine Boyson.
High-tech culture also intersects with hand-made processes in Jodi Stuart’s room of 3-D pen-formed, ABS plastics. [5] These works are joyous, and Form Futura in particular reminds me of both children’s play tunnels and an abstracted biomorph. The multicolored, woven, and occasionally spiky plastic sculpture literally peers through the glass at Design and Build’s Dream Dragon like a mirrored serpent.
An installation view of WAVEFORM Experiential (Pat Higgins and Sam Moritz), I.R.I.S. (The Inhabitable Reality Intelligence System), 2021, mixed media. Image by Madeleine Boyson.
The most interactive and technological playground in the exhibition, however, is I.R.I.S. (The Inhabitable Reality Intelligence System) by Pat Higgins and Sam Mortiz of WAVEFORM Experiential. Genre-bending fantasy into science fiction, I.R.I.S. is an immersive “...Prismatic Light Vessel that allows the user to scan the multiverse” by stepping into an “Activation zone” flooded with colored light. [6] This spaceship requires visitor engagement to function and consequently, Higgins and Moritz’s work suggests that any multi-dimensional, fantastical travel must originate with the self.
This, then, is the driving message of The Fantasy Show: that fantasy requires us to make believe and still it draws upon our deeply human realities. We bring our histories, internal landscapes, and preoccupations with us into the genre as a place to work them out. I end my trip to MOA by visiting the In My Fantasy wall before being transported out on the dreamlike narrative of Olive Moya’s [Mouthing Words] mural in the Atrium Gallery. Here the Design and Build artists invite visitors to write our fantasies on mirrored cards. Creating new worlds requires looking back at ourselves, a personal reflection emphasized best by one response that reads “[In my fantasy] …THERE’S NO CILANTRO.” No matter the level of craft or experience, fantasy inspires a childlike and self-reflective play that is essential to good art. In the end, it is genuine creative alchemy that transports us to new dimensions.
Madeleine Boyson is a Denver-based writer, lecturer, curator, and artist. Her art and scholarship concentrate on American modernism, natural photography, and (dis)ability studies, including issues of care and dependency as well as the wholeness of the body. Madeleine holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art History and History from the University of Denver and volunteers as Development Director for Femme Salée—an online intersectional platform focusing on complex embodiment in the arts.
[1] Ella Enchanted is a Newbery Honor book written by Gail Carson Levine that was published in 1997.
[3] Rachel E. White, “The Power of Play: A Research Summary on Play and Learning,” Minnesota Children’s Museum, 2012, accessed October 10, 2021, https://www.childrensmuseums.org/images/MCMResearchSummary.pdf.
[4] From the exhibition wall text.
[5] ABS stands for “acrylonitrile butadiene styrene”—a thermoplastic polymer often used for injection molding and 3-D printing.
[6] From the exhibition wall text.
