The artist Sam Grabowska, currently showing at Denver’s Leon Gallery, has a curious educational background.
The exhibition’s written materials list a doctorate in architecture with a concentration in cultural anthropology; a master’s degree in humanities; one bachelor’s degree in film; and a second bachelor’s in environmental design.
That is a lot of learning, and you could rightly assume it would lead to a career of making complicated works of art. Indeed, the pieces in the show, titled “Haptic Terrain,” wrestle with complex ideas.
Grabowska’s works explore the human body and soul, and how they exist and evolve under difficult conditions, how people weather social and environmental disorder, but also how they navigate the physical structures of our world — the ways in which we respond to architecture and urban environments, even when those spaces are uncomfortable and non-supportive.
Let’s just say all of those things take a toll, they transform us, and it can be a difficult process. In a very uncomfortable way, Grabowska’s new exhibit begins at the point of trauma and then goes on to dwell in its aftermath.
If there is a narrative to “Haptic Terrain” — and there does feel to be one, and it is about survival — then it does not deliver a clear and happy ending.
Yet, somehow, the individual works feel uncomplicated. They’re direct. If life is gnarly, so is the wall-mounted sculpture titled “All of Man Is an Island,” a wrinkled, sinewy, chewed-up glob of bulkiness rendered in the color of overcooked meat.
The piece, which does resemble the mass of an island in both shape and typography, delivers a stripped-down message: We suffer, we endure, and we do it alone, even if we are not better off from that experience.
It helps that Grabowska uses simple materials. The work might resemble an oversized pork rind but it is actually made of brown, plastic grocery bags that have been bunched up and wrapped around an aluminum armature and puffed up with insulation. The use of familiar objects places the piece in the real world.
The show’s centerpiece, an oversized installation titled “Remote Sensing,” has a similar knotted feel but in a different shape. The piece features five, rod-like forms suspended at different heights from the ceiling. Some are about 8-feet long; others are probably half that length.
But again, Grabowska manipulates her materials — grocery bags, concrete and insulation — so that they look biomorphic. In this case, they resemble abstracted mammal bones detached from whatever body they were once part of.
There is a bit of the grotesque in the work. Some of the bones appear old and dry, while others are in a state of decay, as if someone ripped them off, nibbled most of the flesh and left them to rot.
But there is, somehow, beauty in the wreckage, an acknowledgment that vulnerability is part of the human condition, a respect for our shared fragility and potential to fail in the worst of ways. It’s just not pretty.
It is easy to see how all of this Denver-based artist’s educational accomplishments come together in this body of work. The objects are architectural in the way they take three-dimensional shape, and they are anthropological in how they talk about existence over time. They look like cinematic set pieces and landscape design all at once.
The special effects are convincing, and sometimes the props are real, including in works like “Excavated Touch,” which involves a long lock of actual human hair, about 15 inches long, that has been twisted into knots and attached to a background of gray concrete.
The emotional journey of this hair — cut, contorted, perverted, set apart, forsaken — evokes the formidable challenges of simply existing in a world that can be aggressively, or accidentally, hostile. To live means to grow, but hope is easily chopped off at the root. It happens all the time.
“Haptic Terrain” is a relatively small affair. Leon Gallery, a storefront space on the 17th Avenue commercial strip in the Uptown neighborhood, is a single, compact room. I counted just 14 objects in the entire show.
That may leave some visitors wanting more to look at if they venture to Leon; it is hard to know when enough is enough or when it is too little for a special trip to see art.
But the exhibit does not feel sparse, and the pieces on display each have enough drama to draw you in. That includes the site-specific “Baladette,” which Grabowska actually placed in the Leon’s wooden floor. The work exists among the rafters between the first level of the gallery and the basement below. It is covered over in glass and looks like a vitrine of sorts.
It is again a blob of resin molded into some mutated three-dimensional form. Gallery visitors come upon it as a surprise and it looks to reveal some object that has long existed in secret, inside its host without acknowledgment.
It is eerie, mysterious and unknowable. Yet, it gives off a sense of perseverance, some being or animal or emotional entity continuing to exist, no matter what.
That is actually a good way to sum up the show overall. “Haptic Terrain” is full of struggle, and it is visceral, raw and carnal. But there is an appreciation for the idea that living things endure through hardship. They are not necessarily better off, sometimes they are quite damaged, but they do go on.
IF YOU GO
“Haptic Terrain” continues through Nov. 9 at Leon Gallery, 1112 17th Ave. It’s free. Info: 303-832-1599 or leongallery.org. Grabowska will give an artist talk at Leon Gallery at 6 p.m. on Oct. 17.
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