Visitors to the CU Denver Experience Gallery will be asked to contemplate life in its most elemental sense through the gallery’s latest exhibition. Artists Travis Vermilye, Jaimé Belkind-Gerson, and Katie Caron take viewers through the phases of preconception, conception, and birth through works that are simultaneously conceptual and scientific.

The works of the artists provide opportunities to look deeply at our neurological and energetic relationship with self, each other, nature, science, art, and technology.

Incubator Features Many Works of Note

Featured works include Belkind-Gerson’s sculpture “Mama,” which is a tribute to the “often invisible strength” of women, writes the artist. The work encompasses not only mothers but also caregivers, entrepreneurs, partners who “balance an endless array of roles with grace, resilience, and selflessness.”

Vermilye’s “Womb Room” is an immersive piece, tucked in the back corner of the gallery and enclosed by soft fabric. Simulating being inside a womb, the piece features animation and audio that is at times hypnotic and other times discomfiting. A beautiful wooden stool made by furniture designer Robert Turek invites visitors to sit and experience the sensations for a minute.

Caron’s “Neuron Forest” is a larger-than-life sculpture made partly from tree branches. Caron explored the neuron’s likeness to other essential elements in nature through the piece. “Hauntingly, we observe the brain’s familiar branching fractals in roots, electricity, rivers, and especially biology (passages in the lungs, network of arteries, the nervous system),” she writes.

The concept for the exhibition came from Hope Carwile, a licensed clinical social worker, who came across artist and CU Denver professor Travis Vermilye’s work at an exhibition at the Arvada Center. Carwile had envisioned a larger project for almost 30 years and after meeting Vermilye decided the time was right to start implementing an initial iteration of her idea. Vermilye suggested including Belkind-Gerson and Caron in the exhibition based on Carwile’s idea and his familiarity with the work the other artists had done in the past. While conceptualizing the exhibition, “our conversations embodied the current climate of mental health, dis-ease, community building, stages of life, and what I now call the new four elements: nature, science, art and technology,” explains Carwile.

All three artists are educators. Belkind-Gerson is a pediatric gastroenterologist and Associate Professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz; Caron is the Department Chair of Art and Design at Arapahoe Community College; and Vermilye is an Associate Professor in CU Denver’s College of Arts & Media.

This exhibition is a collaboration with IL, a grassroots organization recently sprouted by Carwile, Kim LeClaire, a global educator, and Stewart Golditch, a retired bus driver. The mission of IL is to “provide creative resources to the general public for exploration, and engagement with the 4 stages of life, and our relationship to the natural world, sciences, art and technology.

Carwile hopes visitors will take time to pause and be with each piece, read the descriptions, and forgo judgment. “Be with the womb room as if you are in the most nourishing place you can be,” Carwile suggests.

Exhibition Details

Incubator

November 14, 2024 – February 2, 2025

Conversation with the artists: January 23, 2025 6-7pm

CU Denver Experience Gallery (located in the Denver Performing Arts Center)

Please visit CU Denver Experience Gallery’s website for hours of operation during the holiday season.