Opening Reception: Make Yourself, At Home

LOCATION: PlatteForum - 3575 Ringsby Ct

CATEGORY: Art Events

UPCOMING DATE AND TIME:

• Friday, May 15, 2026  6pm - 8pm

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You’re invited to the opening reception of “Make Yourself, At Home” and witness the amazing mylar community garden that Drew Austin and our ArtLab interns made! 🌱

“Make Yourself, At Home” presents a body of work as an exploration in the understanding of self, through the act of making. Inspired by overlapping worlds of interior design, queer coding, quantum physics, aging, and personal intuitive response, the physical crafting of the work takes precedence over the meaning of individual pieces.

“Make Yourself, At Home” will be the LAST exhibition in our Annex Gallery at Taxi before the big move so come celebrate this amazing exhibition with us! 🎉

EVENT INFORMATION:
Friday, May 15th, 6-8pm
3575 Ringsby Ct. 103, Denver, CO 80216

*Charcuterie and beverages will be offered during the reception*
*Free parking and ADA accessible*

About the exhibition:

“The queer experience is all about alchemy. Turning the most painful things into the most beautiful: prison into poetry, funerals into parades, and plagues into revolutions.” -Leo Herrera

Centering a process-based approach, this body of work unfolds as an exploration of self through the act of making. Rooted in overlapping languages of interiority, queer aesthetics, domestic ritual, memory, and intuitive material response, the work privileges inquiry over conclusion. Meaning emerges not through singular objects, but through layering, repetition, and proximity. 

Using repeating motifs derived from fleeting shadows, the works function as records of response rather than declarations of certainty. Repetition becomes a means of understanding—forms shifting across surfaces and scales in ways that mirror the construction of identity itself: assembled through intuition, performance, concealment, longing, and return.

The works oscillate between two material and emotional registers. Some pieces exist in a quieter frequency: darkened surfaces, softened edges, moments of pause that evoke lamplight, solitude, reflection, the intimate grounding of domestic space, or the flutter of possibility in public queer space. Others move outward with a heightened visibility, embracing ornament, saturation, permeability, and excess. Together, these registers remain in constant conversation, not as opposites, but as parallel conditions housed within the same body. The tension between subtlety and spectacle, concealment and revelation, becomes a structural language within the work itself.

Collected objects, reused materials, gifted remnants, and recurring forms accumulate into an evolving archive of lived experience–holding memory, touch, time, and previous lives within them. The physical labor of making functions as a form of processing—a way of tracing the movement between memory and presence, desire and acceptance, fragmentation and wholeness. Within this framework, home emerges not as fixed location, but as an accumulative condition built from ritual, sensation, familiarity, and chosen grounding; a material record of someone learning to more fully inhabit their own interior world through the act of making.

The community garden on view, created by the ArtLab interns, centers collaboration and collective ownership. A shared vision of flourishing plants fills the corner of the gallery and boldly confronts the outside world, asking viewers to greet the installation from the exterior of the gallery, viewable from multiple directions and throughout different times of the day. The plants hold their own agency, collecting color from installed lights, refracting light on surrounding surfaces, and reflecting the viewer upon closer inspection.