They started as simple doodles: Twodimensional drawings, flat, in a graphic, illustrative style, no shading. But there these animals were. So, she talked to them. And like so many things within her artistic practice, they grew into themselves. When Denver-based artist Jess Webb THE STORY BEHIND THE WHIMSICAL began the process of designing the Rainbow Room and the Womb Room for Convergence Station nearly four years ago, it was just a fledgling of an idea that lived in her mind. Something like an incubator, the space she envisioned was one of coziness and whimsy, both natural and supernatural, an imaginary drawn from elements of real life that felt familiar yet impossible, playful in their materiality, appearance and relationship. Jess knew Meow Wolf in its formative years, prior to the permanent Y L E exhibition spaces, when it was a group of DIY artists in Santa Fe, NM. She recalls going to some of their shows: “One in particular was a geodesic dome structure that was filled with thrift store junk, it was so maximalist. You walked in and it was computers, stuffed animals, shoes — and I thought, This is amazing, I wish I could have a community like that in Denver that I could work with.” It was during a Communikey (CMKY) Festival in Boulder, CO when Jess first met the group from Santa Fe. The connection continued from there, but her involvement couldn’t begin just yet. “When they started building House of Eternal Return, I was going to be involved, but I was single moming at the time and I couldn’t go down to work on it. But a lot of my friends did … it came out to be such a neat thing.” Jess’ background was one that drew her to Meow Wolf’s immersive artistic experiences. Her academic experience in both spacial media (“basically another way of saying ‘sculpture’”) and art education let her passions for working with people and natural material thrive. She’s focused on teaching within alternative spaces rather than in more traditional classrooms, such as Think 360, a Denver-based org that champions accessible arts education, where she’s worked with differently-abled artists of all ages. Like many other Meow Wolf artists, she’s been connected to the fine arts world, completing residencies and gallery shows. However, also like many other Meow Wolf artists, she’s never limited herself to one type of creative practice. Rather than thinking of it as artwork, she likes to think of it as artplay. Her career experiences have ranged from interior design and custom installation, to creative direction and film production for music videos. She makes paintings and ambient music; she designs earthware and jewelry; she uses textiles and wood and plants. “When I found out they were building one in Denver, I was ecstatic. I felt like it was a long time coming.” Early on in the development process, Jess began working with Meow Wolf Co-Founder and Senior Creative Director Caity Kennedy. After pitching her idea of the Womb Room, she learned her installation would exist in Numina, a sentient universe that is just as much a living being as it is a place. No. 121 ANIMAL CAVE AKA THE WOMB ROOM At first, when the Womb Room existed only as collaged planning sketches and in Jess’ mind, “… it was going to have a net, a place you could lay down in — it was going to be a cushy area with pillows.” But between the emergence of COVID, budget constraints and fire code requirements, her plans shifted. “We had to change a lot of things.” The core of her idea remained the same, to create a place that felt like the beginning of life and time. But all of the materiality changed. “I started rethinking the use [of the room] — how many people were going to be in that space, touching things — it just seemed smarter to move away from fabrics and textiles, and more towards harder washable surfaces.” “Originally everything was going to be made out of fabric and cloth and giant stuffed animals essentially. Then we sort of leaned towards a sculptable concrete instead, with the Rainbow Room specifically.” RAINBOW ROOM/CREATURES The Rainbow Room is a candy-colored psychedelic vestibule to the Womb Room. Her creatures, once just doodles, surround the portal. They huddle around the entrance, not quite greeting visitors but not quite warding them off either; their expressions range from bemused to skeptical, to indifferent. “I know the one on the left is really grumpy,” says Jess. As she developed her initial doodles, these otherworldly animals took on personalities of their own. Jess felt she could talk to them; they even had names. “The one on the bottom left was one of the first ones that I made, her name is Etta. It’s blue with a yellow face, and ears that come out, and she’s just, like, kind of pathetic and depressed, but I just love her.” As she sculpted and hand painted them, she got to know them more. These animals are reminiscent of Jim Henson characters, specifically from the movie Labyrinth (1986), in which a lycra-clad David Bowie is the king of goblins who snatches away a young girl’s baby brother. In her effort to rescue the child from a seemingly infinite labyrinth by midnight, she encounters a hodgepodge of fantastical beasts and critters. Some are tricksters, and some want to help. Jess said that she was “obsessed” with the movie as a kid, and his characters served as very strong inspiration. “There’s one creature that’s up to the right that is kind of ugly, with a wrinkly double-chin going on. That definitely references the door-knocker character [in the film].” As she shifted to incorporating different media, her stuffed animals transformed into concrete and plaster. In their transformation from sketches to sculptures, Jess wanted to play with the push and pull between two- and three-dimensional objects, letting them emerge from the walls while retaining some of their flat quality. WOMB ROOM It’s fitting then that her animals exist between two different planes, as they also act as a welcoming committee to a new world: a chrysalis, a gateway between other spacial dimensions, where one can go backwards BY T R A RNSTEIN T S I B E J S E E S J S B E W S B O B O - P I N - T E R Y V A I E C L W B A H N C H T Y S
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