DIORAMAS & DYNAMIC MEMORIES WITH MISTER CHRISTMAS DENVER-BASED ARTIST, MISTER CHRISTMAS HAS A DEEP AND RARE UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURE OF MEMORIES — THAT WE DON’T REMEMBER THINGS AS THEY WERE, OR EVEN AS WE WERE. BY AMANDA SHAFER You pull up to an unassuming, industrial office have been keeping their anthropological finds since building south of Denver proper. You knock on a grey door identical to all the other grey doors facing the street. You’re greeted by a friendly-looking fellow with a wide smile and a twinkle of mischief in his eye. He welcomes you inside and you cross the threshold into a playground of the kind of things you would have been thrilled to find in your grandpa’s attic as a child — old analog television sets and radios, clocks, tin toys, tiny train parts, record players and gadgetry galore. Movement and tiny lights twinkling among the shelves of the bric-abrac of time gone by keep catching your eye. Upon closer inspection, you see that inside this Big Ben alarm clock or that 1940s Crosley Radio are scenes too whimsical to actually exist — pulled out of your childhood memories. Here’s one: it’s a table-top rotary phone like your aunt had in the 80s. But you step closer and see that the rotary piece in the center is missing. You look closer and recognize the fluorescent glow of a certain fast food restaurant’s golden arches framing a perfect replica of said fast food joint as it looked decades ago. Closer. Is that a UFO descending on the roof of the recognizable red-and-yellow arched restaurant? CLOSER. It’s beaming somebody … something … up. Is that … Grimace? Yep. Grimace Is Going Home. This is the studio where Denver-based diorama artist Scott Hildebrandt, aka (affectionately known as) Mister Christmas, makes his magic. If you stumbled upon this place with no context you might find it difficult to pin down — toy repair shop? Mad robot scientist’s laboratory? Secret storeroom where aliens studying human behavior No. 127 the 1920s? Hildebrandt’s artistry is not confined to this playful, labyrinthine studio — it has also found a home at Meow Wolf Denver. And what better place for the work of Mister Christmas than an immersive wonderland like Convergence Station? Hildebrandt’s contribution to Meow Wolf’s largest exhibition to date is called, You Are Here. True to Hildebrandt’s meticulousness, and devotion to innovation, nostalgia and wonderment, the installation takes the form of a gable-ceilinged hallway bricked from top to bottom with dioramas, tiny worlds in miniature, each telling an individual story. All together, it weaves an overarching tale that can be “read” if you stand in the hallway long enough. We know a thing or two about memories at Convergence Station. We (quite literally) place the highest value on our “mems.” And if there is anyone else on earth (or on any of the other worlds we frequent through the Convergence) that we consider to be a mem-expert, it is Mister Christmas. His intricate miniatures are tiny snapshots of memories (Real? Imagined? Mine? Yours?) made from bits of nostalgic ephemera, crafted painstakingly to scale and nestled inside authentic vintage vessels. Mister Christmas has a deep and rare understanding of the nature of memories — that we don’t remember things as they were, or even as we were … we remember things the way our hearts tell us they ought to have been. Little Scott Hildebrandt spent hours and hours making miniature railroads with his grandfather and unknowingly honing the skills and eye for capturing big imaginative ideas on a teeny-tiny scale. He applied YOU ARE HERE, PHOTO BY KATE RUSSELL P H T O O B Y A M A N D A S H A F E R
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