10 FEBRUARY 2-8, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Michael’s and stuck a lightbulb inside. I was inspired by a childhood memory of having an ant farm. I put ant eggs from outside in with the ants that were already digging, and when the eggs hatched, a war broke out. I remember being fascinated by the whole situation. It’s one of my earliest memories.” He’s always been curious and adventurous, and at 27, when he was an Air Comm Corpo- ration engineer designing air conditioners for helicopters, he came up with the idea of biking around the world. His goal wasn’t to overcome any fear or get to a particular desti- nation, but to “keep going until I stopped,” he says. “I wanted to get to a place where I could go no further, and know I went as far as I could.” After saving up $24,000, Lemanski embarked on his journey in 2013. He started in Portugal and biked across Europe into Russia, then down to Mongolia and China. He then fl ew to Alaska and cycled all the way down to the tip of South America before fl ying to Australia and biking its western coast, Tasmania and New Zealand. He took a fl ight to his fi nal continent, Africa, and biked from South Africa up to Egypt. He esti- mates that he crossed a total of 42 countries. Camping for most of his journey, Lemanski was able to commune with plenty of ants to allay any longing for the ant farm back home in Colorado. “I would take my cooking pot and set it next to an anthill and let the ants do my dishes every night,” he recalls with a smile. Even with ants as companions and a cleanup crew, though, life can get boring when you’re cycling every day, and that’s what led to Lemanski’s fi rst experience with psychedelic mushrooms. “When I was traveling down in Argentina, I would pick mushrooms off the cow patties,” he says. “I knew that psilocybin mushrooms grow on cow patties. So I tasted a little and went to sleep, and when I woke up the next morning, I was like, ‘I probably shouldn’t do this.’ “I put them in my little trash bag and biked a couple miles, and then I was like, ‘I’m gonna eat them all,’” he remembers, and laughs. “And then I was on the hunt every night looking for my cow-patty mushrooms.” After three years of biking, Lemanski returned to Colorado in 2016. Three months after his homecoming, he was refl ecting on his journey when his then-roommate in Boulder invited him on a different sort of trip. He offered Lemanski a hit of LSD, on blotter paper printed with — what else? — an ant. “An antacid,” Lemanski quips. It was his fi rst time taking acid — a far cry from cow-patty boomers — and he rode out the trip by looking at his ant farm for ten hours. “And that night,” Lemanski says, “I conceived to build the world’s most beauti- ful ant farm.” He took his new mission seriously, even acquiring a patent in 2017 for his “decorative ant farms.” They aren’t your ordinary Uncle Milton’s, that’s for sure. They’re more like ant spaceships, with Lemanski using images from the Hubble telescope as backgrounds, after putting them through an algorithm and then Photoshop to make them appear even more psychedelic. As the ants plow through the soil, they create designs that look like mountain landscapes — a living work of art. “As they dig, it exists right in the present,” Lemanski explains. “Because it changes all the time, right? You go to sleep and you wake up, and they’ve dug another inch of tunnels. And after a week, after two weeks, suddenly it’s turning into something, and then after six months, it’s like there’s a whole story that has a memory of...how the mountains grew and then disappeared and then grew again.” While he continued to work as an en- gineer, designing marijuana breathalyz- ers for Lifeloc, Lemanski created one ant farm after another. He’s sold about fourteen (prices range from $1,195 to $1,600), with the fi rst three purchased by his parents and sister. “I’m chasing my dreams,” Lemanski explains, “and that’s no surprise to them.” By now, he’d bought a house in west Den- ver, where he fi lled his basement with ant farms. “I stared at them for a long time,” he recalls. “I loved it. I would just invite some- one in — maybe a Jehovah Witness would show up and want to talk to me, and I’d be like, ‘Let me show you something!’ Then I bring them down into my basement to look at my psychedelic ant farms, and it’s just, like, a Tuesday afternoon; they’re not expecting it. I would go down fi rst, and I would turn around and watch them walk into the room and see their face. Like, it was a huge joy for me, just the confusion, but also them seeing it is really beautiful.” In order to share that joy, he decided to create a gallery that would introduce his art to the public. He left his job, and with funds from his ant farm sales as well as what he’d saved from his salary, he opened Ant Life at 2150 Market Street in June. “Anyway, it feels great to have it in a space where [people] can have that feeling, but also not in my basement. So it’s been great getting it out into the world,” Lemanski says. “When my engineering co-workers came to the opening, they were surprised,” he adds with a laugh. “They were like, ‘Uh, we had no idea you were into this.’” On a wintry day, the 6,200-square-foot warehouse space is a little drafty, but the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Lemanski is cheery as he swings open the heavy door with a wide smile. His long hair grazes his shoulders, and he’s wearing one of his bright, tie-dye-esque clothing designs — another gallery offering, since he realized he had to have some more marketable options if he wanted to pay the bills. “Eventually, I realized not everyone wants ants in their house,” he admits. Ant Life has an open fl oor plan, somewhat separated into three rooms by jutting walls. The colorful clothing hangs along the brick wall to the immediate right of the entrance, and the designs match those of the velvety wall hangings Lemanski has created, which he calls space screens. “The concept is when you’re tripping for ten hours on LSD or some- thing, you can just have a collection of fabrics and just be swapping them out so you’re not looking at the same thing and have a rotation of something new to look at,” he explains. The space screens hang on the brick wall in the second room, which also houses the ant farms and his light spaces (these are the same design as the ant farms, just without the ants). This area has no windows, but there’s colorful light coming from the wall separating the main room from the clothing display and entrance. While some people have screensavers to entertain them when tripping, Ant Life has this wall covered in a projection of fractals. Lemanski’s biggest ant farm is here, still devoid of ants from the earlier freeze; he’s titled it “The Shoreline of Sanity.” It’s 4 feet by 6 feet, and he estimates it took him 100 hours to build. “I had a vision to make more farms and make them bigger. Lord of the Ants continued from page 9 continued on page 12 Jacob Lemanski built the world’s largest, trippiest ant farm for his gallery on Market Street. EVAN SEMÓN COURTESY OF ANTLIFE EVAN SEMÓN
