10 MARCH 13-19, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Picking Up the Pieces A COLLABORATION BETWEEN A LOCAL ARTIST AND ST. FRANCIS RESIDENTS BRIDGES THE GAP BETWEEN STIGMATIZED COMMUNITIES AND SOCIETY. BY KRISTEN FIORE When artist Emma Balder set up two thirteen- foot blank canvases for residents of the St. Francis Center, had them paint them in bright colors, and then asked them to rip up the paintings and rearrange the pieces, Darrin Johnson saw a metaphor for life. “Cutting it up like your life was falling apart. You can pick your life up, put it back together and it might be more beautiful and colorful than before,” says Johnson, who was homeless for three years before coming to St. Francis, a refuge for people transitioning out of homelessness in the Denver area. Putting the pieces back together to create something more beautiful is one message that Balder and St. Francis residents hope people get out of their art exhibition, Heard to be Seen, Seen to be Heard, opening March 27 at Understudy. During three collaborative sessions with Balder in September, eighteen residents gath- ered for regenerative art sessions and group dialogue. In the fi rst session, residents talked about some of the challenges they’ve faced and overcome, as well as challenges they were still facing, including mental and physical health issues, addiction, trying to fi nd a job, trying to get insurance, being around other people and being alone. Residents wrote about these issues on challenge cards and then channeled the challenges into the canvases through abstract expressionism. During the second session, residents did blind contour drawings as a warm-up. “It’s basically when you draw something, but you look at what you’re drawing and not the drawing,” Balder explains. Johnson saw a deeper meaning in this exercise as well. “That actually was my favorite part,” he recalls. “We went on the deck and one of the exercises was to pick an object. I picked the cash register building and was getting ready to start drawing it. She told us, ‘Look at it, close your eyes, now draw it.’ When you close your eyes, it’s all together. When you open it up, your life’s in chaos.” After the blind contour exercise, the resi- dents channeled more emotions by drawing on the canvas and then giving shape to those emotions with paint. “There would be these built-up layers of paint, going over and over again in the same spot,” Balder says. “That, to me, reads as a refl ection of some of the frustration of dealing with the multiple layers of issues.” During the fi nal session, the group came up with one way to overcome each chal- lenge and wrote those down on the challenge cards. Then they cut up the paint- ings, rearranged the pieces, reconstructed them around a wire sculpture and glued the pieces together. Balder later took the pieces back to her studio and sewed them together. The resulting boulder- like structure is the focal point of Heard to be Seen, Seen to be Heard, but there will also be a video showing what happened during the sessions. Some of the chal- lenge cards and drawings will also be on display, and the drawings will be for sale, with proceeds going directly back to the residents. And thanks to the support of an Arts in Soci- ety grant administered through RedLine Contemporary Art Center, participating residents were also compensated $20 an hour for their work. Understudy is the perfect place for the exhibition because artists themselves tend to feel like understudies, Balder says. “There’s a main role that we’re not quite getting,” she notes. “That, and I know a few artists who have been homeless or are on the edge of being homeless, and I think there’s some overlap in feelings there.” At the conception of the project, Balder was looking for ways to bring artists and non-artists together through healing art. At the time, she was also doing a lot of hiking, sketching boulders and making small boulder sculptures in her own style, which is at the intersection of painting and textiles. “I’m using my painting like fabric and fi bers like paint,” she says, “so basically what that looks like is I’m manipulating these small bits of textiles and fi ber paintings, which are more detailed works, and creating abstract paintings, cut- ting them up and rearranging the pieces and sewing them together in new confi gurations.” As she studied boulders and created her own, she started thinking a lot about the boulder as both a barrier and a shelter. “And how can we fi nd a way to fi nd comfort and peace and shelter in our barriers?” Balder muses. “That kind of opened my mind to a lot of ideas, just thinking about the things that I was going through, thinking about some of the things the residents were going through. So that sparked this idea of creating this project around some of the barriers that the residents were facing.” For Johnson, the hardest part of the proj- ect was getting past the awkwardness of dealing with his emotions in front of other people, but the release was worth it. “In order for this whole thing to come together truthfully, we had to be truthful on those cards,” he says. “To release something, you have to be truthful with yourself. I let myself open in a different way. I’m not a sad person, but I let my emotions do what we did.” The emotional release was palpable in the room during the dialogue sessions, he adds. While some residents were hesitant about the project at fi rst, Reid Shaylor was all for it. “I use art as a release because of all the BS I’ve gone through all my life and because of my sexuality,” says Shaylor, who was homeless in St. Louis before becoming a resident at the St. Patrick Center there and fi nally transfer- ring to St. Francis. “When they approached me, I said, ‘Oh, this would be perfect.’...A lot of us, when we get a certain age, we feel like our relatives just leave us. They don’t care about us. But they inspired and got people to work together as a community and not be separate, alone in their apartments. That inspired me to be happy.” Through the collective creation and dia- logue sessions, the project aimed to address the emotional, physical and fi nancial barriers people face transitioning out of homeless- ness and to help them foster a sense of be- longing within society. “Projects like Heard to be Seen, Seen to be Heard use abstract art to empower residents, allowing them to ex- press their stories and reconnect with their inherent self-worth,” adds St. Francis Center CEO Nancy Burke. “These initiatives not only provide stability and security but also inspire hope and transformation.” Balder adds that art can be a bridge be- tween stigmatized communities and society. “That’s really what the title of the show and this project is about,” she says. “I think it’s re- ally important to hear some of these stories, to know them and to know their names so that they can feel seen and valued in society. In order for them to be seen and feel part of society, we have to hear them. In order for them to feel heard, we have to see them as human beings.” Shaylor hopes that people who see the exhibition will recognize the humanity of the St. Francis residents in the art. “The piece says, ‘Hello. How are you? We’re not dead. We’re not down there on the scum of the earth. While all of y’all are out there having a good time, remember we were once there, too,’” Shaylor says, adding that just because someone hit rock bottom doesn’t mean they’re not a human being anymore. “Through art, we can express what little we have left to say, ‘We’re not dead yet.’” While the fi nal product is large and ab- stract, it is heavy with a range of emotions. And all of the details are still there if you look closely — a butterfl y, a house, a face. “Someone saw art in a banana on a wall,” Shaylor concludes. “So when people see this, I hope they see more depth into the human soul, the human characteristics. We have a lot more to show and a lot more to give.” Heard to be Seen, Seen to be Heard opens March 27 and runs through April 27 at Under- study, 14th and Stout streets. A few residents, including Johnson and Shaylor, will speak at the opening reception at 5:30 p.m. March 27; learn more at emmabalder.com. CULTURE KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS Residents stand behind the boulder-like structure they created out of cut up paintings. PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL BRENNER AND A ARON ON’VEROZ
