January - In the artist's studio

A peak into the artist's studio. See Sellars Project Space as a studio. Works in progress, special guest artists and lots of great pieces for you to take home!

Boutique in a Box No. 3 POPSUP at SPS for December

Here we are again... it's that time of the year again for SPS' Boutique in a Box. This year there are some really amazing pieces of art to take home or give as gifts and we will be implementing our new online store so that those of you who are unable to attend the openings or are out of town can start collecting the amazing artists we work with here at Sellars Project Space.

A reception for the exhibition will be held this Friday, December 2nd from 6 - 9 p.m. Hope you can make it.

Walk through of RuiNation

ruination to kick-off denver arts week at sps

Sellars Project Space is proud to present a series of new photographs by brother Jeff and Joshua Ball in an exhibition titled, RuiNation: The Rust-Belt Remains.This exhibition opens with a reception for the artists on Friday, November 4th from 6 - 9 p.m. during Denver's city-wide Super First Friday in celebration of Denver's Art Week. The artists will be in attendance. This exhibition continues through November 30th, 2011.

“RuiNation” a photography exhibit by two Mid-West Brothers who see beauty in the Rust-Belt’s urban decay to open at Sellars Project Space this November

The Industrial Revolution is officially over. After an era of cultural optimism and pure industrial might, the United States no longer finds itself in a booming manufacturing-based economy. Many plants have closed, supply lines slowed and our once-proud workforce has faded into office cubicles and super-store checkout lines. The revolution is dead and the result is a sprawling countryside peppered with barren smokestacks and blackened factory framing. Within that imagery lived the inspiration for a project that would ultimately become RuiNation.

In early 2010, two brothers, Denver based Jeff Ball and Toledo, Ohio based Joshua Ball, looked at what was happening to the nation’s industrial infrastructure and saw more than just rusted steel and crumbling brick, they saw art. The brothers grew up in Toledo, Ohio, which has long lived in the mechanical shadow of industrial Detroit. For a majority of the 20th century, blue-collar cities like Toledo relied heavily on the auto industry and the manufacturing jobs that it produced. In the past few decades, the industrial Mid-West has witnessed countless businesses leave, factories close and middle-class jobs disappear. The “rust-belt” is now a mere shadow of its former self and while the industry is gone, many of its ruins still stand.

Where many see twisted metal, rotting timbers and concrete dust, the brothers saw an opportunity to capture the nontraditional beauty of that decay. These long-lost pieces of the industrial Midwest are a testament to our country’s history; they stoked the fires that fueled the engines that built a nation. Now that the revolution is dead, those pieces of rusting rebar and crumbling masonry now stand as both monuments and ruins to a nation that continues to survive. The remains of the rust-belt remain.

The images in this collection are not intended to simply remind us of better days when a factory worker could provide their family with a piece of the American dream. They were created to remind us of our potential, our collective drive to build a better world and to create wondrous things that never existed before. This is the essence of art, and the inspiration for this exhibit.

attachment opens october 7th

Sellars Project Space is pleased to host the 4th exhibition of new photographs by Dutch photographer Maarten Haverkamp in an exhibition titled Attachment. This October exhibition will offer a reception for the artist on Friday, October 7th from 6 to 9 p.m. Haverkamp will be traveling from the Netherlands to install his exhibition beginning the last week of September and the first week of October. This exhibition continues through October 31st, 2011. Sellars Project Space is located at 4383 Tennyson Street in Denver, Colorado. For more information or direction please visit sellarsprojectspace.com or call 720.475.1182.

About Haverkamp's work in his own words

Travel is a form of pilgrimage for me, but one whose reasons are only revealed upon arrival. Places are not destinations but starting points. By leaving home, one sees with "new" eyes, with a sense of wonderment and attentiveness to detail. The untainted eye drinks in the landscape, until it makes sense, and then attempts to express the spirit of a space with images.

To anchor my understanding of a place, I need solitude, to experience the environment fully and without distractions. This need grows stronger when I return to places I have been before. Then I notice the alterations in a place, what they tell and how I too have changed since last visiting. This experience is a purely intuitive process of observation, revelation, and stillness. I attempt to inhabit the heart of the space, what it is, what has happened in it, who was here, and what it tells me about myself. I try to weave each of these threads into my photos.

The photos expose the exceptional nested in the ordinary, the beauty of carefulness and craft. I attempt to engage with the living identity of a place. The beauty of incompletion, of the act of becoming, also plays a role in my work. This is achieved by isolating elements and placing them in their environment in a way that makes the familiar strange.

Stillness speaks many languages. In stillness and solitude, my connection with a place deepens until its character begins to reveal itself to me. Emptiness rolls in like a tide, and when it recedes, constellations of details catch my eye. Through respect and openness to the moment, individual details offer themselves to the camera.
The photos are not manipulated in the computer but are a true reproduction of the moment I made them.