Holy Fool

The figures in Laura Shill’s sculptural installation, Holy Fool, hover somewhere between subject and object, grasping at something unreachable, while suspended in a state of perpetual precarity.  Stretched to their material limits, and set against a glittering backdrop, they resist and ultimately succumb to the inevitable pull of gravity.

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Artist Bio:

Laura Shill is an interdisciplinary artist based in Denver, CO, whose work is a combination of sculpture, installation, performance, and photography. Her work addresses ideas of disclosure and concealment, agency and emotional risk, desire and discontent, often oscillating between humor and heartbreak.  A primary goal of her practice is to invite participation, whether active or passive, meeting participants where and as they are while making the distinction between spectatorship and participation. Often present in her work are the pronounced absences she creates to make visible the invisible power structures that inform our relationships to each other or conceal the work of care that props up the whole human endeavor. Her sculptural and installation works borrow theatrical conventions as a nod to the performance of the self that we undertake daily. Many of these works invite touch and blur boundaries between public and private space. Shill employs repetition of form to create environments that make thousands of hours of invisible labor material. She uses everyday objects and supplies to make these works, often salvaged from roadsides and thrift stores or scavenged from former iterations of projects to test her theory that anything can be transformed with enough time and attention and care.

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‍Public hours:

Thursdays through Sundays, 12:00pm – 6:00pm, November 4th – November 27th,

Opening Celebration November 4th, 6:00pm  – 9:00pm

Closed on Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 24th

Understudy is free-to-visit and open to all. We are located at the Colorado Convention Center / Theatre District light rail stop near 14th and Stout. Look for the Shantell Martin art bench.