Saturday, March 24, 2012, 8 p.m. at Rhinoceropolis (3553 Brighton Boulevard), Denver. Suggested donation $5, with the request that attendees bring a plant.
This is the first fully documented installation-event installment of the Fantasia series — Tom Murphy’s later (2016) framing identifies 2012 as the year the series “evolved into something more” than the 2010 album-release and 2011 video-art-show formats. Per Colin in the Hesse interview: “Fantasia 2012 is a group effort. We want to pack paradise into one night, like a magic spell and welcoming of the springtime. We will be installing interactive sculpture and video rooms into all spaces of Rhino. There are about twenty of us presenting it, each person has a different level of collaboration with whatever the outcome becomes.”
The “about twenty of us” framing matters: it sets the scale that the 2014 and 2016 installments would later expand on. Stephan Herrera’s co-curatorial role with Colin is the through-line from 2012 onward — Herrera quotes in the 2014 Westword piece say of 2012: “Last time we did Fantasia, there was, like, four of us that were doing most of the grunt work.”
Description from Colin (2012-03-23 Westword interview)
“Yes. Well, I think Rhino is already a fantasy village. I just want us to bring that out more. Fantasia 2012 is a group effort. We want to pack paradise into one night, like a magic spell and welcoming of the springtime. We will be installing interactive sculpture and video rooms into all spaces of Rhino. There are about twenty of us presenting it, each person has a different level of collaboration with whatever the outcome becomes. There will be plants everywhere, snacks, videos, music and dance performance, games, costumes. Overall chaos. All sensations. An infinite zone in a giant diorama. Celebrating heart and imagination.”
The “infinite zone in a giant diorama” phrase from the 2012 interview is picked up again by Colin in 2014 (“it’s kind of like being in a life-sized diorama”) — the diorama metaphor is the canonical Fantasia thesis statement from Colin’s own mouth across two installments.
Format
- Interactive sculpture installed throughout Rhinoceropolis
- Video rooms in all spaces
- ~20 contributing artists, varying levels of collaboration
- Plants distributed throughout (attendees brought them as suggested donation)
- Snacks, videos, music, dance performances, games, costumes
- Thematic framing: “magic spell and welcoming of the springtime”
Lineup notes
- Co-organizers: Colin Ward, Stephan Herrera
- Roughly twenty participating artists (named only as a group, not enumerated, in the Hesse interview)
- Colin performed in his Alphabets multimedia configuration
Context
Mentioned in Westword’s “Another 100 Colorado Creatives: Colin Ward” (Feb 3, 2015) alongside Fantasia 2014 as examples of Colin’s curation work. The Hesse Alphabets profile (2012-03-23, day before the event) confirms Colin was about to tour with Pictureplane in April 2012 immediately following Fantasia 2012.
Sources
- Westword — Alphabets’ Colin Ward (Josiah M. Hesse, 2012-03-23) — primary source for date, time, venue, donation structure, and Colin’s own framing of the event
- Westword — Another 100 Colorado Creatives: Colin Ward (2015-02-03) — retrospective listing as one of Colin’s curatorial signatures
- Westword — Fantasia Returns to Rhinoceropolis This Weekend (Tom Murphy, 2016-09-09) — series-context framing identifying 2012 as the year Fantasia “evolved into something more”
- See also Alphabets’ Colin Ward: “It began when I was born. Or before. Or scratch that it just began five minutes ago.”