chewing on the wires - Opening Reception

Join us as we celebrate these new works made by PlatteForum Resident Artist jewelarae and the 2026-27 cohort of ArtLab youth interns.

The event is free and open to all.

Accessiblity and Parking:

PlatteForum's Address: 910 Galapago Street, Denver CO 80204

Street Parking: There is lots of street parking around the neighborhood. Keep in mind, street parking fills up on First Fridays.

Lot Parking: There are a few paid lots around the neighborhood. West High School usually offers a paid parking lot during First Fridays. This lot is directly adjacent to PlatteForum.

Public Transportation / Biking: PlatteForum is a 7 minute walk from the Kalamath Street & 10th Avenue bus stop, and a 15-minute walk from the 10th & Osage light rail station. Bike racks available on site on the west side of the building.

Accessibility: PlatteForum has reserved one accessible parking space on the east side of the building (marked with a cone). There is also a ramp with a handrail from the east side of the building to PlatteForum's door on the 2nd level. Once inside, you can move throughout PlatteForum's spaces and to the restroom without steps. One restroom is ADA accessible. Please let us know if you have any accessibility requests or questions. Contact: info@platteforum.org, 303-893-0791.

About the exhibition:

cables hum and machines sing, drowning out other voices. money, messages, commands, desires, questions course through the wires. these machines are insatiable, drinking the water endlessly, thirsty from calculations, their sparks contained inside tentacles—a sea of comings and goings.

chewing on the wires is jewelarae's debut solo exhibition featuring conceptual sculptures and wearable artworks. this exhibition explores the physical infrastructures sustaining digital realms, tracing synthetic intimacies and machine mysticisms through objects that blur the boundaries between technology and the body. technomaterial—discarded electronic relics, decommissioned hard drives, scrapped conduit pipe, rock samples from abandoned mines, fragments from derelict buildings, reclaimed metal—are reconfigured to trace material memory, sedimentation, and residues left on skin.

chunks of rock intersect machined aluminum, cast pewter, and silver to conjure an eerie kinship with machines and their infrastructures: these discarded objects are transformed into mutants—no longer entirely debris, tool, machine, jewelry, or body but some type of ever-evolving hybrid.

the work imagines machines and materials as beings with appetites, memories, and relationships. it is silly to think that the apex of sentience is human. industrial infrastructures—wires and cables—are things extracted and processed: intensely transformed nature, disconnected from their origins but not severed from their spirits.

to play with jewelry means working in radical proximity: direct contact with skin that embeds an object into lived experience. precise boundaries become less certain, more difficult to locate. machine debris moves inside our flesh as our flesh rests on machine parts. dead skin cells catch between surfaces; microplastics swirl inside veins. the work sits somewhere in between, making it difficult to determine where one material body gives way to another.