Spectra's New Immersive Experience Is a Plant-Filled, Psychedelic Dream World

On a hot July morning, a giant robot creates a welcome patch of shade next to an inviting hobbit hole. The small, curved door leads into a little house, where lights pulsate kaleidoscopic images through a mirror. Framed butterflies line the walls alongside even smaller dwellings, including a little house with a Dolly Parton poster. Inside a diminutive silver box is a message written on a teeny-tiny folded paper: "They know the old ways. Something the elders don't know. No, some things are deeper than knowledge, evolution is required."

It sounds like a dream, but it isn't. Everything at Novo Ita: Propagation, Spectra Art Space's latest iteration of its annual summer installation, evokes the fantastical, fairy-tale qualities of Alice in Wonderland. Visitors are immersed in a peaceful, psychedelic realm of luminescent butterflies and delicate plants, caught up inside a captivating narrative.
Spectra founder Sadie Young is all about storytelling, and so are the gallery's installations. Since opening in January 2017, Spectra has been a pioneer on Denver's immersive frontier, offering well-crafted tales in installations far superior to the trendy commercial shows that bill themselves as "immersive." Most of these installations have focused on the city of Novo Ita, including Spookadelia, which opened at Spectra last fall, won a 2023 Best of Denver award, and finally closed in late April after multiple extensions.

Novo Ita: Propagation expands on the storyline of past installations, which Young crafted with Caelan Donovan, a friend and Dungeons & Dragons master. In the land of Novo Ita, after the "great event" that ended "the oil age," citizens are rediscovering ancient ways of working with the earth and finding an enlightened community as they connect with each other. In doing so, they witness the growth of the Spectral Tree, an entity that projects the same good energy that helps it grow.

"Novo Ita is all based off the science-fiction genre of solar punk, which is typically like post-apocalyptic but really hopeful. It's supposed to be a hopeful vision into the future, where people are better to each other and to the planet," says Young, who notes that "novo ita" means "new way" in Latin.

"The more damage they undid from the oil age, the more the tree grows," she continues. "So the tree was showing them they're doing the right thing. We did the Festival of Spirit, where everyone was celebrating the tree getting big, and this year, we're calling it Propagation. Because in the story, the tree's making seeds, but at the same time, it's sending out a pulse of energy to attract people from other colonies to come to Nova Ita to share ideas and technology and to get their own seed. The scheme of it is that the better people are to the earth, the more plants return, the more different kinds of animals are starting to return, the little nature spirits came back."
That earthy, bucolic fantasy is rendered beautifully throughout Propagation, which covers two indoor spaces and Spectra's entire backyard. A cushy cave from Spookadelia has been transformed into a dreamy lagoon, wrapped in deep blues and teals, with lullabies softly filling the space. A central installation is bursting with bright butterflies, symbols and rainbows. Plants of all sorts abound, flourishing on vertical gardens and filling up a greenhouse that is also home to little spirits.

"We invest a lot of time and resources into truly bringing the botanical element into it," Young says. "There's probably $10,000 worth of plants in that yard."

And the Spectra team takes good care of them, even using an "orchid expert" to tend to the rare orchids in the greenhouse. "We work with Echter's [Nursery], and we've also been collecting plants throughout the years, so we have rare plants. We have one-of-a-kind plants; we have really unique plants. Of course, some are picked, because they'll grow fast or we want like color in certain areas," Young explains. "We also want to appeal to all of your senses. We want it to look pretty, and we want things to be in bloom for people whenever they come in the season, but we also want to have smells associated with it, or some of them have a different feel than others."

That makes the upkeep of Novo Ita: Propagation far more labor-intensive than it was for Spookadelia, but the effort is worth it, Young says. And while Novo Ita is just as engaging as Spookadelia, with puzzles, augmented reality and storylines to investigate, it's also less high-energy. "There are areas of high intensity and high interactivity and just fun and play, but then it's followed by something like that hobbit house, where you can just go decompress and just sit and enjoy it, reflect or just relax," she notes. "So it's designed in a way to have those moments of highs and chills."
Visitors may recognize some pieces from Spookadelia or earlier immersives that have been upcycled and reworked to fit into new settings and tell different stories. This not only aligns with Spectra's commitment to sustainability, but to the Novo Ita ethos of being friendlier to the earth. The gallery also reflects Novo Ita's emphasis on community: Young opened Spectra to provide a space where people would feel safe and confident to show their art for the first time; some artists involved in this show hadn't built large installations or contributed work before. "I always like to throw in a couple of artists who I want to give an opportunity to, because that's what's it all about — it's about giving artists opportunity," Young says.

Although Haley Jo Barker had crafted small pieces for past installations, she took over the entire cave area to build the tranquil lagoon. Hannah Bish, who creates under the moniker Deep Space Violet, was showing her prints at Spectra when Young asked her to take on a space across from Barker's, which Bish transformed to emulate an underwater rainbow. Kari Tamblyn, aka KariNotSorry, painted the mural on the floor of the central installation, whose ceiling is covered in butterflies, with a rainbow swing hanging in the middle. The mural is meant to symbolize the queer, neurodivergent and disabled communities, as well as how ecology fits into those areas.

Throughout Propagation, Young concentrated on "representing as many people from as many walks of life as possible," she says.

Other artists include regulars in the Denver scene, such as Corrina Espinosa and David Hanan of the Denver Digital Landgrab collective, who used augmented reality to place Novo Ita spirits throughout the installation that can be accessed through sneakily placed QR codes. When unlocked, the spirits share tales of their land and launch visitors further into the story.
Young was also eager to incorporate Cal Duran, a local artist who'd created an installation for Meow Wolf's Convergence Station with David Ocelotl Garcia. "Cal is wonderful," she says. "He's a queer artist, but also when he talks about his art, he talks about his heritage and his ancestors. So I really wanted to have him in there, because he harks back to all of those past mythologies, which is a huge part of solar punk and which is beautiful."

Duran created a room covered with masks, small circular mirrors and woven ojos de Dios. An altar holds a goddess as well as a journal that Duran wrote in using different colors of ink. The journal lays out the prophecy of the Rainbow People, "legendary beings" who "will return on a day of awakening when all people will unite and create a new world of justice, peace and freedom."

Other messages in the journal — "Don't you see that you are magic / Use your joy as magic" and "We are never alone, we are everything! All inter-connected in a cosmic weave of so many ones before us" — ignite the self-reflection that influenced the entire show. Young came up with the storyline during COVID, a time in need of hope and other virtues she wants to inspire through all the Novo Ita installations.

"Not just hope in the way of the planet, but hope in people," Young concludes. "It's like treating humanity as an ecosystem, where everyone has to work together for humanity to work, just like you see ecosystems work in the rainforest. That's one of the virtues people can discover...learning how to be better humans from plants and the environment. Because it all works together, and if we all work together in that same way, those are the key parts that I want people to leave with. And if people just leave relaxed, that's okay, too."

Novo Ita: Propagation, through September 17, Spectra Art Space, 1842 South Broadway. Tickets are $22.