Art
A new interactive show by the groundbreaking Denver artist Thomas Evans, aka DETOUR, pushes the boundaries of mixed media while raising questions about who we are — and who we will be.
Imagine it’s the year 2119, and you’re attending a retrospective of an iconic band in a Graceland-like museum. The exhibition is dedicated to their art, showcasing not only their music and story but the society in which they exist: transportation, media and even social protest.
This peek at a possible future comes courtesy of a new show from one of Denver’s most creative artists, Thomas Evans, known as Detour. His work — playful, multimedia and often interactive — defies easy categorization. One recent project is a two-part abstract mural with strings tracing one of the massive zig-zag color blocks; the strings create tones when touched, so viewers can play a duet.
“I’ve never seen any other artists work in the kind of space he’s in,” says JC Futrell, education director at RedLine Contemporary Art Center, where Detour’s 5Pointers show opens November 8. “His curiosity is more like an engineer or scientist than a standard visual artist.”
Futrell met Detour in the mid-2000s, when Evans was in college, moonlighting as a DJ and figuring out what to do with art. An army kid, he grew up “around everywhere; I don’t think I spent more than a year in one place.” That itinerant backstory matches his journey to becoming a professional artist: He got an MBA from the University of Colorado Denver, did a stint at an ad agency (“I hated it”) and an equally short one in the military, ended by a torn ACL.
I've never seen any other artists work in the space he's in.
All that led to Evans moving to Tanzania in 2013 to work with an education nonprofit. “It’s really simple,” he recalls. “Not a lot of distractions, just thinking about what I wanted to do when I got back” to Denver. Like a lot of cities, Denver was in the midst of rapid change, and a friend of Evans had purchased a building in Denver’s historic Five Points neighborhood and offered him a studio space. Evans gave himself a year to make art full-time and had a solo show within months.
Detour’s work takes many forms: portraits with bold, saturated hues, dazzlingly kinetic outdoor murals and spartan abstracts. He also works in sculpture, music, video and photography. But maybe his biggest talent is combining them all. “He’s forging his own path,” says Futrell. “There isn’t an academy or degree you can get in what he’s doing right now.”
That means he’s heavily self-taught. For 5Pointers, Detour learned bookbinding and woodworking from sources like YouTube. “I want to expand my skill set and make it my own way,” he says.
Perhaps Evans’s most arresting art is what he calls his “interactive sound works”: visual installations that play music when touched. He uses elements like electrically conductive paint and MIDI controllers, with synthesizers and speakers embedded unobtrusively in the artwork. They come alive when touched, playing tones, beats, even melodies. Touch a new spot and the music changes.
“One of my big pet peeves going to [art] shows is [seeing] people have their backs to the painting, talking to each other about what they’re going to eat next week,” he says. Sound works solve a challenge: “How do I get people to actually have a conversation with another individual about what’s happening in the piece?”
Just as vital: What is that conversation about? A strong theme in Detour’s work is minority and urban culture; the characters in 5Pointers, for instance, are all based on local musicians like Venus Cruz, DJ Check One and Carl Carrell, who also collaborated on the music that will play when audiences interact with the installations. But audiences won’t just hear the music of the future and learn about who creates it; they’ll experience the culture and history that produced it, right down to the name of the show.
Detour’s studio lies in Five Points, one of Denver’s oldest neighborhoods and a longtime center of the city’s black culture, which is rapidly being gentrified (many newer Denver transplants know the area only as River North, or RiNo). One of the plot points in the show’s story revolves around the Rossonian, a local hotel and jazz club that once hosted musicians like Duke Ellington.
It’s just one of many threads that showgoers can experience as they explore the 5Pointers’ story and Detour’s riffs on the future, not only of music but transportation, language, sports and the rest of the world in which the 5Pointers live. (Lived? Will live?) That timeline is, of course, up to the audience to interpret.