Denver’s ‘Natura Obscura’ Takes You Into The Immersive Forest (Q&A)

A surreal walk through the woods with the Museum of Outdoor Arts and Prismajic

Natura Obscura, an immersive art experience featuring over two dozen local artists, will open at the Museum of Outdoor Arts (MOA) in the Denver area in January; the experience intends to take participants into a surreal journey through a dreamlike forest, while asking the question, “What’s your nature?” The experience — designed by MOA and Prismajic — has been created in collaboration with a number of emerging artists from MOA’s Design and Build education program.

We spoke to Jennifer Mosquera, Chief Creative/Cofounder of Prismajic, as well as Artist Tiffany Matheson over email about all things Natura Obsura.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

No Proscenium (NP): Could you tell us a little about yourselves and your background?

Jennifer Mosquera (JM): I grew up in Virginia Beach, VA, and was always interested in the arts and in creating. I moved to Colorado in 1995 when I enrolled at the University of Denver Law School. Looking back, it seems that from my first real job as a Deputy DA in Denver, to drastically changing my path and working in various positions in building and design, to owning a gallery and cooperative artist space, to more recently co-founding an art forward event design firm called Artistry Events & Design (AED) that ultimately became our current company, Prismajic, everything has lead me here, to Natura Obscura.

Tiffany Matheson (TM): I am currently living life reincarnated as a working artist in Denver after having a career in international business in NYC, followed by returning to school with plans to become a physician. I completed a bachelor in Biology with Studies in Sculpture from CU Denver in 2015, and have been pursuing my own version of a DIY MFA since.

The summer after graduation I was part of Museum of Outdoor Art’s Design & Build program, which is a wonderful philanthropic offering to emerging artists. Since then, I have been active in the art community by showing at group and solo exhibitions, sitting artist residencies, installing public art in various Colorado cities, and teaching university workshops. I am currently an associate member at Pirate: Contemporary Art, one of Denver’s longest operating artist collectives.

NP: What, in a nutshell, is this project about?

JM: Natura Obscura, which translates as Hidden Nature, is a surrealist walk through the woods that serves as a metaphor for an exploration of the life of the mind. We’ve always been interested in deeper, more meaningful art experiences.

While there’s nothing wrong with art as pure entertainment, we’ve always been more interested in harnessing the power of art to transform how people look at themselves and the world in some way.

Natura Obscura is our first large scale opportunity to do this with unfettered creativity, without a client impacting our creative processes.

TM: Synthetic Nature is an interactive room currently being built for MOA as one facet of Natura Obscura, an exhibit consisting of multiple creative zones featuring work by various Denver artists. The original design for Synthetic Nature was inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror rooms, and the installation uses reflection, projection, and various other methods to evoke a sense of dimensional transportation within a futuristic space forest.

NP: How did the project come about? Why make an immersive art experience?

JM: From the very beginning, when we first founded Artistry Events & Design in late 2012, our goal was to do our own, independent, large-scale creative projects. Very early in the process of building AED, in early 2013, we started focusing on what we called immersive experiential theatre. Back then immersive experiences weren’t as high profile as they are today, but we felt that these rich, layered experiences were the future of the arts. So we started developing concepts and selling them into the corporate market.

We entered an industry design competition in early 2014 where we created a scene inspired by The Night Circus, a New York Times best selling novel by Erin Morgenstern. It was an amazing installation—we had a violinist in an antique wedding dress and this elaborate Venetian crows head mask, our catering partner created a beef heart tartare in homage to the crossed lovers theme in the book, it was just incredibly layered and sophisticated. This marked a milestone in our development, where we really started translating our vision into something concrete.

Over the next several years we kept honing our craft, learning materials and developing the teams and expertise to really build at scale. At the end of 2016 we did a huge immersive party for YPO, an organization of CEOs of companies doing between $10 million and about $200 million in revenue, and they loved it. The client was great about letting us run with the creative, and after that experience we decided it was time to start focusing on our own projects. So we rebranded AED as Prismajic and started developing that company. We expanded the vision, added more advanced technology, and built a 400 square foot pop up in our studios to showcase our concepts.

The Museum of Outdoor Arts (MOA), an art museum and organization in Denver with whom we had a relationship, had been interested in doing a large-scale immersive experience for years. They took the tour of the pop up and we decided to collaborate, which led to Natura Obscura.

TM: As an alumnus of the Design & Build program with experience in large-scale installation art, fabrication and new media, I was approached by MOA with the opportunity to be a collaborator on the Natura Obscura exhibit through showing work in a portion of the museum produced as the culmination of a fall Artist Residency.

I absolutely love immersive art. I grew up running around Casa Bonita, an Americana treasure here in Denver parading as a restaurant that cleverly conceals a multi-story indoor waterfall complete with cliff divers, rampaging gorillas, performance, an outlaw’s hideout cave, arcades, wishing wells, piñata breakings and more. Having this be a formative part of my youth, along with other experiences and travels, led to the development of an active mind, keen with curiosity and yearning to play.

Whenever I experience immersive art, I have the liminal sensation of being taken out of my physical self while simultaneously embarking on an odyssey of the mind.

It is this unique and special experience I desire to create and share with others. By stimulating the creative mind through multisensory engagement, we stretch the imagination via exploration and create the opportunity for a deeply intimate, memorable experience.

NP: Who are your collaborators?

JM: Besides Prismajic and MOA, there are the 11 artists from MOA’s Design and Build summer program, a few artists and craftspeople from Prismajic’s staff, and about a dozen other artists who had worked with MOA in the past. All told there are close to 30 creatives who’ve worked on the project, and they’re all incredibly talented and imaginative people.

TM: I am the lead artist of a team of Design & Build Alumni who collaborated to create Synthetic Nature. My team members are Travis Powel and Ian Wagoner, both graduates of Denver University with BFAs in Emergent Digital Practices.

NP: Why choose a journey through a forest as a framework?

JM: This is a concept we’ve been working on for a long time at Prismajic. The author Joseph Campbell, whose work explored comparative mythology, considers the forest to be a metaphor for your subconscious. That’s a foundational concept of Natura Obscura, and one that we find extraordinarily compelling and powerful.

Natura Obscura operates on 3 levels: the literal, as a walk through a surrealist forest; the subconscious, as an exploration of the philosophies and mythologies that have been passed down through the millennia; and the spiritual, which sees nature as divine, spiritual, and an extension of something greater than human kind.

TM: The organic landscape of Synthetic Nature was derived from the combined thematic conceptualization of MOA and Prismajic to emulate a walk in the woods. As the overarching theme found throughout the exhibit, the sensation of being in nature lends a sense of unity.

NP: How are you engaging people’s senses in Natura Obscura?

JM: We do it primarily through physical art. We incorporate the visual arts, scents, sounds, touch, lighting, and movement to create a richly layered experience.

However, we also engage people through exploration and discovery. There’s an interactive element to the experience that’s designed to really draw people in. Our experience has been that interactivity creates an engagement with the audience that is very difficult to create otherwise.

TM: Peppered with variations of infinitely reflecting mirrors, Synthetic Nature is a magical space forest that comes alive at the touch of a hand with starlight trees, clearing mists, rushing wind, celestial reverberations, plus more enchanting light, color, sound and visual animations. A lowered temperature and humid environment add to the illusion of extraterrestrial transportation.

NP: How is technology being incorporated into the exhibit?

JM: We’ve always thought of technology as just another tool in our creative tool belt, like a powerful and flexible paintbrush. We never use technology for it’s own sake. Being so meaning and message centric, we start with an objective in mind: “this is what we want to communicate or create in this area.” We then look in our tool belt for the best tool to fulfill that objective. Most of the time it’s still the traditional arts, but sometimes, and increasingly more so, it’s technology.

In Natura Obscura, we use augmented reality, projection mapping, sound technologies, and sensor based technologies. In fact, because we don’t have an area to create a physical gift shop, we’ve created an augmented reality gift shop.

TM: Synthetic Nature is an interactive installation where visitors are invited to find discrete user-initiated sensors that trigger reciprocal reactions of light, sound and projection throughout the room. When all of the elements are engaged simultaneously, the guest creates a symphony of sparkling lights, otherworldly sounds, and dazzling motion graphics.

NP: What do you mean by “augmented reality gift shop”?

JM: As part of the touring app for Natura Obscura, you can access a virtual gift shop.

Your phone is the “lens” that allows you to explore the products available, and allows you to purchase from the phone/handheld device.

NP: Who is the ideal audience member for this work?

JM: Natura Obscura is a very broad based experience that people can explore on a variety of levels. For those who want a strictly visceral experience, the art and technology are beautiful and Natura can be appreciated as a purely visual arts experience.

However, for those who want to explore more deeply, there’s a rich world of symbolism and metaphor that encourages you to think more deeply on philosophical and spiritual levels.

We’ve always felt that you can have both a super fun, visually stunning experience and a richer, philosophical experience in a single installation. The artist just has to have the intention, vision, intelligence, and foresight to create it.

TM: Synthetic Nature was designed specifically to be appreciated by all ages, be it through fabrication considerations like the height and placement of the tactile elements and floor to ceiling mirrors and projections, to simply having experience of existing within the environment of the room.

NP: What do you hope participants take away from this experience?

JM: It’s my hope that people are opened up to art as interactive, participatory and fun. I also hope that, for those who want to explore further, the experience is not elusive in it’s meaning, but rather is a dance of looking inward. We hope you discover the place within where the meaning you find in Natura Obscura leaves you feeling more connected, and with a sense that you’ve have learned a secret. We hope that our mythology can awaken a sense of awe, gratitude, and self-reflection.

TM: I would love to see guest experiencing the transformation of the Synthetic Nature from a dark, blackened space to one alive with movement, sound and color after they listened to the inner desire for play that led to the discovery of a mystical world. The Japanese term shinrin-yoku, which translates quite literally as taking a “forest bath”, is the restorative act of absorbing the light and atmosphere of the woods. When stepping through the shrouded door to Synthetic Nature, it is my hope that visitors experience a sense of awe and wonder as they journey into a hidden space forest, rife with opportunities for discovery, interaction and reflection.

Natura Obscura runs January 11— April 28 at the Museum of Outdoor Arts in Denver. Tickets are $10–15.

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