The Fulfillment Center
The Fulfillment Center
Black Cube Headquarters
2925 S. Umatilla Street, Englewood, CO 80110
Curated by Cortney Lane Stell
September 13, 2019-February 14, 2020.
Admission: Free
Review by Samantha Hunt-Durán
What is human fulfillment in the digital age? Black Cube’s new exhibition The Fulfillment Center explores just that.
For those who haven’t heard of this experimental non-profit, Black Cube was founded in Denver by philanthropist Laura Merage, with Executive Director and Chief Curator, Cortney Lane Stell. It offers a fellowship program to a handful of artists per year. This program prides itself on fairly compensating artists for the act of creating. Since 2015, Black Cube has operated in direct contrast to the standard “white cube” traditional gallery—hence the name Black Cube. Black Cube’s exhibitions take the form of site-relational “pop-ups” that exist and operate within the community.
In 2017, Black Cube sought out a warehouse space in the Light Industrial District, an industrial corridor along South Santa Fe Drive in Englewood.[1] Nestled amongst auto-body shops, stone cutters, and the occasional Hell’s Angel, Black Cube’s headquarters is perhaps, at best, a shock to the system of an otherwise gritty, working-class community. At worst, Black Cube is the annoying millennial scourge that reeks of gentrification and the threat of future displacement. Stell is aware of these misgivings and is actively working on building relationships within her new neighborhood. Business owners and neighbors were invited to view The Fulfillment Center, but Stell is almost certain that none showed up for the opening.
Black Cube Headquarters. Image by Samantha Hunt-Durán.
Although technically the second show to happen in this warehouse space, The Fulfillment Center is the first traditionally-curated show, but it still sports Black Cube’s signature experimental style. In true Black Cube form, the exhibition is site-relational, as the warehouse itself acted as a site for which the artists created their work. In this way, The Fulfillment Center is not about the warehouse but related to the warehouse as a conceptual shorthand for larger socio-cultural issues. Eighteen artists created pieces in relation to the theme and site for The Fulfillment Center. At least nine are familiar faces to Stell’s curation[2] and five are alumni to the Black Cube fellowship program.
The term “fulfillment center” is a double entendre for the warehouse spaces that fulfill our online orders and for the ways in which our humanity is being fulfilled (or not) in the digital age. Many parallel themes emerged in the pieces created by these eighteen artists.
Not surprisingly, consumerism, consumption, and commodification were obvious tropes in several works, including Zach Reini’s vinyl mural, Playlab, Inc.’s sneaker shop performance piece, and Nina Sarnelle’s digital video set amongst a wall of Amazon boxes.
A more elevated angle to the consumerism trope was the theme of materiality and the agency that non-human objects have in our human lives. Mauricio Alejo highlights this non-human agency in his kinetic/auditory installation in which five recorder flutes on a table are “played” by a fan that rotates back and forth. In a more serious turn, Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s sculpture incorporates figurines of young Asian girls being crushed under the weight of a pile of mass-manufactured welcome doormats.
Installation image of The Fulfillment Center featuring “Changing Station” by Sammy Seung-min Lee in the foreground. Image by Samantha Hunt-Durán.
Perhaps more subtly, themes of embodiment, personhood, and intimacy are explored by Sammy Seung-min Lee, Adam Milner, and Laura Shill. Seung-min Lee created a baby changing table/conveyor belt hybrid sculpture that analyzes the rushed nature of contemporary human intimacy. Laura Shill’s robotic companion cat installation critiques how the parameters of intimacy are changing with the rise of digital and robotic companions. Milner’s blood-soaked cotton gloves installation highlights the dollar value placed on the human blood and other donatable organs.
Personhood, automation, and work are reflected more literally in the human toll that these warehouse operations and e-commerce landscapes logistically require. Momoyo Torimitsu’s endlessly-crawling robotic Japanese businessman grapples with the toll of achieving success in an increasingly competitive economy. Joseph Coniff’s installation of a pallet jack, safety vest, and sports drink left abandoned in the middle of the exhibition floor signify the presence of a warehouse worker. Similarly, Jonathan Fletcher Moore’s concrete-soaked worker uniforms endlessly spin on a mechanism controlled by an AI algorithm.
Instead of traditional artist labels, the pieces in The Fulfillment Center are demarcated with the abbreviated name of the artist and a scannable QR code. Scanning these QR codes evoked the sense of scanning barcodes in a fulfillment center. The pieces were mainly all displayed within metal shelving units, compounding the warehouse vibe. This clever display method gives a segmented space to each piece, while evoking the sense of an e-commerce repository chock-full of wares waiting to magically appear on their purchaser’s doorstep.
So, what happens to a nomadic art gallery that has gone into escrow? Stell assures me that Black Cube will continue to operate nomadically in the same ways that it has before. She envisions the new site acting as a tethering point for future programming and exhibition projects and, more operationally, as an office, studio, and storage space.
Mounting this multi-artist exhibition allowed for overlap and discussion between the regional, national, and inter-national artists featured in the show, however the creation of the artwork itself was not collaborative between these artists. In the future, maybe this warehouse will allow for creative partnerships in ways previously untapped by Black Cube.
Perhaps carving out a home base is a comfort to Black Cube, especially in the face of the new kid on the block.
Or perhaps Black Cube Headquarters signals a new level of commitment to and investment in the Denver area.
Samantha Hunt-Durán is a Denver native, born and raised. She holds a MA in Art History, a BFA in Pre-Art Conservation from the University of Denver, and currently serves as a board member of the Commerce City Cultural Council. Her research interests include materiality, alter-modernism, embodiment, and object-oriented ontologies.
[1] Black Cube Headquarters is open on Saturdays from 12:00 to 4:00pm or by appointment via email. I found that Stell was incredibly receptive to my visit and making an appointment was easy.
[2] SANGREE (RTD bus terminal in 2016), Alejandro Almanza Pereda (“Game Changer” 2014 BMoCA), Joseph Coniff (“Likeness” 2012 RMCAD), Stephanie Kantor (“Mock Pavillion” 2016 San Antonio), Sammy Seung-min Lee (“Arrived” RedLine 2017), Adam Milner (“First Draft” 2013 McNichols), Zach Reini (“Soft Subversions” Pirate 2013), Laura Shill (“Personal Structures” 2017 Venice), and Natalija Vujošević (“Playgrounds” 2015 RedLine).
