What do black holes, microplastics and a runway fashion show have in common?
At the Galleries of Contemporary Art in Colorado Springs, the answer unfolds in layers of black fabric, glittering trash and sustainable couture.
Artist Nina Elder’s exhibition, “The Source Never Diminishes,” inspired this year’s House of GOCA fashion show. The throughline is transformation — and the idea that endings are not endings at all.
Making the invisible visible
Walk into Elder’s show, and you’ll notice a lot of black.
Not empty black, but layered, textured and sculpted forms suspended from the ceiling. The exhibition, she said, revolves around “themes of giving form to the formless or trying to find ways to help people focus on the void or absences… almost everything in our life is negotiating around presence and absence.”
Many of those forms are made from erosion control fabric — the kind typically used along highways to keep dirt and rocks from spilling onto the road — which Elder has sourced from transportation agencies.
“It sheds so many microplastics into the watersheds,” she said, “otherwise they would put it in the dump.”
The resulting pieces resemble windsocks — practical and familiar in Colorado. They point to forces that shape daily life but often go unnoticed.
“I was really thinking about the invisible forces that we live with and trying to think of existing things that show us those,” Elder said. “And the wind is very interesting to me because we can't hear the wind until it touches something. We can't see the wind until it touches something else. The wind by itself is silent and invisible. And so ... this exploration into how to present absence.”
Turning inward: From meditation to ‘trash asteroids’
A grid of small, colorful circles began, Elder explained, as a way to resist doom-scrolling habits.
“These really started as a daily meditation on waking up and not wanting to just look at the news,” she said, adding that she calls the drawings “From the Center to the Center.”
“To me, that really feels like what it feels like to meditate and be mindful is you're breathing into the center, you're exhaling from the center.”
That practice of attention expands in the center of the gallery, where a pink platform holds hundreds of objects she has collected over the last decade — rocks, bones, fragments and even a gold-colored turd.
“But literally of all these things, at some point they were rolling around on the floor of my truck,” she said with a laugh. “I've lived on the road for the past 10 years, just going from project to project to project. I haven't had a home. And so any nomad, I think, I'm constantly picking things up to help me find my way or help me feel connected to a place. And so these are all sort of evidence of that.”
Some of what she gathered was trash. Instead of discarding it, she compressed and embellished it.
“Why do we just get rid of everything and we don't give it this regard and gratitude of, ‘I used this, supported my life, this was important to me?’” Elder said. “I get deeply concerned about how we're just so ready to throw things away in our culture. And so I started sort of bedazzling all of these, what I call trash asteroids.”
For Elder, those “trash asteroids” are not just playful objects. They mirror what happens on a cosmic scale. When a massive star collapses, it becomes a black hole.
“Black holes mathematically, we know they exist,” she said, “but we can't fathom how if all the light and all the matter and all the energy gets sucked into something, how it gets transformed into something else.”
That mystery, Elder said, reframes loss. There is no true hard stop, only transformation.
Stepping onto the runway
Elder’s ideas are leaving the gallery walls and entering the world of fashion.
House of GOCA, an annual runway event in Colorado Springs, is designed as a companion to the main exhibition at GOCA, a program of the Ent Center for the Arts. This year’s theme, “Stardust”, draws directly from Elder’s exploration of collapse, interconnectivity and renewal.
Designer Aaron Graves is one of the featured artists translating those concepts into garments.
“I love how fabrics feel,” Graves said. “So beforehand I'm already holding it up, throwing it over, even a dress form or even the back of a chair just to see how something drapes.”
He described one of his looks as having “a very, very heavy drape,” with a slight train that “will spill behind her” as the model walks. Another piece “hangs in these beautiful folds along the side,” transforming when the model raises her arms into “another cascade of drapes.”
For Graves, the show is not about copying Elder’s work but building on it.
“It's not like we're flat out trying to reinterpret what the artist did, but expand on it in our own way,” he said.
The challenge lies in translating something as abstract as “the cosmos and interconnectivities” into fabric and form.
“It was taking that and trying to find a way to translate that into a garment when you have something that's not necessarily tangible,” Graves said.
Like Elder, Graves creates with sustainability in mind. Many of his pieces are made from sustainable materials and are upcycled clothing. He also added that movement is essential in all of his work.
“Everything I design might look great standing still, but it is designed to move,” he said. “There's always a flow to it … So there's nothing rigid about it.”
Nina Elder’s exhibition “The Source Never Diminishes” runs through March 7 at GOCA. House of GOCA’s Stardust fashion show takes placeon February 20 in Colorado Springs.
