Six/Six, which is now on display at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, manages to rein itself in without stifling any of its disparate and sometimes ethereal parts.

Those parts—provided by regional artists Rokko Aoyama, Rebecca DiDomenico, Lorre Hoffman, Scott Massey, Victoria Perez and Janet Williams—consist of either self-contained solo shows or single installations housed in the six spaces that make up the Arvada Center’s large lower gallery.  If there’s a general theme, it’s one of transformation.

A small menagerie of DiDomenico’s obsessive explorations of the flexible dynamic between material and form fill up the first alcove of the gallery.  There is, as part of a kind of cross-section of DiDomenico’s recent work, a bevy of crowns (each pieced together from a number of homogenous objects realign from chopsticks and metal mesh to tomatillos and beetle wings); a couple of suspended spiral sculptures;  “1,000 Wings”, a thousand butterfly wings encased in mica and joined by hinges to create a grid;  and a suspended grid of ink and pencil drawings on vellum.

The effect is one of appreciation for DiDomenico’s implicit and meticulous understanding of her materials and a sense that the world can be ordered in a number of wildly imaginative ways.  It’s a high-water mark in the show for this idea of highly controlled investigation, one that tellingly dissipates and resonates across the other galleries.

Overall, it’s a smart show that covers a lot of ground, both conceptual and physical and as its seeming compartmentalization gives way to vigorous connection, it hints at a larger metaphor of a communal need for a wide spectrum of unique voices.  “Six/Six” makes it look easy.

-J. Gluckstern