Our first group show, in June 2025, introduced the lore of The Terrible Wise and our mascot, the Chimera. A chimera is a fictional creature whose parts come from different animals, representing the unrealistic or unrealizable—the foolish, wild, imaginative, impossible dream. In the Iliad, Homer described the chimera as such: “she was of divine stock not of men, in the fore part a lion, in the hinder a serpent, and in the midst a goat, breathing forth in terrible wise the might of blazing fire." 

 

Chimeras moved from the ancient Greek to the medieval, from center-stage to the margins of holy texts. As this collective exists in the context and lineage of Western thought — perhaps at the end of the West’s rope — we seek to understand and then subvert this imaginative world, taking the ingredients and reversing the recipe from one of domination to one of unity through uniqueness. 

 

In the lore, which you can read in the zine, we meet the members of the collective as archetypes living in an abstract village under the dominion of a tyrannical ghost king. The artists, or Makers, discover an ancient world full of lost Colorado nature, and through a series of creative quests, assemble a chimera with blucifer’s hooves and a columbine tail to protect them from the tyrant. 

 

While the Makers are safe to celebrate and make in the world they discovered and made, such as on their Solar Return, they also know that there are still so many suffering archetypal villagers, and they sought to give back. They made a COW-mera to help the Helpers clothe and feed their neighbors on the coldest nights. 

 

The Makers all had wishes for themselves and others, and asked each other over and over how such loveliness and suffering can exist all at once, questions echoing through smoke and wood panels. Then, in the northwestern meadow, surrounded by flowers of baby’s breath, bleeding hearts, columbines, and dandelions, the Makers found their questions echoing in and around an ancient Wishing Well. 

 

The Wishing Well has been symbolized by its transactional passivity—toss a coin in, walk away. Largely sentimental, magic only to children, who grow to have their hearts broken by reality, their magic either shunned or hidden away. Boycott shimmers, sketchbook drawings, and harmonies sung on commutes feel like drops in a bucket. The old stories fade into obscurity as we scroll through our reflected and manufactured desires. Western culture raises children to believe that our wishes will be granted so long as they are silent, secret, and cost a pretty penny. As we reckon with the lies covering the horrors of our privilege of fully stocked grocery stores, the internet, and fairytale lovestories, we wonder where that innocent belief in a beautiful world went. Did it evaporate?

 

There is an Ancient Greek myth about a man whose mother was a Naiad, a seasonal spring nymph who lived in and was the water of the spring beneath a local well. This man asked the Well how he could achieve all of his desires. He was grabbed by the Naiads and brought inside the waters of the Well. There, they washed him with their own sacred water of wisdom, and he found he had all of the answers inside him when he surfaced. 

 

Can we believe that we are mythological Makers, made of the same water as the Naiads? By reaching into our inner wells and pulling out our foolish dreams, strange visions, and reflections together, we may actualize the symbolic power of the Well as collective Wishers. It is inside the show that we aim to transmute our grief back to a place of wonder with the whole community. 

 

The Wishers are powerless when they dream alone, just as the stone and water are powerless to grant our desires themselves. When the Wishers voice and act on the belief that the love, beauty, and goodness lost or taken from us can live on in a new form – in new relationships, songs, animations, aid – we can simultaneously write and live out a new mythology. Why not :)

 

Our desire for peace and justice is not going to be granted from watery whispered wishes. It will be sung in foolish fire until it is realized. We invite you to see the collective’s art swirl into a beautiful reflection of our community’s dreaming, and to cast your coins to Casa de Paz, an organization of Helpers for our neighbors so cruelly incarcerated at the Aurora ICE detention facility, for the children who should never have to wish for safety, who should be free to carelessly dream with their loved ones around the Well. 

 

–from Alisa Christiane Otte, co-creative director of The Terrible Wise