There’s a reason fairy tales continue to resonate long after childhood.
The forest has always been a place where rules change. It is where children encounter danger, where strangers hide secrets and where animals can become guides, threats or protectors.
Anne Siems taps into that mythology but drops it into a world of smartphones and data harvesting.
Her forest becomes both sanctuary and surveillance state.
Hansel and Gretel aren’t helpless. They are gathering evidence. They are adapting. They are learning how to move through a world in which being seen can have consequences.
That tension gives the work its strange beauty. Siems pairs unsettling ideas with an almost dreamlike visual language, creating images that can feel simultaneously tender, eerie and quietly threatening.
The wolf, too, becomes more complicated. Rather than simply embodying the monster waiting in the woods, the figure exists within a larger ecosystem of characters and creatures navigating a world where the distinction between predator and prey isn’t always clear.
Perhaps the most relatable element of Siems’ work is her longing for a less connected world.
She recalls landline telephones, letters, radio and old television—a time when communication was slower and, at least in theory, easier to leave behind.
Today, disappearing isn’t quite so simple.
The smartphone is simultaneously a camera, microphone, map, wallet, social life, entertainment center and record of our movements. Disconnecting can feel less like turning off a device and more like stepping outside society.
Siems acknowledges that contradiction. She doesn’t offer an easy escape from technology, nor does the exhibition pretend we can simply return to an analog past.
Instead, Hansel, Gretel and the Wolf imagines what resistance might look like inside the system.
The exhibition’s politics are unmistakable. Siems takes aim at a technological landscape shaped by relentless data collection, corporate interests and powerful technology companies operating in an era of shifting political and social boundaries.
But the work isn’t simply dystopian. There is resilience here, too.
Siems uses the fairy tale as a way to reclaim some agency from a world that can feel increasingly difficult to escape. Her characters are watched, but they watch back. They are vulnerable, but they aren’t powerless. The forest is dangerous, but it also provides cover.
That duality is what makes the exhibition compelling.
There is beauty alongside menace. Humor alongside paranoia. Vulnerability alongside resistance.
And perhaps that’s the real twist in this contemporary fairy tale: the goal isn’t necessarily to escape the forest.
It’s to learn how to move through it without giving up your sense of self.
See the exhibition
Anne Siems: Hansel, Gretel and the Wolf opens Friday, Sept. 4, with an opening reception from 6–8 p.m. at Visions West Contemporary, 2605 Walnut Street in Denver. The exhibition will remain on view through Oct. 3, 2026.
For a city that has built much of its contemporary identity around art, technology, reinvention and the changing American West, the exhibition feels particularly at home in Denver.
After all, the New West has always had its own stories about who is watching whom.
Opening: Friday, Sept. 4, 2026, 6–8 p.m.
On view: Sept. 4–Oct. 3, 2026
Location: Visions West Contemporary, 2605 Walnut St., Denver