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Got art? Got too much?

It's easy to get jaded, I know. Too often we're seduced by the rich variety of fine art available here in our little mountain town. The William Havu, the Galleries Extraordinaire, the Colorado Academy of Art in Boulder - never mind heavyweights like the Museum of Contemporary Art or the Denver Art Museum. Sure enough, Denver is swimming in artistic expression. But have you sampled the fruits from UCD's own tree?

Perhaps it's time you did.

Meet Beau Hagberry. An up and coming sculpturer from our own College of Arts and Media, Beau set himself apart last week, enacting on the school grounds a site specific performance of his latest work entitled: Forgiveness.

That's right, performance sculpture. Not exactly the kind of thing you expect to read about, but Beau is not exactly the kind of artist you'd expect to meet.

"Forgiveness" chronicles Hagberry's quest for absolution. It's an interactive piece by design, intended to both capture and mirror the process of forgiveness itself. In the studio this artist has fashioned scores of hand-painted plywood rounds, each chiseled with coded numbers representing a lifetime of inequities. In the field he lays these sins down by ones and twos to form a tight column stretching more than 20 feet. Once finished he returns to the beginning, picks up the first few plaques and walks them up to the head of the line. He did this a week ago Monday, slowly creeping his piece back and forth between the Arts and the Plaza buildings. For eight solid hours.

"The structure of my performance," he says, "considers the modern philosophical idea of forgiveness to be an ephemeral act of the spirit, the emotion, the body and the mind, repetitively working together in a particular direction." Hagberry demonstrated in one workday his own particular direction by laying out his sins, one by one, in a presentation meant to reflect the cycle of confronting, processing and coming to passable terms with our wrongs - then repeating the procedure.

Why repeat? Because we never simply forgive and move on; life doesn't work like that. Hagberry's work models in the physical world the sometimes patent, sometimes repressed, but always slow labors privately endured by those looking to forgive. In a way, his piece picks up precisely where the limitations of our language systems fail us.

To forgive is an act. Forgiveness, then, implies an act cleanly and comfortably finished. But rarely is the process so complete or void of complication. Instead, argues Hagberry, the "act" of forgiveness persists as a "constant and repetitive process" of the human condition, one that forcibly binds subjects to their deeds. It's spiral theory. We can't escape our past, but we can hope to come back around and address the same skeletons lingering in our closet from a new and more enlightened perspective. Like modern-day Sisyphus, we're damned to push our burdens to the tops of our mountains. But with each new day, if we process forgiveness, we can find that our rock is a bit smaller, a bit easier to roll. On the other hand, if we don't process that forgiveness, we'll find ourselves shackled with a guilt unbreakable, unbearable.

"Forgiveness" testifies as to why we should process, why we should address our sins. It shows us that the keys unlocking our salvation come not by boxing in our guilt or abandoning the forgiveness process, but by embracing it, no matter how long it takes or how much is required.

Guilt is like a bucket of anvils, one we choose to carry with us in this marathon life. Following this analogy, it seems as though we could set the bucket down and walk away free. Not so, says Hagberry. Inevitably we saddle ourselves with remorse precisely because we fail to exercise it. As shame and regret accrue, building upon and reinforcing each other, our task becomes ever harder, the bucket grows heavier. Set the bucket down? We'll be swimming in it if we don't face our own, inner suffering.

With "Forgiveness," Hagberry doesn't just set his bucket down; he empties it for all to see.

True, we don't have a decoder ring. We don't know what Hagberry's personal pains are; but we don't need to. Each numbered plaque functions as an equal-opportunity symbol; each can freely represent any sin committed by any one sinner. We call it catharsis. By examining the process and not the product, Hagberry's piece offers spectators insight into the mechanisms of forgiveness and the levers granting its release.

It's up to us to decide how firmly we want to pull them.