enthrall, fascinate, hypnotize, stupefy, magnetize, grip, spellbind, entrance, attract, beguile, bewitch, cajole, captivate, delight, enamor, enrapture, allure, DRAW!


But this wasn’t always the case: “My original re-inspiration for art came in Valley High School, from Mrs. Sirl, my art teacher, and she allowed me and my friends to be graffiti artists while it was taboo and no one else was accepting it and she said, ‘I know you love what you’re doing so I’m going to let you do it, make your ceramic pots on the side and get them in to me for your grades and as long as you’re following what you really want to do in art I’m gonna pass you.’ I found the art community in Albuquerque was where it was (Street Art) it was the only logical place for me to go.”


But these days, you won’t find Harroun hooded beneath a streetlamp, instead, he spends his nights and his days colliding the immaterial world of the pixel with that world we can touch and feel. How did this once boy go from the streets of Albuquerque’s Street Art scene to the farthest reaches of creative technology?
“I didn’t like 3D animation for a long time," says Harroun, "I really thought it was never going to work for me as an artist, it just didn’t make sense…One day my dad took me to Siggraph, which is a computer graphics conference, so animation companies like Pixar and Dream Works and all the little studios that you’d never heard of—they all get together once a year…all over the country. The first one I went to was in New Orleans at their convention center, and it opened my eyes to 3D animation. It was a world where actual artists were really making things happen. I thought, up until that point, that it was just computer guys that I didn’t know—I mean that was my brother—I didn’t quite understand computers at that point. I was still just drawing with paint and pencils and I didn’t really think a computer could make art, well at least I didn’t think I could make art with it. Then I saw Siggraph and I was like, Holy crap! This is exactly what I want to do with my life! I saw a bunch of geeks and weirdos and artists making beautiful things together and that’s when I realized that when you put a geek and an artist together in the same place they can make magic unlike anything, and that’s essentially what happened is engineers and artists getting together and expanding and imagineering.”
But this was only the beginning for Harroun. After his father brought him to the Siggraph conference, he went to the Denver Colorado Art Institute and graduated with an animation degree. Then he returned to Albuquerque to work in visual effects, but the prospects had become grim, “At the time it was really, really, frightening. We had a couple big studios here, and they up and left because of the incentive. The state wasn’t going to be the right fit for them. But, I started realizing at that point that I didn’t want to be a gear in a machine. I didn’t want to be that guy doing one little task on an animation, going nine to five Monday through Friday, making something I loved into a real chore.” Harroun had to do something that was different, something that pushed conventional boundaries in the creative world, “That’s when I decided to get into 3D printing and had the backing of some family and other people that were just always supportive of me and bought my first 3D Printer.”

The advent of 3D printing coupled with his deeply moving experience of the Siggraph conference has driven Harroun to expand his artistic endeavors in both artistic expression and practicality. He’s envisioned and begun a line of jewelry that’s both stunning and whimsical. His pieces have yet to find a wider acceptance in the fine art scene. Harroun is well aware of the bias against accepting this new medium, and his response is one of calm understanding:

I looked at the jewelry he had been wearing all this time, a geometric rabbit sat on his breast and what I recognized as some kind of complex sacred geometric patterns wrapped around his finger. I was enthralled by how these came into being and asked, “So the ring that you’re wearing, that’s a 3D model that you created and you had it printed? So you could have that ring printed in any size to fit anyone?”
“Exactly. Scale it up and down. I measure the inside diameter...scale it so this diameter is an exact dimension...I’ve found that this particular pattern (he’s referencing the ring I just mentioned) when it starts getting really small, I have to change the flower shape a little bit or it doesn’t look right.”
There are physical limitations of resolution that Harroun has learned from experience. Like so many of his projects, and in the very spirit of Siggraph which inspired him, his ability to produce the jewelry he’s designed is a collaborative effort, “I’m not printing it into metal, I’m printing it into plastic, and then I take it to a guy here in town, Silver Cloud, Charles, he’s probably one of the best at it there is…” Silver Cloud casts Harroun’s 3D prints into the final metal product that people will wear. It’s a process that Harroun has been able to touch thanks to the experience and knowledge shared with him by his brother, Doug, who has studied fine metals through UNM, “so one reason I can even touch jewelry and understand it is because I have my brother,” says Harroun.

He mentioned a more controversial perspective, regarding the need to work with others, “We want to collaborate. I think competing is the most dangerous thing our species is toying with right now.” He didn’t go too far into this topic, but I had the sense that it was a matter of principle to Harroun, something he valued perhaps knowingly, to a fault. I sensed something stubborn then, stubborn and beautiful like a wolf as part of a pack. There is no doubt that when humanity most succeeds toward a goal it is in collaboration with one another that we excel as a species. Our greatest achievements are not made alone, but are made with the support and knowledge of others. It was a powerful statement, and I realized that I wasn’t just talking with Harroun, I was meeting some part of his brother, his father, and his mother. I was meeting some part of the teachers he’s had in the past and the fellow artists he’s worked alongside to materialize the beautiful creations he was sharing with me.

He’s right. It’s one of those pinnacle inventions that has changed the world. There was a world limited in ways before the advent of 3D printing, and then there is the world we’re coming into now with people like Harroun who are using this technology to expand their horizons and to push the confines of traditional methods.

“I would say this—with regards to technology and art—the electric guitar did not get rid of the acoustic guitar and great guitarists are going to play both equally well. But when the electric guitar came out, people laughed at Bob Dylan and wrote him off for it. They said, ‘You don’t know how to play music! This is a machine making music for you!’ and all of 3D printing kind of plays itself into that thought process for some people now.”
I ask Harroun what he imagines for the future, “In ten years...my work I think it’s gonna’ be more prevalent and a lot more people are going to be doing it. I think there’s a younger generation, maybe the high school and college age right now, that are taking computer art and running with it and are going to show me, in a way, where to go too. Traditional art—it’s everything you have to know it—but there’s also a whole ‘nother realm to it,” Harroun tells me excitedly. Then he became just a little bit sad, but hopeful and said, “We’re stuck behind technology, and the money behind it too. Albuquerque particularly, with the lack of funding for a lot of things like this, a lot of people don’t get to touch on it.”
He’s right. Access to the technology comes at an expense, and most students in our New Mexico schools won’t ever work in a 3D modeling program much less experience the thrill of watching that model print out. Harroun has been lucky, and he knows it. He appreciates it. “I’d love to help people more too,” Harroun tells me, “I’ve done some workshops, lending my hand out to the community to help other people do 3D Printing. Is it accessible? Yes and no. Are kids just gonna’ be able to go just find a printer and start making their own stuff?...” Some will.

What follows are some more works by Dennis Harroun and excerpts from our conversation regarding those works. Enjoy!
Intergalactic Ambassador

“Sherri Brueggemann [is] doing the Intergalactic Ambassador Project and she got these characters from Powerball actually, here in Albuquerque. The Powerball had these little spherical characters. The city was going to get rid of them and throw them away and she said, ‘That’s a horrible waste of these cool fiberglass sculptures!’ and there were about 30 of them that the city had made and put in the various Circle K’s around town to advertise the Powerball. So, she adopted them and repurposed them to be intergalactic ambassadors.”
“New Mexico is the only state that recognizes aliens [with] Alien Appreciation Day—it’s the day after Valentine’s Day. We have a state acknowledgment of aliens. So my concept, and it’s controversial... I I made him an illegal alien.” “She took them down to Spaceport and there’s 30 of them there, and now he’s at my studio and he’s not really doing anything. Mine stands out because he’s wearing a giant orange jumpsuit...there’s a lot of good artists in that show!”
“Sktrachworks is how I made that intergalactic ambassador, it’s a cool material! Jared Nicholson made this product based on wasp paper.”
Off The Wall (casht)

He was as surprised by the tone of my question as I was feeling surprised at his love for graffiti. Yes he found it beautiful, and then some:
“It’s free. It’s as free of an art form as it gets. It doesn’t need to answer to anyone. it has some rules and codes people go by, but those are always being broken and changed. It’s the ultimate act. Graffiti says that a country is free. If you see graffiti you know that something is going right because kids are gonna paint graffiti anywhere in the world. It’s those oppressive places that squash it, but then the human spirit is squashed in the process. You have to crush the human spirit to get rid of graffiti and it’ll exist whether people like seeing it or not. If we embrace it and allow it to exist in our cultures more, and we don’t condemn it, it’ll grow, blossom, thrive. It’s a perfect example to talk about how we can let our world be free-er and allow young people to be young...Yeah, I think it’s beautiful! I don’t think just tags on the streets—that’s like the off spurt ...you’ve seen beautiful graffiti art haven’t you?”
“Not really. Most of the graffiti art I see, it looks angry, it’s like the walls are bleeding, like somebody’s sharing a wound.”
“Oh, wow! Well so then, to that I have to say that cities bleed. There’s a lot of traumas and a lot of people out there with issues ...I see a grey wall with nothing on it is trapping it’s secrets and it’s holding onto them and it will only explode eventually if you don’t let it—street art is a way to ventilate that emotional impact that these cities have on our psyches. They’re draining, so graffiti art is a way to color the world and I would ...no doubt when you see the modern day graffiti art scene, especially here in Albuquerque, it’s been repressed to an extent that you don’t see the good side of it. If you go to Austin and Miami and places like that...When a city like Austin is doing as well as it is economically—music is spiritual energy so we can say spiritually—and everything in all these other ways, their art is gonna look better. Their street artists are going to be happier, they’re going to be going home to better stories on the news, and better healthcare, all of that is going to end up impacting the way their art looks and street art is a good litmus test of what’s going on in the city. So when you say bleeding, yeah no doubt, the city right now would show signs of that with Trump and the Hispanic people here, they’re really upset and crying inside, and some of the best artists in the world are street artists and they’re in Europe...Blu, Etam, Eron...amazing murals on huge walls, Banksy...”
He had a point. Seriously, who doesn’t like Banksy? That artist has brought graffiti to a new level entirely.