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WEEK OF AUGUST 24, 2023
VOLUME 96 | ISSUE 38
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Denver area: second highest annual inflation rate in the U.S. BY TAMARA CHUANG THE COLORADO SUN
Wall art called Space Screens cover the walls at Jacob Lemanski’s Ant Life in Denver.
ki got a patent on them, and in June last year, opened a space to publicly display them at 2150 Market St. in downtown Denver. Today, he has 11 illuminated ant farms for everyone to enjoy. Filling a couple of the walls inside the larger Ant Life venue, Lemanski calls the display “the Ant Space.” Each of these framed ant farms is unique, and will be different with every visit. It’s living wall art, Lemanski said. “It only exists in the present because it’s constantly changing,” he added. Additional original artwork displayed inside Ant Life is what Lemanski calls Space Screens. These are close-up images – some are photographs of plants and other objects that Lemanski took on his cycling adventure – on dyed velvet that are hung from a light bar to create a dynamic, psychedelic wall
Prices continue to climb in the U.S., but few regions saw inflation grow faster than in Denver, which posted an annual inflation rate of 4.7% in July, according to the Consumer Price Index. The Denver metro had the second highest rate next to Tampa, Florida, which was at 5.9%. The U.S., by comparison, was 3.2%, the same as New York’s. Los Angeles landed at 2.7% from a year ago, Hawaii at 2.1%, and Washington, D.C.’s hit 1.8%. At least Denver’s rate is dropping, said Richard Wobbekind, a senior economist and faculty director of the Business Research Division at the University of Colorado. It’s fallen from 5.1% in May and 5.7% in March. “The trend is definitely in the right direction,” Wobbekind said during a news conference this month. “Hopefully we are going to see some continued trend downward in some of the core inflation areas.” With the national inflation rate still more than a point above the 2% desired by the Federal Reserve, interest rates are likely to remain high. And that’ll continue to challenge industries that are sensitive to interest rate changes, like construction, housing and the financial sector. “Getting that additional (percentage point) is going to be a tough road and that’s going to keep these interest rates elevated for a longer period of time. I think the higher interest rate environment is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future,” Wobbekind said. “We don’t see the inflation rate coming down under that 3% significantly until next year.”
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PHOTO BY CHRISTY STEADMAN
Building ‘the world’s most beautiful ant farm’ Ant Life prompts human pondering in Denver BY CHRISTY STEADMAN CSTEADMAN@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
While Jacob Lemanski was circling the globe on his bicycle, the only thing he missed was his ant farm. It was one of the few possessions he’d kept before setting out on his adventure. He built it himself, using scrap sheets of plastic and he set a dim light behind it to illuminate the ant tunnels. Lemanski’s cycling adventure entailed circling the world twice — a feat that took him 999 days, almost three years. Nearly all of his time was solitary, aside from the friendly waves and saying a casual hello to the thousands of people along his route, which consisted of traversing six continents. During the long stretches of
pedaling, Lemanski had a lot of time to reflect. He often thought about his ant farm. So, when he returned home, Lemanski, who has a background in mechanical and aerospace engineering, set out to build the “world’s most beautiful ant farm.” Lemanski created a living habitat with a colorful backdrop of nebulae and stars that reacts to the colorchanging lights built within the frame. Once built, Lemanski spent many hours looking at it — observing the ants as they tunneled and watching the roots of various plants as they grew in the soil. Watching the ant farm became meditation for him. “Every time I looked, it was different, and I was mesmerized,” Lemanski said. “Watching it become something is the fun of it.” Lemanski then built a second ant farm, then a third. Eventually, it became a collection of eight. Lemans-
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