Series: Art
Opening Reception Date: Friday, September 19, 2008
Time: 6:30 - 9:00 p.m.
Venue: Visual Arts Building

Exhibition dates: September 19 - October 18, 2008

Ticket Prices: Free

The exhibition "Alchemy or Change" explores works of art and artists that distill unexpected results through specific choices in materials and process.

The show pulls together painting, drawing, video, works on paper, sculpture, and photography from local, national, and international artists to illuminate how simple yet powerful substitutions and determined acts in the practice of making resonate with both ineffable and physical attributes.

The decisions an artist makes selectively, intuitively, or spontaneously inform the work’s content, providing layers within the complex whole of the work, asserting a dialog both the artist and the viewer have to reckon with.

These decisions, often instinctive, strategic and responsive amalgams of making, produce subtle shifts in the viewer’s expectations and the work’s content expressed through material choice and process.

Exploring this theme, the work in the exhibition collaborates with light, heat, and chemical reactions. States of alteration, extraction, resistance, touch, abrasion and adhesion resonate in some choate of ephemeral and physically real, and reach into the actual and the sublime. Mechanical, digital or analog form and formlessness divert placing pictorial illusion and dis-illusion in dialog. The mundane or familiar is transformed, intertwining the practice of making with question of surface, form, structure, process, material, and, finally, content.