Exploring Uncertainty: An Interactive Art Exhibition (Part One: Personal Uncertainty)

Composed of flat, geometric planes, Shawn Camp’s paintings present visual puzzles, where multiple conclusions can be made based on the viewer's perception. Following Schrodinger's Cat theory, Camp introduces the idea that anything can exist in multiple states or conditions until it is observed and measured.Through challenging our perception of light, shape, and color, these works reference a “thought experiment” where the paradoxes of quantum superposition exist. If reality is determined by our own observations, no definitive conclusion can be made from these works, leaving the viewer in a state of suspension as they look, then look again.

The impression of depth, extending outward or inward, in these paintings remain uncertain as shapes shift between translucence and opacity, and inclined rectangles fold in onto themselves. Working with acrylic paint, the artist exploits these optical effects, revealing the ephemeral nature of our own awareness, allowing the viewer to experience uncertainty between perception and reality.

Ellen Croft's three-dimensional works reflect her unmediated, interactive approach to the physical world. Through a filter of contemporary political and capitalist constraints, her engagement comes from a place of rebellion where uncertainty is met with artistic intent. Working in large-scale, she cuts, tears, and reassembles materials sourced from previous works of art, including original drawings from her sketchbooks, that result in new abstract forms. Through this experimental process of destroying and reconstructing, old into new, the artist examines identities and classification within the “abstract,“ where the boundary between representation and invention remains undefined.

Crofts’ process embraces uncertainty. The element of surprise in constructing and assembling these ephemeral works deploys a method to explore the tensions that exist in the personal and political present. Balancing the delicacy and weakness of her repurposed materials reveals how instability can guide creative potential. Her work defies certainty and resists definition, allowing herself and viewers to re-discover new ways of building meaning, forging connections, and weaving identity.

In this series of photograms, Nicholas Dertien represents the powerful invisible sensations of an asthma attack. Interested in the thresholds that lead to peak experiences and altered perception, the artist intentionally induces an asthma attack to investigate such turbulent bodily experiences. To create a visual representation of the sensation, the artist produces instinctual drawings in the moment of these attacks. He later transforms these drawings into blown glass vessels, which are in turn documented through the photograms on display here. The resulting images aesthetically resemble medical x-rays, connecting, or relocating, the sculptural vessels back to the body. In addition, Dertien has created a series of large-scale drawings to further explore the topic.

Dertien works speak to a level of uncertainty that comes when our bodies, our own vessels, are in crisis. His work explores the tensions and unpredictability of the body during a transformative moment. Through this clinical gaze, the photograms confront us with what is considered fragile and unknown about the body, the self, and the human experience.

In this display of individual artworks, Bernie Diaz creates a unified installation that invites the viewer to make their own visual discoveries from fragmented and disjointed forms. He aims to present a sense of cohesion out of textual and visual play that is born from a lack of familiarity with the images. His artistic practice involves cutting, scavenging, layering, and reconfiguring words, found images, patterns, and colorful shapes that are seemingly unrelated into hybrid decorative works, that comprise glyph-like compositions. However, unlike ancient Mayan or similar glyphs, his new arrangements are undecipherable, leaving the viewer to create their own sense of wholeness from obscurity.

For the artist, uncertainty lives in this formal play, where identity is woven through the accumulation, recontextualization, and fragmentation of texts and images. These artworks come from Diaz’s Grapados (stapled) and Paper Trails series, which, by merging them here, creates layered readings that lead to new interpretative possibilities.

Christopher Miñán Fitzgerald’s luminous portraits of patients in intensive care units reflect the tensions that exist when ambiguity, form, and fate dangle in the face of incomprehensible tragedy. To make sense or extract meaning from near-death experiences, the artist begins with transforming the dehumanizing medical gaze to that of deeply personal portraitures. The process begins with watercolor studies, resulting in fragile and uncontrolled forms that are created when the medium of watercolor pools and bleeds. The second part in the process reimagines the subject in the sturdier material of acrylic or oil paint, regaining control through solidifying the form and structure within the image in large scale.

Fitzgerald invites the viewer to visually contemplate the uncertainties of the self and the body by shifting from a clinical gaze to a compassionate one, exploring the tension of perceived experience against our own mortality. In this way, he confronts the boundary between life and death through the uncertainty of the subject’s fate.

Ezra Romero’s uniform and systematic use of color, shape, and line creates engaging geometric panels for the viewer to explore and compare. Using principles from historic art styles such as Geometric Abstraction, Optical Art, and Minimalism, Romero’s work detaches from the concept that there is an absolute to perception and observation. Applying techniques that draw upon simultaneous contrast and the Bezold Effect, the artist presents an optical exercise that challenges both the two-dimensional nature of these paintings, and the viewer's understanding of color.

Romero further internalizes the process of these works by exerting careful control as a therapeutic exercise, although the resulting artworks break with static perfection as the forms on the canvas become unstable when viewed. He aims to produce an uncertain experience that can impact the viewer in both intellectual and emotional ways.