Gallery Openings and Artist Receptions

Join us for this month's Gallery Opening & Artist Reception! Gallery Openings and Artist Receptions are great opportunities not only to view unique and captivating art, but to chat informally with the artists and learn about their inspirations, mediums, and techniques. They are FREE, family-friendly, and open to the public. Light refreshments are served. Contact Gallery Director Savannah Thomas with questions: 706.279.3129

ART/DEV is a group of interdisciplinary experimentalists. Alex Cruikshank and Heath Montgomery founded the group in 2014 after a collaboration for an art project as a way to continue their work and hopefully meet other artists and experimentalists. Andrew Rodgers and Kit Buckley have become collaborators and many projects over the past years have taken shape as different members make proposals and lead projects that the other members work on. In addition, our practice is based on exploratory events that encourage participants to engage and reshape their own experience. We host these events at various locations and call them “PlayShops.” These events present a set of tools, and a prompt, for making art. The members of the group are there as guides but also function as facilitators for participants. This guided play happens around a theme like sound, light, or drawing. Some of the work from those events inspired collaborations within the group for this show.

About Kit Buckley: 
Kit Buckley is a printmaker and digital artist interested in language and exploring the edges and limitations of a medium. He uses computers to incorporate randomness into poetry and narrative, from creating Twitter bots to iterate through every version of a joke, using web code to think about memory and storytelling, and building randomized short stories that are different every time someone reads them. His printmaking focuses on using found textures and emphasizing the inherent qualities of the materials. 

About Alex Cruikshank: 
Alex Cruikshank is a founding member of Art/Dev and new media artist currently focused on interactive public installations. A programmer by trade, he has often sought ways to take his skills past purely utilitarian ends. This has taken the form of digital art using evolutionary algorithms, generative algorithms for plotter drawings, and interactive programming for large-scale light installations. He believes that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", but even more mundane technology can create a little magic with the right application. 

About Heath Montgomery: 
Heath Montgomery is a multimedia artist working predominantly with paint, pattern and objects. As a co-Founder of the group ART/DEV and educator, his work is exploratory in nature, and he often seeks to surprise himself with his creations. Quite literally “seeing what happens when” 20 gallons of paint is squirted at a window over the course of a month or how the eye perceives broken grids and moire patterns behind images or if sound can be shaped and rhythm can be achieved with mechanical sketches. His current series of sculpture and paintings is called “Fools Gold” and it is an investigation of reality / perception as it relates to value. Pyrite or “fools gold” so named because it is not as valuable as real gold, is quite beautiful in its crystalline form and can be geometric in structure. Heath finds this experience valuable and has questioned for a long time how one can quantify an experience especially an artistic endeavor. He finds it absurd that such a comparison between money and experience can be made given that we all have unequal access to means of exchange. His work is an attempt to share something that is meaningful because it is formative not just because it has economic value. His favorite currency is laughter.  

About Andrew Rodgers: 
Andrew Rodgers, a technologist and artist based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, has been a lifelong learner and maker. His creative pursuits began with an obsession with photography at a young age that continues to this day. The last few years, however, have seen him leave the safe confines of capturing reality with his camera as he’s delved into the intersection of technology and art, through both virtual and more tangible mediums. His focus bends toward interrogating the mundane for a deeper understanding of our physical and social environments.  

I’ve always been driven by the question ‘What happens if I do this?’ And, through the influence of my collaborators in Art/Dev, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by the form and behaviour of the media artists use, leading me to share some of these explorations. I still love nothing more than hitting the open road with my camera, but I’ve really enjoyed these more synthesized pieces. My photographic work tends to be driven by my desire to capture the emotion I felt in a time and place, whereas this project has given me more opportunity to construct the direction and outcome.   

Through these collaborations, I have also sought to engage the viewer more explicitly in my work. In Art/Dev’s largest installation to date, we created a 15’ x 45’ LED wall as part of a stage in one of Chattanooga’s downtown parks. Instead of having an A/V team manage the experience, as they would during a typical concert, we invited the audience to control the wall, allowing them to interact with the installation, as well as the artists onstage, creating more active, kinetic ways to participate in the performance. 

Rodgers work continues to explore our complex and evolving relationship with emerging technologies, in a world increasingly and rapidly changed by them.