“The Art of Materials” & “Tools as Art” Exhibits
Petaluma Arts Center
230 Lakeville St.
Thursday May 9, 2024 to Saturday June 22, 2024
Price Varies
The Art of Materials (Main gallery)
This exhibition brings together artists who are working with paper, fabric, industrial felt, metal, steel, cement, clay, plastic, cork, and wood. Some of the artists combine disparate materials that embody imaginative content or reuse materials that create symbolic forms. Others opt for a single material that gives full voice to their artistic expression. The Art of Materials exhibition asks two major questions: why an artist chooses the material used in their artwork and how the selection of that material reflects what the artist wants to say.
Tools As Art (North gallery)
Tools. We take them for granted. The machine-shop smell of the hardware store with its rows of odd-shaped hammers and axe heads as elegant as Cycladic sculptures. Or the raw energy of the construction site, massive excavators chewing up the earth like prehistoric creatures, carpenters throwing up walls, electricians unspooling wire. We may use our minds to translate and understand the world at large. But it is through our hands we experience its physicality and through our tools we often make sense of it.