Opening of Summer Exhibition

Point of View at Salina Art Center

Salina Art Center invites everyone to enjoy an opening night reception on Thursday, May 25 from 5-7pm at 242 S. Santa Fe. Several artists will be in attendance with brief comments starting at 6 pm.

Point of View, curated by Christine Olejniczak (Lawrence, KS), features four artists; Alicia Kelly (Lawrence, KS), Becky Hyberger (Salina, KS), Candace Hicks (Nacogdoches, TX), and Mandy Bernard (Homer, AK). The exhibition is available from May 25 through September 3, 2023. The Art Center gallery hours are Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday from 11 am-5 pm, Friday from 11 am-7 pm, and Sunday from 11 am-3 pm. Admission is FREE.

Point of View takes a cinematic look at dream fragments, crop circles, surveillance, and a world of light and shadows. Alicia Kelly presents an environment that welcomes visitors with a first-person experience, a reminder to call home, an invitation to pass through a patterned canopy of light - to feel small - to experience being out of scale with your surroundings. Wearable pieces, done in collaboration with Mandy Bernard, wrap the body inside the sculpture. The relationship with sculpture is personal. In another gallery, Candace Hicks suggests a story revealing that a fluffy, cumulus cloud is the main character of an inept plot of cover-up and violence. You are part of the surveillance team. You are outside of the action but an essential witness to the crime. Other narratives throughout the installation are scenes and objects based on information from unreliable sources that may or may not be true. Is that actual video of a crop circle being formed? It makes you wonder. Who is providing the information? How do you know what is true and what are the stories we tell ourselves? Becky Hyberger shares a perspective gained through years of journaling her dreams. She is showcasing a piece that imagines that pillows can be storage containers for dreams. The dream fragments are created in miniature, at architectural scale so that we can look down on them. A transformation has occurred, and we are giants in the room. We are large and the dreams are small, fragile, easy to examine. We can talk about it now. We’ve changed our point of view and that story seems like a long time ago.

Point of View is funded by the Salina Art Center Endowment Foundation. Grant support is provided by the Horizons Grants Program of the Salina Arts and Humanities Foundation (funding is provided by Horizons, a private donor group).