An Exhibition featuring Works of Art from The Art Center's Artability/Art for All Program

Escape showcases the work of students in The Art Center’s Artability/Art for All outreach program. Initially comprised of one class every other month, Artability has grown to four to seven classes each week and serves over 160 students with mental and physical challenges. The student artists in this exhibition are members of local agencies Strive, Ariel, the Grand Junction Regional Center, and Pathco.

Escape welcomes the viewer to enter an ethereal environment where artistic works emulate the natural world.

The premise behind Escape was to take everyday and environmental objects and either use them as tools or assemble them together to create artistic works. Some items used include cotton balls, wooden skewers, organic matter, push pins, rubber bands, toothpicks, water, factory discards, paper clips, tissues, broken glass, and tree branches, sticks, and stumps. These simple objects take on new meaning as they are transformed into artworks and environments that evoke systems inherent to the natural world.

As you view the exhibition, we encourage you to look past the components of each piece in order to see what you see, rather than what you think you see. You’ve read by now that the artists in this show deal with mental and physical challenges, and maybe you have some assumptions about what that means. We challenge you, the active viewer, to (re)evaluate those assumptions. Whether an art object or a person, there is always more than meets the eye.