The Time Travelers’ Garden is a group exhibition of the artwork of Dustin Grella, Christopher Hoot, Liz Maugans and Mark Soppeland. Presented at the Beachwood Community Center Art Space, the show will run from June 30 through August 28, with an artists reception from 1 to 2:30 pm on Sunday, July 10.

Artists have had a complex relationship with time and place since the earliest known cave paintings. Then as now, artists engaged memories of the past while being focused in the moment to create images that would record their existence for the future.

The four artists in this exhibition are exploring diverse artistic practices that involve highly personal approaches to the interconnected, broadly-defined ideas of time, travel and the garden.

Dustin Grella is an assistant professor of animation at Queen’s College in New York. His stop motion animated projects have been exhibited at many international venues, including showings at the Cannes Film Festival and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. His ongoing project is the Animation Hotline in which he has left an open invitation to the world to leave recorded messages of personal short stories on his voicemail. These become the soundtracks to his remarkable visual interpretations.

Christopher Hoot is a professor of art at the University of Akron’s Myers School of Art where he teaches foundations and graphic design courses. His current research moves between the Old World techniques of paper marbling and other forms of painting and digital photography, which merge with high tech computer-generated and -manipulated images, and video art. These media and techniques are combined and intertwined to investigate and form abstract landscapes, soundscapes, and cityscapes which resonate on various levels.

Liz Maugans is the founding director of Zygote Press and current director of YARDS Projects and curator of the Dalad Collection at Worthington Yards in Cleveland’s Warehouse District. Her multi-layered paintings and collage-based prints are created, in part, from images reconsidered and repurposed from her past to make contemporary commentary on politics, social issues, and her personal life as an artist, wife and mother.

Mark Soppeland is a distinguished professor of art emeritus at the Myers School of Art at the University of Akron. His new paintings are part of the Organic Algorithms/Dangerous Abstractions Series. These works address wide-ranging concerns of our current social/technological phenomena, including issues related to our new, first time in history, Big Data Moment with its ability to instantaneously retrieve the past, monitor and manipulate the present, and potentially predict the future.

The Time Travelers’ Garden is organized by Susan Gordon Merdler, senior adult manager of Beachwood Community Services, and Beachwood resident Mark Soppeland. The gallery is free and open to the public from 8 am to 4 pm on Monday through Friday.

THE TIME TRAVELERS’ GARDEN | JUNE 30–AUGUST 28
OPENING RECEPTION 1-2:30PM SUNDAY, JULY 10

BEACHWOOD COMMUNITY CENTER ART GALLERY
25325 Fairmount Boulevard
Beachwood, Ohio 44122
216.292.1970