Alteration is different from creation. Or is it? Artists Sarah Isenhart, Jessica Pinsky, and Beth Whalley make certain that  the added lines, textures, and patterns in their work yield results as rich and independent as the original.

Sarah Isenhart, stitching over the ragged topography of old pictorial maps, uses embroidery as both a decorative and  sculptural tool. Her meticulous needlework pays homage to laborious women’s craft techniques while inspiring a fresh  outlook on its application as a contemporary mechanism, transforming the paper from image to object. A painter in her  past, Jessica Pinsky takes scissors to her old canvases, cutting and reassembling them piece-by-piece with thread.

Combining her more academic pursuit of painting with her private passion for sewing, each piece represents a painterly  mark or brushstroke. Pinsky’s penchant for work on the loom also is not lost in other works, a grid structure of 1s and 0s  recurring in subtle but often surprising ways.

Beth Whalley is interested in Cleveland’s shifting landscape, and its effect on the surrounding eco-system. Focusing on  underloved urban wildlife (specifically the opossum and turkey vulture) as her muses, Whalley combines re-purposed  old wood with mixed media to paint decorative portraits of the animals and their crumbling surroundings. Her modified   use of found materials combined with her subject matter serve to alter our awareness.