Surreal by Nature Exhibition

Jonah Jacobs is a self-taught Cleveland artist.  Jacobs uses unconventional materials including oatmeal, plaster, sand, yarn, gravel and dryer sheets.  The media is layered on cardboard, formed and burned into organic shapes.  These are then dipped and sprayed with dyes.  His abstract surreal pieces are influenced by the gnarls and microscopic structures found in nature.  The physicality and how form and function are intertwined in nature is the foundation from which his sculptures are designed.

Maria Uhase develops a surreal relationship between animals and plants within her paintings. She forms unexpected visual pairings such as depicting ideas which are simultaneously macabre and peaceful, or light-hearted and serious.  Uhase spent her residency experimenting with the collaboration between human creativity and artificial intelligence by using a neural network program to aid in generating new concepts.  The combination of her hyper realistic paintings with AI generated ideas serves as an ironic layer in her work.  Uhase is a recent graduate of the University of Akron and is based in Wadsworth, OH.