Emphasis on Digital

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The intricacy of digitally printing twenty Shrinky Dinks with fragments of image, and the equally demanding efforts of Michelle Hegyi, another artist represented in the show, put to rest the stereotype of digital art as an easy out. Hegyi, who's been experimenting with computer-generated art since 1984, says she spends more time on her digital works than on paintings, because with the former there's "the possibility of making it perfect." Her large, tranquil prints, from the series The Shape of the Sky, show cool blues overlaid with crayony textures and paintlike strokes in yellow and brown. Some of her works include encaustic, an overlay of beeswax that imparts a gentle, warm opacity to the images.

Lynda Cole also uses encaustic in a vertical series of three creamy, foggy works (above) that depict a wiry nest containing mysterious glyphs, a series of blurry smoke ring-halos, and a swirling sphere of geometric lines.

In contrast to these dreamlike works, local bookbinder Barbara Brown's mathematical paper sculptures transform digitally printed paper into intricate, origami-like books. Her work Disambiguation: Notification of Possible Occurrence resembles a silvery, pointy accordion imprinted with images of nails borrowed from a friend's sketch.