Exhibit by Ohio-based artist to open at Wright Gallery Oct. 24

Sculptures by Ohio-based artist [Mark Schatz] (http://www.markschatz.com) depicting people's attempts to make sense of an indifferent universe will be featured in “True Believers,” an exhibit opening Oct. 24 in the Texas A&M College of Architecture’s Wright Gallery, located on the second floor of the Langford Architecture Center’s building A, at the university’s College Station campus.

An Art Talk featuring Schatz is scheduled at 3:45 p.m. Oct. 24 as part of the Research Symposium. The exhibit will be on display through Dec. 15.

“I try to evoke something deeply familiar in surprising ways with pieces made of simple construction materials and accumulations of castoff materials,” said Schatz.

Pieces in the exhibit, he said, draw from utopian communities, geological forms, insect behaviors, folded maps, and chance occurrences in an exploration of people’s desire to create order, and even wonder, out of the chaos of a world experiencing its own cycles of generation and decay.

His use of banal materials offers viewers a detached glimpse of people’s behavior and habits, said arthopper.org’s Jimmy Kuehnle in a review of “Universe,” a piece in a 2013 Schatz exhibit in Cleveland.

“The structure, loosely based on a geodesic dome, exists in a state of flux,” said Kuehnle. “It neither folds nor unfolds. The strange form presents contradictions of interior/exterior, of up/down, of high/low.”

Standing atop or below the shifting cardboard tectonics of “Universe,” he continued, viewers can project their lives and aspirations into the piece’s restaurant districts, harbors, ports, or in an isolated cabin on a floating boulder or a graphite-smeared plain.

Schatz’s work was included in the 2011 exhibition “New Image Sculpture,” which inaugurated a new wing of San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum.

His sculpture, installation, drawings, and photography have exhibited widely in solo and group exhibits.

An assistant professor of art at Kent State University, Schatz earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Michigan and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Texas in Austin.

The Wright Gallery’s [exhibition schedule] (http://one.arch.tamu.edu/news/2016/8/24/wright-gallery-display-work-eight-artists/) continues Jan. 24, 2017 with “Anonymous Women,” an exhibit of photographs by artist Patty Carroll that depict women and various objects covered in drapery — Carroll’s commentaries on women and their obsession with the home.