Inside of the Outside

This art exhibit is a collection of art that challenges expectations rendered in an array of media—figurative, representational, abstractions, acrylics, digital print, ink, and watercolor. From large canvasses to smaller prints, this exhibit explores our relationship to the outer world of “reality” and universal consciousness to the inner world of individual transformation.

The trio of Drew Beam, Susan Routledge, and Dan Beam are award winning artists whose works reside in art collections, homes, and offices. United by their love of craft and challenging the status quo with the unexpected, this is the second significant showing the three have done together. The first was the successful “We are Animals” show at Gualala Arts Center in 2019. The “Inside of the Outside” exhibit is designed to provoke new insights in how we look at the world with wit, humility, and confronting possibilities. It invites and inspires audience discussions of what art evokes and how might it shape how we look at the future as we peer into the unknown.

If foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds (as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said), then wise contradiction is the fire breathing dragon of larger thinking. The upcoming Inside of the Outside show at the Gualala Arts Center breathes fire into contradictory perspectives. What appears to be, is not necessarily so. What seems representational is expressive, intuitive, and counter-intuitive all at once.

This art unhinges our points of view and shatters our expectations, while it reflects and sometimes makes sense of our time. Like all eras of big transitions, we are having to make meaning in a time of great complexity and expanding chaos. We do this by zooming out to see new patterns, then zoom in to open new possibilities. What we see is—a simultaneous coming and going; big things and little things changing things; unexpected new combinations taking over the harvest of new thinking. In short, we see the Inside of the Outside.