The Exhibit

My series “What we Find'' had its first exhibition in The Rusty Iris Art Bus, which is a rolling, interactive exhibit space. I’ve been on the crew of The Rusty Iris from her beginning, and her theme is participation and collaboration, so it was a match made in heaven.

What We Find is a digital art series, but it was inspired by these beautiful physical artifacts - doll clothes knitted and crocheted by my grandmother, an old wooden Victorian dollhouse, and other lovely objects I found or was given. So I wanted to do an exhibit in which the viewers could see these actual objects in the three dimensional world and then find them inside the images.

This exhibition was my first opportunity to interact with a large audience of people who were seeing the images for the first time, and it was fun to show them that:

• the characters in the images were actually wearing the little doll clothes displayed on the shadow box frames

• the characters were interacting with the soup pot and computer circuit board and watering can that were dangling from the ceiling or displayed on shelf nearby

• and that the scenes were set in rooms of the dollhouse that was displayed at the end of the exhibition space.

People told me that the images were magical all on their own, but when you learned how they were made, where the objects came from, and the story within each image, the pictures took on a whole new depth.

Below each image in the exhibition was a QR code so the viewer could use their phone to jump to a page on my website that described the image, the story that I composed and illustrated through the image, and where the objects within the image came from. In effect, you could keep going farther down the rabbit hole.

I really treasure how an exhibit like this can bring together and integrate our experience of the digital world and the physical world, and enhance our appreciation of both.