Jeff Hesser’s new Gallery exhibition is the exhibit with everything

It’s complicated. Jeff Hesser’s exhibit has everything: large-scale drawings, clay, wax, and bronze sculptures, and a brand new digital interactive piece titled “Newborn.”

Pennsylvania College of Art & Design’s interim Gallery Director Quinn McNichol is leading a team of PCA&D students to arrange Memory: Digital and Traditional Work by Jeff Hesser, which opens First Friday, February 5.

This exhibition will engage gallery visitors in a rich experience of artworks, which possess a strong and powerful physical presence, evoking a range of emotions and responses; while showcasing new digital art-making media, unlike anything seen before in Lancaster.

Hesser, of Providence, Rhode Island, explores themes of memory, presence and absence, clarity and confusion. He is an artist whose practice is rooted in drawing and observation of the human form. His work expands into relatively new art-making media such as 3D printing and interactive digital experiences. His process, a combination of observation, invention, repetition, construction, and deconstruction, may be seen as a metaphor of the human desire to recreate a memory. Hesser hopes to share an experience with his audience; he often states that his goal is to “transform passive viewers into active participants.”

The exhibit will be held February 5 through March 13, 2016.

• Artist talk for students and members of the public will be held at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, February 5.
• Reception for the artist will be held 6 – 8 p.m., February 5 during First Friday Lancaster.