MCC to host assemblage exhibit by artist Mimi Peterson

McHenry County College is featuring an exhibit of "Perception is Real" by Mimi Peterson of McHenry through June 30 in artspace 144, in the Art Department Hallway in the college's Building A, 8900 Route 14 in Crystal Lake.

Her installation features three distinct assemblages based on the premise that art and experience inform and shape one another by changing cognitive space and appealing to our senses.

"The +\- Positive/Negative Perceptions" piece intends to provoke the imagination by the symbiotic merging of common plastic materials and optical maneuvering as in the sequencing of space and sense of light, air, color. The junk materials used in the piece evoke thoughts about our consumer culture and a primal sense of play. "Play is about fun, but also connects us with the surrounding environment," she said.

Peterson's "Tick-Tack-Tow Game" piece deploys construction materials, including soil, sand, water, glass. "Their seemingly ambiguous juxtaposition is ethereal in nature," she said. "It expresses impermanence. The work is not static, and like climate change, it means to express cause and effect, time and conscious."

In the piece "Shadow Play: Intuition, Instinct, Impulse, Reflex," hundreds of mostly invisible monofilament "taggers" span the 10-foot wide canvas surface. Each filament "tagger" casts shadows, inviting the viewer to look through the textured maze to the white space, to follow the dark drawings and engage with the installation. The work aims to be a collaboration between 2-D and 3-D art, an assemblage made of strings, mimicked by graphic marks and lines, along with prisms. "They become arrested images in space, dependent on fugitive light and motion to reveal the process and meaning," Peterson said.

"The hybrid mixing and matching of these seemingly unrelated elements intends to challenge conventional typologies and perceptions of how things should look and feel," Peterson said.

Peterson earned her master of arts in art education degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before becoming an artist, she worked as a textile and color consultant and earlier, as a teacher and marketer. She has exhibited throughout the Midwest and most recently, at the Chicago Cultural Center.

For more information about MCC art galleries, call Sandra Lang at (815) 455-8785 or email slang@mchenry.edu.