By Jessie Raynor, Akron Area Arts Alliance Director Summit Artspace Gallery opened its 10th anniversary season with Unmonumental Landscapes, an exhibition by emerging artists Debra DeGregorio, Coe Lapossy, Sommer Tolan and Chelsea Blackerby. The young women explore personal understandings of the contemporary world through landscapes created from collections of ideas, objects and images.

The group was brought together by DeGregorio, who recently returned to Akron after earning an MFA in New York. She said the show illustrates a current trend she saw of creating art that appears ephemeral or temporary. “It seems the pendulum of art has swung from expensive, precious materials presented literally on a pedestal to more accessible, less materially impressive media presented lightly,” DeGregorio said.

In creating their paintings, the artists used inexpensive materials such as expanses of white paper, watercolors, straight pins, thread, sequins and gel pens. Colors used are soft, airy pastels – ethereal hues that create an overall feeling in the gallery of floating. The majority of works are simply tacked to the walls, making them appear all the more transitory. DeGregorio and Tolan agreed that by omitting the expense of working on framed canvases, they felt free to experiment and just let things happen.

The anchors in the room are installations by Lapossy and Blackerby. Shown on a large screen TV, Lapossy’s video installation is titled Waking Up and Getting Up Has Never Been Easy. It shows a groping hand searching through an endless tunnel of undulating, cloth sheets. Blackerby’s sculptural installation, titled Excellent Accommodations, uses plastic toy packaging that has been boiled to melt into interesting shapes. Splashed with light green and soft pink paints, her fanciful structures sit atop rusted wire stands. To an imaginative eye the transfigured trash looks like miniature gardens, mountain ranges and enchanted forests. Yet Blackerby’s interest is homelessness and the creative housing solutions of vagabonds, squatters and displaced populations.

The exhibition runs through February 25. Summit Artspace, a growing downtown art center, is a project of the Akron Area Arts Alliance in partnership with Summit County government.