BY DAVID NOSTRAND

Copy Editor

A new art exhibit is open and available for free to the public in the Madelon Powers Gallery.

The current exhibit features the clay sculptures and drawings of David Stabley, a local artist who currently teaches sculpture and ceramics at Pennsylvania College of Technology.

Stabley’s art aims to capture a dreamlike quality, and he does this through the combination of human features, environmental imagery — such as blades of grass climbing man’s long neck — and abstract, angular drawings.

An artist’s ambitions don’t always reflect the final product, but Stabley’s work achieves an ethereal, dreamy quality reflected in both his drawings and sculptures.

The drawings play with perspective in showing human faces looking at abstract scenes, and it’s here where his Picasso influences are most prominent.

“When we …interact with our immediate physical world, we are doing so at many different levels,” said Stabley.

This philosophy is well represented in his drawings. The fractured structure of his work seems to depict different layers of the multiverse overlapping.

All of his work is created with attention to color arrangement, and many feature a variety of bright colors bouncing off each other, again giving the impression that his paintings depict worlds that are interconnected, beautiful, and even a little messy.

Stabley’s sculptures are equally obtuse. Many combine the mechanical and the organic, such as a piece where are a human heart rests atop a farm shack, which itself sits upon a sleeping man’s head.

What this piece means in a literal sense is less important than the mood it creates. It is an “overlapping of images, shapes, color and textures portray these worlds within worlds,” said Stabley.

Many of his pieces do indeed feel layered, often times occupying the space between reality and fantasy, like the world of Oz got tangled with rural Kansas and spit out in an art gallery in East Stroudsburg.

The exhibit will run until March 14. The gallery hours are Monday, Tuesday, and Friday 11 AM to 4 PM and Wednesday and Thursday 11 AM to 7 PM.

Email David at:

dnostrand@live.esu.edu