Friday August 18 – October 15, 2023

In celebration of surrealism, Heights Arts partners with No Exit New Music Ensemble to bring together groups of artists to create collaborative works that embrace chance and the inexplicable. Inspired by games and thought exercises the Surrealists used to access the unconscious mind and move beyond the ‘rational’ world, the featured art was created using techniques favored by the Surrealists.

In order to facilitate this project, the Heights Arts Exhibition Community Team created four “teams” of artists, each of which include a random grouping of three visual artists. Heights Arts then provided copies of A Book of Surrealist Games to each team, instructing them to work with 12 words or phrases provided by the Heights Writes Community Team. (These words could be anything from lines of original poetry to historical quotes, phrases lifted from the news, or conglomerations thereof.) Finally, the Heights Arts Music Community Team selected 12 pieces of music from Northeast Ohio, again randomly assigning them to the artists for their use.

The resulting twelve works of art, each the product of three visual artists, three sets of words, and three pieces of music, will be on view at Heights Arts in the Collaborage exhibition, from August 18 to October 15, 2023. Adding another layer of chance, every work in the show will be auctioned off — allowing guests to fully embrace the strangeness.