This sculpture by Kenzie Wells was created for an exhibit titled Gradience. A plush roadway bends in an impossible manner, creating a loop. Yellow lines designate parking spaces on this surrealist road. Small "Wrecking balls" on chains and litter are scattered about.

Artist Statement:

Gradience imagines a metropolitan scene, contorted within a wormhole of warped space and time. Each structure within the exhibition gives form to a physical gray area of jumbled materials and objects from everyday settings. Commonplace expectations are defied, leaving viewers traversing through a new dimension. Domestic and industrial objects have become petrified into rocky, stony slabs, leaving their functional qualities amiss in a condensed and crystallized state.

Through this distorted, dimensional lens, the exhibition probes the constraints of our perception and questions our need to categorize and form binaries. We live in a society structured around the idea that opposites cannot coexist. As a queer, non-binary person, I exist in the gray areas between and outside of this structure.

Gradience is an urban space subsumed by properties of various planetary anomalies where opposites coexist. The icy, blazing surface of the exoplanet Gliese 436 b seeps into structural material layers of the built environment, forming a gradient between human-design and naturally occurring processes. The materials, textures, and colors present in each conglomeration simultaneously call to mind lava and ice, hard and soft, or liquid and solid, blurring the line between these supposed opposites to further break down societal categorization.

Courtesy of Channel to Channel