tantalizing tendrils. This piece is now hanging in the Janet Carson Gallery at the Eau Claire Regional Arts Center – part of the Free Fall exhibition.

At a young age we learn that falling is sudden, uncontrollable, and results in bruises and scraped knees. As we age, the negative connotations stick with us. The Free Fall: Inverted Bodies and Suspended Images exhibition at the Eau Claire Regional Art Center’s Janet Carson Gallery encourages viewers to see falling as part of a larger transformative process, with the potential for growth and creation that comes out of instability. Curated by Meghan Mehlos, a Spanish lecturer at UW-Eau Claire and a member of the Eau Claire Regional Arts Center Visual Arts Committee, the exhibition is one of the gallery’s semi-annual multimedia themed shows. Sculpture, video installation, photography, encaustic collage, and paint are the mediums that will be displayed.

The show consists entirely of artwork done by local artists, including Wanrudee Burnakorn, Megan Byron, Lori Chilefone, Stephen Katrosits, Jyl Kelley, Jason Lanka, Terry Meyer, Philip Schladweiler, Becky Streeter, and Bruce Warren. Conversations that Mehlos had with the artists and viewing their artwork helped shape the concept of free fall into more specific interpretations or subthemes that correspond with the works in the exhibition, strengthening the quality of the show. The works range from Burnakorn’s photographs, which have an intriguing narrative quality, to Megan Byron’s Environment of Organisms, a translucent piece made of hot glue that appears to fall from above the viewers like a lacy waterfall. Although all of the pieces exhibited are static, resting motionless on their supports, many of them evoke visual or conceptual movement.

Mehlos’s thoughts on free fall began a number of years ago but developed into a theme for the exhibition in just under a year while she determined which direction she wanted the show to go in. She was inspired by the poem “El colgado” (“The Hanging Man”) by Veronica Volkow, a contemporary Mexican author. The poem is about a man who is hanging and about to die, but in the poem and corresponding print, the dying man is represented in a very free and liberating way. “When I read the poem, I realized that changing or inverting a point of view is enough to completely change the meaning of something, so a body that was falling could just as easily be seen as a body that was flying, and that was the idea that inspired the theme for this show,” Mehlos says. She believes that all of the pieces in the show have potential to be seen from different perspectives and have different meanings for each individual who views the artwork. A change of perspective may transform loss into liberation – for example, fall becomes flight and hanging becomes floating. Many of the submissions ended up working well with the other artworks, reinforcing the idea of free fall as having multiple connotations.   

The opening reception for the exhibition Free Fall: Inverted Bodies and Suspended Images is Thursday, March 28 from 6-7:30pm at the Janet Carson Gallery at the Eau Claire Regional Arts Center, 316 Eau Claire St. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9am to 4:30pm, and Thursday from 9am to 7pm. For more information, visit eauclairearts.com.