SANTA FE, NM.- Turner Carroll Gallery announces a group exhibition, "Bio-Morphed,” presenting work by Shawn Smith, Rex Ray, and Josh Garber. In this exhibition, the gallery looks at how each artist interprets nature through unconventional materials.

Shawn Smith’s pixelated, wooden creatures and his three-dimensional prints invite us to question the different ways nature can be interpreted. For Smith, nature is expressed through photographs and is therefore interpreted through pixels. Smith starts by zooming in on an image and then creates a drawing on graph paper, which is used as a map to build 3D and digital- looking animals and other elements from nature. In the digital age, we are often removed from the natural world and yet Smith is able to give life and movement to his sculptures. Smith has born impressive accomplishments such as commissions for the W Hotel in Austin, Microsoft in Minneapolis, Wired in London, and most recently, being featured as one of the forty artists in the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery exhibition, "40 Under 40: Craft Futures."

Rex Ray draws inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, textile and graphic design, and Op Art. Ray's compositions layer fluorescent abstract shapes to conjure images of botanicals, biology, and living organisms. Many of his works are titled from biological terms such as Isidia (a vegetative reproductive system) to reflect the organic movement in his work. Ray's abstract shapes grow and move on the canvas giving the illusion that the subject matter is constantly morphing and developing. His work is widely exhibited at museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. As Ray's collection of original works grows smaller his pieces are in high demand from collectors and institutions.

Josh Garber welds many functional components together such as screws, hex nuts and steel bars to create layered organic forms with a mosaic like surface. He states his work is about “eroticizing industry and technology.” Conceptually Garber is informed by complex systems particularly those in neuronal networks and digital topography. He has completed public art commissions in Cincinnati, Phoenix, Chicago and Kenosha, Wisconsin. Josh’s sculpture can be found in a number of public and private collections including that of the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the City of Chicago Collection. Though Smith, Ray, and Garber work in very different mediums their ability to transform elements of the natural world so radically lets the viewer experience their work differently each time.

This show runs concurrent to the McNay Art Museum exhibition "Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting" that includes Rex Ray, Beatriz Milhazes, Jose Alvarez and other greats, and also opened before Shawn Smith's show at the Wichita Falls Museum of Art "Texas Sculpture Inside and Out."