December Galleries Opening Reception: Small Works: Off the Walls | Nicole Foran | LAEA Educators

On Display: December 4 – 23 Opening Reception: December 4th, 5:00-7:00 p.m. Small Works Off the Walls Coinciding with the onset of the holiday shopping season, this gallery show features artworks of all media priced at $250 or less. All sales are “cash and carry,” meaning purchasers will get to take the piece with them when they buy it, instead of waiting until the end of the exhibit. _____________________________________________________________ Foulds Theater Gallery Selected Works by Nicole Foran “Geography of Substitution employs mixed media to construct a geography of substitution—places that stand in for other places I have lived, remembered, or imagined. I represent Iowa as Indiana, Florida as South Texas, Oklahoma as Saskatchewan. These are not attempts at deception so much as deliberate misalignments, where visual similarities—flat horizons, qualities of light, roadside architectures, vegetation—become convincing enough to hold the weight of memory, but never fully resolve into truth. What interests me is the instability between recognition and dissonance. A landscape might feel familiar, yet small details resist certainty. These substitutions reveal how memory edits and compresses place, often prioritizing emotional coherence over factual accuracy. The work leans into a kind of false nostalgia—a longing for places that are already partial, displaced, or misremembered. The project also responds to contemporary conditions of representation shaped by artificial intelligence and synthetic imagery. As AI-generated images increasingly blur distinctions between documentation and fabrication, these works examine how easily familiarity and authenticity can be constructed. Rather than hiding these slippages, I foreground them, using substitution to question the reliability of both memory and photographic evidence. Drawing extends this process by slowing it down, allowing inaccuracies and distortions to accumulate through translation and repetition. Ultimately, the work is less about accurately depicting place and more about the unstable space between lived experience, memory, and mediated images.” _____________________________________________________________ Member Gallery LAEA Educators Show The Lee Art Education Association (LAEA) is an organization of art teachers from both public and private institutions throughout Lee County. This group of talented artists and educators are excited to share some of their personal and professional artwork with the community. A wide variety of media and subject matters will be represented in this show, but the common theme will be the love and passion of educating and inspiring our local youth to take pride in the arts. _____________________________________________________________ Featured Artwork: “Promenade” by Nicole Foran