Current Art Exhibitions
View, explore, experience, wonder, imagine, dream.
September 14–October 4
The Way I See It…
Exhibition Overview:
Ordinary scenes become imagined realities shaped by observation, memory, and emotion.
Alan M. Richards’ The Way I See It presents nearly 50 photomontages that begin with photographs encountered in daily life. Each source image creates a lasting emotional response— sometimes because of a face, a gesture, a relationship, a place, or the quality of light. Through photomontage, those initial impressions are reconstructed into new visual narratives.
The works move through diners, hotel rooms, city windows, neighborhood streets, parks, and private interiors. Although the settings are familiar, the scenes do not document events exactly as they occurred. They are imagined realities in which memory and observation combine, leaving room for the viewer to wonder what happened before the pictured moment and what may happen next.
Together, the works invite a slower form of looking. They suggest that the ordinary is never truly ordinary when we approach it with curiosity, empathy, and imagination.
Artist’s Statement
My pictures begin with ordinary moments. I am drawn to photographs that stay with me long after I first see them—images whose emotional effect cannot be explained by their subject alone. I use those photographs as points of departure rather than as records to be copied.
Working through photomontage, I combine people, places, architecture, light, and fragments from different sources. The process allows memory to alter what was originally seen. Details disappear, unrelated experiences come together, and a new scene gradually takes form. What matters most is not literal accuracy, but emotional truth.
The people in these works are not meant to have fixed stories. I prefer to leave space for viewers to bring their own memories and experiences to the images. My hope is that the work encourages us to pause, look again, and recognize the extraordinary emotional life already present within everyday experience.
–Alan M. Richards