Anything Goes: Contemporary Art and Materials

What do roofing shingles, doors, cardboard, glitter, newspapers, bicycle wheels, buttons, and denim have in common? They are all used as materials in the artworks included in Telfair’s permanent collection exhibition Anything Goes: Contemporary Art and Materials. This exhibition considers artists across divides of geography, privilege, formal education, and access who have continued to explore materiality and its potential for aesthetic invention and the construction of meaning. Some are looking to art historical examples set by the cubist collages of Pablo Picasso; others gained inspiration from the leveling of mediums employed in the hybrid combines of Robert Rauschenberg. Many artists, unaware or uninterested in canonical precedents, scavenged materials and objects out of necessity, for symbolic or expressive purposes or simply by seeing the potential in things cast off by others. All of these artists and artworks remind viewers of the value and artistic potential of the objects that surround us in our everyday lives.