But the land moves in

“Industrial Park” (oil on canvas), by Charles Goolsby in his show “Range of Motion,’’ at the Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College, Providence, Feb. 22-March 22.

The gallery says:

“Charles Goolsby’s oil paintings of landscapes reside between complete stillness and sweeping gestural chaos, specific place and fiction, rendered realism and ambiguous abstraction, and physical object and illusionary pictorial space. Within these dichotomies, his images result in visual expressions of beauty, familiarity, liminal transitions, and anxiety. His landscape imagery builds on 19th Century American landscape painting traditions and implies a sense of contemporary issues including climate change, landscape transformation as a commodity to be consumed, and an effort to raise awareness that we, as humans, are often finding ourselves in isolation interacting with our locations.’’

‘Vehicle for self-knowledge’

“I think you are the bravest person I know, in that I can't predict” (hand-cut paper), by Antonius Bui, in the show “New Explorations in Mediascapes and Memoryscapes, at the Bannister Gallery, Providence, through April 21.

— Photo courtesy Bannister Gallery

The gallery explains that the show presents the work of Karen Azoulay, Antonius Bui, Natalia Nakazawa, Sagarika Sundaram, Yelaine Rodriguez and Ayoung Yu as they "interpret their personal histories" through a wide array of mixed media. Through this diverse collection of works, these artists explore "human perception and connection as a vehicle for self-knowledge."

The art of avoidance

“Conspiracy Shape” (graphite and colored pencil on paper), by John O’Connor, in his show "John O’Connor: Self Avoiding Walks’’, at Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College, Providence, through Dec. 10.

The gallery explains that Mr. O’Connor “combines text, sketch, and musings reminiscent of field journals with influence and undertones that show what ultimately cannot be avoided. His drawings evolve incrementally over long spans of time, as O’Connor absorbs, plots, and transforms information into vibrantly colored pieces that straddle an aesthetic line between diagrams and fully articulated structures, forms, and spaces.”

Based in the New York City area, he’s originally from Westfield, Mass.

Downtown Westfield and Park Square

Not the center of the universe?!

Image from the show “Copernicus,’’ in the Bannister Gallery, at Rhode Island College, Providence, through Oct. 25. Curated by Jenny Chen Jiaying and Frank Wang Yefeng, this exhibition was inspired by Nicolaus Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, published in 1543 and the first Western book to challenge geocentrism — the belief that the Earth is the center of the universe. By this, he also suggested by implication that humanity is not the center of the universe, either.

“‘Copernicus,’ the gallery says, “provides a new perspective on the world and humanity, dissecting technology, geopolitics, nature and society to question anthropocentrism, centralization and other ideas common among humans. ‘Copernicus’ aims to challenge viewers and have them think about the modern equivalents of the same sort of questions that Copernicus asked hundreds of years ago.’’