Experience the image of the found object popularized by the San Francisco Bay Area Funk Movement as it has been reinterpreted and developed in a modern context by the talented and multifaceted artist Finley Fryer. On Wednesday January the fourth, the Natsoulas Center for the Arts will dedicate all three floors of the gallery to “Unique Creations of Finley Fryer.” The exhibit will feature a diverse body of work ranging in medium from Fryer’s expressive color collage paintings to his organic consumer waste sculptures and will span from earlier in his career to his more recent developments.

Symbolically towering in front of the gallery itself, at nearly eighteen feet in height and approximately 2,300 lbs in weight, is the daunting Stan the Submerging Man, an internationally acclaimed sculpture of Fryer’s constructed and installed at the 1999 Burning man Festival in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada. A collaborative piece constructed with the help of Fryer’s wife, artist Jayne Bruck, and Kirk LeClaire—whose wildly eclectic musical show called Stan’s Room provided the inspiration for the statue of the titular character—Stan aka the Diver serves as a brilliant introduction to the exhibition as well as an emblematic induction into the creative mind of the artist himself. Stan’s internal structure is fabricated of various dimensions of steel and can be disassembled into fourteen individual pieces. Using 600 tubes of clear latex acrylic adhesive caulk, Fryer attached an exterior ‘skin’ of donated plastic and colored vinyl’s collected by LeClaire that are illuminated at night by 1000 LED lights, illuminating the reclaimed consumer detritus in the spirit of a new realism.