Stop. Look. Listen.

“I’m making everyone work harder this time,” says Tim Nies, whose current show at the Mulberry Art Studios, “Dichotomy,” combines elements of installation, collage, found art and painting.
Dichotomy binds us together and tears us apart, Nies says in his artist’s statement: “Dichotomy describes plant and cell growth, astronomical phenomenon and the mutually exclusive contradiction of thought and action.”
Paintings of organic or abstract forms incorporate discarded electrical equipment, sometimes within repurposed frames, and are linked by a diagram on one wall. Other paintings incorporate unconventional techniques such as a controlled rust staining that looks accidental, but is the result of deliberate spraying of iron objects with a mixture of water and vinegar and laying them on canvas — in one large work, this takes on something like a yin-yang form. On the other hand, a framed canvas is hung backward to display a stain that is entirely accidental but nevertheless evocative of a landscape.
In another work, a window frame contains old math flash cards, some mounted upside down so that the sums are still readable, yet wrong. Yet another flash card rests within a cabinet of found objects, containing the dire sum “9+5=Death.”
This is his second show at the Mulberry Art Studios in about a year, and he seems to have moved away from the rigorous investigations of “Worlds Within Worlds” into a slightly looser mode. With its scrawled words and educational artifacts, its rust marks and damaged wires, the works allude to primary-school education rather than quantum mechanics, the actual results of the process of time, rather than theories about time.
Incidentally, the 8-foot-by-8-foot “Worlds Within Worlds,” the title work of the earlier exhibition, is on display at the Goggleworks Center for the Arts in Reading as part of the “Curator’s Choice” show that runs through April 5.