In Gravity & Wonder, the new exhibition of paintings by Bill Mead, we're invited into a world that feels at once familiar and impossibly altered... a place where scale slips, logic bends, and the ordinary becomes quietly miraculous. His paintings do not shout their surrealism; instead, they ease us into it, allowing the uncanny to emerge from within the recognizable rhythms of landscape and daily life.

This exhibition brings together five artists whose works are in the AF collection. Their practices expand and redefine the possibilities of collage today. Though distinct in approach, each engages with the medium as both method and metaphor, layering visual elements to explore identity, memory, culture, and perception.

Both quotes remind me of Bisbee, a little cultural oasis in the near endless deserts of Arizona. The town, unique in myriad ways, gives off the feeling of a place in which anything is possible, a place abandoned when the copper ran out, and later rediscovered by runaways looking for a fresh start, hippies looking for a new way of life, and artists drawn to the town’s beauty and its affordable rent.