NEW SHOW & NEW SPACE AT GALLERY 100

The reception Friday for Pamela Boyd's "Four Seasons of Nature" will be an opening for Gallery 100 as well.

The gallery, located in cramped quarters on Mount Auburn Road for the past two years, has just moved into a new space at 6 N. Sprigg St.

The quick and somewhat unexpected transition was a happy conjunction of being "squeezed out" of the old space by landlords looking for long-term tenants and the offer of a new space designed for a gallery, said Beverly Strohmeyer, executive director of the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri.

The new gallery offers about three times as much space as the old one had and formerly housed an art gallery called Studio 6. The building is owned by A.E. Birk, whose wood carvings have been displayed at Gallery 100 in the past.

The first show will be Boyd's unusual work with vinyl collage. She has labored with vinyl adhesive film for 15 years in her job at Auto Trim Design. She transferred her artistic abilities with a brush to working with a knife, and says, "It's a big adjustment from painting to cutting."

Boyd started out envisioning pictures in pen and ink. "I do a lot of the same thing and transpose the colors," she said.

As the show's title suggests, wildlife populates most of her art.

Each work is constructed of hundreds and sometimes thousands of pieces, each hand cut and placed. Each scale on a fish, for instance, will be a separate piece.

She began exhibiting her work only in 1993, and says a turning point in her career was receiving her first award of excellence at the Mosaics Fine Arts Festival in St. Charles in 1994.

Part of Boyd's challenge is that her art form is still a bit of a curiosity to many people because it is so rarely seen.

"I'm not unfamiliar with anybody who has pursued it like I have," she said. "But people seem to like it because it's really vibrant and has a lot of true colors."

The reception will be held from 5-7 p.m. Friday. The exhibit continues through March 29.