Park Towne Place

Odds in the Absurd examines the irreverent works by six InLiquid Members in connection with the Dada and post-Dada surrealism movement, in which absurdity, chance, and a sense of mystery do not pose the question ‘Is this art?’, but instead affirm it.

Dada began in the early 20th century as a response to events of World War I. Most notoriously, Marcel Duchamp's readymades emerged from that movement, challenging notions of art that are still argued today. Odds in the Absurd examines Dada from a contemporary lens. In some cases, directly inspired by the father of conceptual art, the group of six artists employs collaboration, repetition, ready-mades, curiosity, and a rejection of the ideas of taste.  

Featuring Lisa Baird and Keillianne McCarthy's surrealist paintings, Jake Jacob and Alex Bard’s timeless installation works, Howard Brunner’s urban photography, and williamCromar, distribution 3D printable models of iconic pieces such as 1913’s Bicycle Wheel by Duchamp.  Odds in the Absurd is characterized by its playfulness, experimentation, and commentary. 

Lisa Baird

b. Wilmington, DE

Lisa Baird received a BA from Bowdoin College, a BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She also studied at University College, University of Oxford, England, and was an Artist-in-Residence at the Vermont Studio Center. Lisa has taught at the University of the Arts, Drexel University, Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, and Delaware College of Art and Design. She has received numerous awards for both her artwork and teaching, including a Leeway Foundation Award for Sculpture and the MBNA Award for Best Practices in Education. Her work is held in private collections throughout the United States, Europe, and Australia. Lisa is the Executive Director of The Hook Experiment, a nonprofit contemporary art space in Oxford, Pennsylvania.

Working across painting, sculpture, video, and installation throughout her career, Lisa has consistently explored the intersections of memory, identity, domesticity, and time. Her paintings examine how photography, technology, and family histories shape memory, identity, and our experience of time. Layering domestic interiors, personal imagery, and cultural references, her work creates psychological spaces where multiple moments in time coexist. Through painting, Lisa investigates memory not as a fixed record of the past, but as a living process, fluid, subjective, and continually reshaped by experience.

Statement

“Throughout my practice, working across multiple media, I have explored the intersections of memory, identity, domesticity, and time. I have returned to painting because it gives memory space to move. Painting allows memories to shift, overlap, and unfold rather than simply be illustrated. Increasingly, I've come to realize that what I'm really painting is time.

Watching my children become adults and begin families of their own has made me think about the strange way memory works—how a room, a chair, a photograph, a screen, or a wedding dress can suddenly pull us backward. Ordinary objects become emotional landmarks, carrying the weight of lives lived while quietly connecting personal memory to our shared cultural inheritance.

Weddings recur throughout these paintings because they are among the most photographed moments of our lives. They mark a threshold between past and future, filled with hope, expectation, family history, and inherited rituals. Weddings also reveal the paradox of memory: the image remains fixed while everything around it continues to change. Relationships evolve, families grow, loss accumulates, and the meaning of the moment shifts with time.

Photography and digital technology have transformed the way we remember. We no longer remember only through lived experience, but through photographs, television, home movies, family archives, and the endless stream of digital images that now shape our emotional lives. These technologies do more than preserve memory—they construct it, influencing what we revisit, what we forget, and how we understand our own histories. Time itself becomes a form of cultural inheritance, carried forward through images, rituals, objects, and stories.

As our lives become increasingly mediated through screens, memory risks flattening into endlessly reproducible images, while identity is shaped by a shared visual language rather than lived experience. Painting offers another way of remembering. It slows us down. It resists certainty and refuses the fixed image, allowing memories to drift, overlap, fracture, and evolve. Different generations, places, and moments can occupy the same space, where emotional truth becomes more important than chronology or factual accuracy.

For me, painting is a way of recovering what cannot be captured by the camera or the screen. If technology records experience, painting reveals how experience is remembered. It preserves the complexity of perception and the individuality of memory in a culture that increasingly asks us to see and remember.  These paintings are not attempts to reconstruct the past. They explore the fragile space where memory, domestic life, technology, and the passage of time continually reshape one another. Ultimately, they are paintings about time, not as chronology, but as something remembered, inherited, and continually remade."

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Alex Bard

b. Philadelphia, PA

Alex Bard is a multidisciplinary artist, born and based in Philadelphia, PA, best defined as a magical realist. Bard’s imagined characters express and explore their world through costume, sculpture, photography, performance and film.

Bard holds a BFA from University of the Arts and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. He attended high school in Maine, where his first exhibition was at the Hallowell Gallery.  Alex Bard has since exhibited in NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Barcelona, and the  WaterMill Center. His work is in private collections in the U.S. and Europe, the Pennsylvania National Guard Museum, and the Episcopal Cathedral.  

Statement

Alex Bard is a U.S.-based interdisciplinary artist, whose works span a range of mediums, including sculpture, costume, performance art, photo and video.

Anthropology, mythology, comparative religions and psychology inspire his work. He strives to explore universally understood symbols that transcend cultural, historical and political boundaries, and speak to audiences from all backgrounds. Each piece presents archetypal images that reflect different facets and levels of human consciousness, encouraging self-awareness and reflection.

The goal for his art is to help people know and understand themselves better. Alex Bard aims to remind viewers of their own innate strengths and qualities, empowering the deeper meaning of their own lives.

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Howard Brunner

b. Allentown, PA

Howard Brunner is an artist and photographer based in Philadelphia. He holds an MFA in Photography from the University of Delaware and a BFA in Graphic Design from the Philadelphia College of Art. He served as a Professor of Photography at the Art Institute of Philadelphia for 31 years. He was also a faculty member in Temple University's Architecture Program, where he taught 2-D Design, Drawing, and a photography course titled *Photography and Visual Literacy*.

For more than 37 years, Brunner has exhibited his photographs regionally, nationally, and internationally. His work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Art and History in Fribourg, Switzerland; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museu da Praia in Maragogi, Alagoas, Brazil; the James A. Michener Museum of Art in Doylestown, Pennsylvania; and the Allentown Museum of Art in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He is a member of the DaVinci Art Alliance and InLiquid.

Statement

“One of my favorite things to do is to walk through the urban environment and photograph whatever grabs my interest. Over the years, these urban walks have evolved into a spiritual practice—a walking meditation of sorts. My best photographs occur when I am able to walk, look and feel, unbound by conscious thought. The aesthetic qualities of my photographs are provisional and improvisational responses to each situation.  I don’t impose any aesthetic conventions or stylistic agendas on what I am photographing. I prefer to let the urban environment reveal its own aesthetics. These are environmental incidents that evoked an emotional or spiritual connection worthy of capturing as a photograph. It's a mysterious and loving feeling when this connection occurs; in this way, I am making the photograph out of gratitude.”

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williamCromar

b. Richmond, VA

williamCromar is an artist and educator based in Philadelphia. He hybridizes a peculiar blend of architecture, music, animation,  art-making, and cutting-edge digital expression into a unique body of sculptural and installation art. Through such work, he develops paradoxical manifestations of the human need to find or invent order. 

He is the recipient of the Silver Medal at the International Biennial of Architecture in Sofia, Bulgaria, and the Samuel Fleisher Art Memorial’s Challenge Exhibitions by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work has been exhibited at the Nexus Foundation for Today’s Art sponsored by InLiquid, and aFSe Gallery in Philadelphia, the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, the Michelle Liao Collection, and the National Liberty Museum.

He directs the Abington College MakerSpace and teaches new media art, encouraging emerging artists to create senseless acts of beauty on the Macintosh. He also collaborates internationally with the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, part of the University of Dundee in Scotland.

Statement

“Around April 2025, I was hunting around for a model to print. We were looking for more ways to engage humanities disciplines in our campus maker space, and one idea was pretty straightforward: print a series that celebrated the history of art and design. If you hang out in the online 3D printing community, you quickly notice it is filled with objects like the Eiffel Tower, Venus of Willendorf, and artist Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog. But you'll also discover that some important works are not well-represented in the 3D printing canon.

For our purposes, I was hunting around for a model of Fountain, a scandalous piece by French-American artist Marcel Duchamp, created in 1917. This infamous spoof of a sculpture is arguably the most influential work of art of the 20th Century, and our art-history series felt incomplete without it. But the pickings were slim; I found only a couple of models representing Fountain, and I wasn't particularly impressed with their quality. So I decided to model it myself.

Little did I realize the rabbit hole I was about to fall into.” 

The birth of Prêt à Faire

Fountain is a Readymade, a particular sculptural expression developed and explored by Duchamp in the period surrounding World War I, and he created several. So when I finished the model for Fountain, I thought an interesting next project might be another Readymade. I figured his first one, Bicycle Wheel, created in 1913, might be an interesting challenge to stretch my model-making capabilities within the realm of 3D printing. Printable spokes? How in the heck could I model that?

So without quite realizing it at the time, I had begun work on a full-blown conceptual art series. Nine months on, this work is now a newborn. It is called Prêt à Faire.

Coinciding with the first major North American retrospective of Duchamp's work in 50 years, my goal is to exhibit Prêt à Faire in my hometown of Philadelphia, which is also home to one of the world's most acclaimed collections of Duchamp's work.” Read the full statement and essay at https://bit.ly/PretAFaire.

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Jake Jacob

b. New Jersey

Jake Jacob is an artist and designer based in Philadelphia. His work navigates the space between Dadaism and commercialism, using collage, assemblage, and painting to explore the power of imagery and material. He holds a B.S. in Graphic Design Communication from Jefferson University (formerly Philadelphia University) in Philadelphia, PA, and attended the University of Arkansas in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Director of Collage Philadelphia (est. 2022), a community-centered organization promoting contemporary collage through events, exhibitions, and institutional partnerships. Dombroski has exhibited at Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA; The Look Listen, and The Athenaeum, Philadelphia, PA; Gallery VII, York, PA; and Kyiv National Art Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine. 

Statement

"1. I Am My Own Best Friend - This piece takes a familiar phrase literally. A human body and its nervous system stand side by side, holding hands. Borrowing the visual language of scientific illustration, the work transforms an objective diagram into an impossible relationship, inviting questions about identity, selfhood, and what it means to be one's own companion.

‍2. American Dream - This five-piece series explores the things we spend our lives reaching for: shelter, wealth, nourishment, pleasure, and security. Using familiar American objects, the work reframes everyday symbols as stand-ins for larger human pursuits. In the spirit of Dada, these objects become both sincere and absurd, asking whether the things we chase are fundamental needs, cultural inventions, or somewhere in between.

Both works draw from the Dada tradition by using familiar visual language and everyday objects to create impossible or contradictory situations. Rather than offering clear explanations, they rely on humor, displacement, and unexpected juxtapositions to unsettle ordinary ways of seeing, inviting viewers to reconsider the meanings we assign to images, objects, and ourselves.”

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Kellianne McCarthy

b. Philadelphia, PA

Kellianne McCarthy works with oil, acrylic, and collage on wood panels. She is known for her saturated color palette and blend of imagery, abstraction, and pattern. She uses those elements to create spaces where the concrete and surreal meet. Influences filtered into her work include the graphic design of Peter Max, the altar pieces produced during the Renaissance, and the ungraspable vastness of the universe. She was born in Philadelphia, PA. She received a BFA in Painting from Moore College of Art and Design in 1992. She is an RN currently working in Philadelphia. 

Statement

"I want to evoke a feeling of place where the elements of the world we know meet bizarre, reverent spaces that make dream sense: Strange, opulent worlds with relentless stripes, patterns, flowers and colors that are lavish and startling."