ART! Day and Night – Kai Franz and Neal T Walsh, Chazan Gallery at Wheeler

Image: Perlin Grid, 2017 – Materials: CAD drawing, CNC-code, CAM-software, plopper (dual-axis precision deposition system), polyurethane, sand, galvanized steel – Dimensions: 65″ × 105″ × 25″ 

On exhibit at Chazan Gallery in Providence now until October 7th is “Day and Night​​” – Kai Franz / Neal T Walsh

The Chazan Gallery at Wheeler presents Day and Night, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Kai Franz and Neal T Walsh, on view from now to October 7, 2026. 

Both Kai Franz and Neal Walsh explore the tension between order and entropy, structure and transformation. While their methods clearly differ, each artist begins with an underlying system—whether Franz’s computational algorithms or Walsh’s gridded foundations—and investigates how that system is altered through time, material processes, and chance.

Kai Franz‘s work examines what happens when systems encounter what they cannot fully contain. He is interested in rules, protocols, algorithms, and other structures that promise order, prediction, or control—and in the moment when matter, bodies, time, or behavior begin to exceed them. Much of his practice develops through an engagement with a system rather than the expression of a predetermined image: following its logic, inhabiting it, submitting to it, and sometimes pushing it until another kind of order begins to emerge.

The works in this exhibition originate in Conway’s Game of Life, a cellular automaton in which complex and unpredictable behavior emerges from a small set of deterministic rules. Each painting begins from a grid of cells that are either alive or dead. Their states determine the next generation according to three simple rules. Instead of allowing the computer to perform these calculations instantaneously, Franz reenacts them physically. For every living cell, he drops a spoonful of house paint onto a wooden board. One generation dries before the next begins. What takes seconds to compute can take years to execute. 

The paintings therefore occupy an uneasy position between instruction and event. Their underlying structure is rigidly determined, but their physical manifestation is not. Paint spreads, pools, collides, sags, and accumulates. Gravity acts differently depending on the orientation of the surface. Identical computational beginnings can produce materially different objects. The algorithm governs the work without ever completely possessing it.

Kai Franz is a Cologne-born German artist based in Providence, Rhode Island. His cross-disciplinary practice spans sculpture, computation, and performance, exploring systems, material agency, chance, ritual, and the relationship between human and non-human making. Franz studied architecture at RWTH Aachen, ETH Zurich, and Princeton University, and previously worked at OMA in Rotterdam and New York. He was a Fulbright Fellow at RISD and an artist-in-residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude. His ongoing project Plopper uses a self-built sand-and-resin deposition machine to investigate post-digital materiality, entropy, and co-creation. His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Akademie Schloss Solitude and Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery. He is Associate Professor in Experimental and Foundation Studies at RISD.

Using old and salvaged canvas from previous paintings, torn pages from discarded books, debris from the studio floor, oil paint, graphite, ink, dry pigments, Neal Walsh builds his paintings layer by layer. The surfaces are scratched, torn, tattered, sanded, scraped bare, and started again and again until the accumulation of marks and mediums resolves into being. Neal often uses grids as a foundation for his paintings; with each layer, this initial uniformity tends towards entropy, the fixed becomes ever more fluid. In this process of adding and subtracting, each layer has an opportunity to play a part but is also altered with the artist’s intentionality: the work echoes nature’s familiar patterns of growth and decay, chance and control.  The paintings are meditations on our complex relationship with time, history and the construction of consciousness. Neal strives to capture in his paintings those poetic fragments that make up the essence of our transitory lives as it unfolds before us.

Neal is a self-taught artist living and working in rural Rhode Island. Deeply rooted in the local arts community, Neal has worked with hundreds of artists to organize art exhibitions, talks, and events as Gallery Director of the arts non-profit AS220 and through independent curatorial projects. Neal lives in an old farmhouse with his family and makes paintings inspired by his voracious reading, long walks in the woods, and observations of light and color in the landscape as the seasons slowly unfold across the years.

The Garden of Earthly Delight 1500-2011 II, 2011, relief print, edition of 5 ___

Gallery Hours:
3PM to 6PM Mondays through Fridays

10AM to 4PM Saturdays

(and by appointment)
Closed on Sundays
There is no admission charge.

Chazan Gallery at Wheeler – 228 Angell Street, Providence, RI 02906 – 528-2227

Chazan Gallery at Wheeler is a nonprofit artists’ space that exhibits a wide range of contemporary works by artists living or working in the area. Providence is a city with a large community of artists, and the gallery provides an excellent space for these artists to exhibit their work. Through an open jury process, the gallery shows work from among the strongest artists in the area in a series of varied and interesting exhibitions each year. Bill Van Siclen, the former Providence Journal’s art editor, has called the gallery “a model of quality and consistency. The artists have been among the best the state has to offer.” Located on the East Side of Providence near Brown University and RISD, the gallery is supported by Wheeler School, a gift to the Providence arts community from the school.*