Pictured: Knot Comes Loose by Zach Gilliland. Photo by Phil Lederer.

Stepping off Palm Avenue and crossing the threshold into Art Ovation Hotel, one is presented with a fateful choice. Go left and find the hotel bar, fully stocked in spirits and potential friends. There’s an empty seat just for you. Or keep going straight, down the yawning hallway where the lights are dimmed and the shadows grow long, where thick carpet swallows the sound of your passage and the walls are covered in colored canvases and sculptures of the strangest kind. This is Light and Dark, if you choose to explore it.

Currently on display in the Crescendo Gallery at Art Ovation Hotel, Light and Dark showcases the work of 12 member-artists from the SARTQ artist collective, as they explore the nature of duality in the world. Love and Hate. Life and Death. Light and Dark. Seemingly at odds but neither can exist without the other, the result is a strange harmony that the artists of SARTQ investigate through everything from digital art and ceramic to largescale painting and even a standout sculpture from Zach Gilliland that looks like an explosion of twisted metal with a concrete epicenter, bursting from the wall like a crowned totem to the gods of modern infrastructure.

Perhaps not the typical hotel lobby fare, admits Art Ovation’s Cultural Curator Robyn Holl. “But in the Crescendo Gallery, we have the opportunity to allow a bit of an edgier touch.”

This includes monochromatic mixed-media from Ellen Kantro, taking the theme head-on with aggressive slashes of black and white on the canvas, as well as digital painting from Diana de Avila, where swirls of folding fractals seem to approximate the geometry of dreams, and a massive 12-foot-long painting by Dana Laag that blends the mythic with the modern. Sculpture in porcelain and stoneware by Taylor Robenalt—a pair of grasping hands with eyes sprouting from the palms and ringed by flowers in bloom—straddles the delicate line between whimsy and disquiet, while ceramic from Emmie Wells manages to be both oddly endearing and so startlingly biological as to approach the artistic notion of the abject. A triptych by Pamela Olin reduces a reclining figure to broad strokes of skeletomuscular suggestion and in doing so imbues the empty space with that much more.

“I love the diversity of the group,” says Holl. “It’s fantastic and it goes with our mission to connect with the community and be part of the art experience downtown.”

Currently on display at Art Ovation Hotel, Light and Dark is on display through October 30. Daily tours with Holl are at 5pm. Call ahead for pricing and availability.

Pictured: Knot Comes Loose by Zach Gilliland. Photo by Phil Lederer.