Creating Unlimited Visions : Computers provide the flexibility to alter, layer and combine work. Nearly 100 pieces so generated are on display.

Computer art has come to the Antelope Valley in a big way. The Lancaster Museum / Art Gallery is presenting “I Sing the Body Electric--Digital Images by Computer Artists,” a show of almost 100 pieces that validate the computer as an artistic tool of grand dimensions.

Using a computer mouse or stylus instead of a paintbrush, and software programs that offer 16 million colors, artists can create unlimited original visions. They may start with a blank screen--which doubles as a canvas--or by scanning in images that become the basis of an artwork.

“Artists who paint traditionally with oil, watercolor or pastels, printmakers and photographers discover that software will allow them to work in a similar manner,” Dona Geib, one of 10 artists in the show, writes in her clear and concise explanation of computer painting and printing. “The important difference for artists working with a computer is that they have more flexibility to alter, layer and combine their art, which allows for many permutations in color, size and complexity.”

“Everybody has preconceived notions of what computer art is,” said Susan Wiersema, the exhibit curator. “It’s not just a computer printout. People are taking it one step further, branching out and turning it into a quilt or a ceramic plate.”

For Richard Sim, a professor of art at Antelope Valley College, the computer allows him to bring together his painting and photography. Taking pictures he shot during his travels to such places as Ethiopia, Egypt, Israel, China and Japan, Sim has scanned them into his computer, infused them with all kinds of color and turned them into vibrant, fantastic images of, among other things, flowers, skulls and ancient wall paintings.

Sim also produces multicolored, silk-screened ceramic decals of his artwork for his hand-thrown pottery. He also collaborates with his wife, Eugenie Trow, a professor of math and playwriting at the college, who writes poems.

The poems are “my attempts to understand the details of this life,” her artist’s statement says.

Trow and Sim put an image of his with a complementary poem of hers. As in their work “Eye to Tomorrow & Truth,” Trow uses the computer to lay out her poems in a non-linear form. It “allows me to put words into the shape I feel, as an artist would use a brush on canvas,” she said. “I can suggest a feeling before the word is even read.”

The computer gives Antelope Valley resident Jaydee Clinton Price a broader range of design possibilities for her fabric art. She works out her designs on computer first, then realizes them in textiles. Her colorful, geometric-patterned fabric pieces, including “Quadrangular Jacket” and the quilt “Abstract Attic Windows,” are displayed here with the corresponding computer images that preceded them.

Thousand Oaks resident Stewart Dickson creates abstract sculptures based on computer images he derived from mathematical theorems. If viewers are not able to comprehend the explanation of the mathematical basis, they can still appreciate Dickson’s artful forms.

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The black-and-white photography of Robert McMahan, professor and chairman of the photography/computer graphics department at Antelope Valley College, has evolved through the computer into colorful, energetic renditions of “Blue Moons” and earthly creatures such as fish.

Photographer Darlene Sprunger, a student of McMahan’s, only recently began putting her realistic images on computer and manipulating them. By venturing into this new territory, she has imbued her charming pictures of such things as birds on a wire and a San Francisco lamppost with an appealing abstract quality.

Antelope Valley College art instructor Glen Knowles produces a computer print of an image--here a mixed-media piece--as part of the process in creating an innovative watercolor. In making the print, he can experiment freely with color and form, and apply his musings to the actual watercolor.

Geib, endlessly fascinated with the textures of cardboard and with box shapes, presents several prints on those subjects that reflect her ability to turn ordinary objects and even trash into art. Victor Acevedo brings together his own photography, 3-D computer-generated models and digital painting in composite images to make “pictorial artifacts intended as snapshots of inter-dimensional and paranormal experience,” he says in his artist’s statement.

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “I Sing the Body Electric--Digital Images by Computer Artists.”

Location: City of Lancaster Museum / Art Gallery, 44801 N. Sierra Highway.

Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 4 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 10.

Call: (805) 723-6250.