Fri 1/2 @ 5-9PM

Through Sat 2/14

Sat 1/24 @ 2-4PM

Cleveland artist Jeffry Chiplis lets his material be his muse and guide his creative vision. And his material happens to be neon — bits and pieces of old signs that accrue to him because people have come to know what he does over his more than three decades working with the gas-filled glass.

“I have a reputation,” he says.

Nearly two years ago, Chiplis displayed a work at the Williams Busta Gallery, a huge, room-filling, 28-foot piece called “The Great White Mountains and the Cold Cathode Plains,” which he then moved to New York’s Scope Art Fair expanded to 60 feet.

There’s nothing quite that grandiose in his latest show, “New Ideas in Inert Gases,” which opens at the Busta Gallery with a reception this evening. The new show is a series of wall pieces, plus two tables build on a base of huge neon letters.

Chiplis also isn’t given to making profound, opaque or jargon-laden statements about his work. He’s not “negotiating the intersection” between anything. He’s just using his artist’s eye to elicit new arrangements of the glowing forms and colors that fall into his hands. Sometimes he’ll even take old pieces and reconstruct them if the materials speak to him in a new way. He’s done that with several of the pieces here, including the tables, which he showed at Cleveland’s F*Show, an annual display of the artistry of local furniture makers.

“They’re different from my other work because they’re functional items,” he says. The letters, he says, “came to me by way of somebody else who said they were in storage for 7 or 8 years and he said, ‘I never did anything with it, I know someone who can use it.’”

Originally, one of the table’s letters spelled “real” and the other said “hi.” The new configurations say “Cle” and “Chair,” although he says, that’s flexible. “The chair table can be ‘chair’ or ‘hair’ or ‘ha’ or any number of other things because the letters all turn on and off individually. They all have argon inside.”

The new wall pieces reflect Chiplis’ playful sense of the possibilities of his material. “Browns Clown” is built on a beer sign, the piece a glowing assemblage of team orange. Another, built on the words “jiu jitsui” is all rakish dancing diagonals, just waiting to be animated by turning on the switch. When they’re all lit up for opening night, they should be quite a sight, luring visitors to stop in and see what’s creating that racket of colored light visible through the gallery’s big picture windows.

The opening reception is free. Chiplis will also be in the gallery Sat 1/24 from 2-4pm to talk and answer questions about his work.

williambustagallery.com/

Cleveland, OH 44115

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