Space Jockey
February 7th to March 4th 2026
Regional artist James Connors will present “Space Jockey,” a mixed media exhibition, at the Frederick Community College Mary Condon Hodgson Art Gallery. The exhibition opens to the public with a reception for the artist on Saturday, Feb. 7, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Visual and Performing Arts Center lobby. A snow date is scheduled for Feb. 14.
Connors attended public school in Frederick County, where he admired his elementary art teacher, Charlie Shobe, and aspired to follow in his footsteps. His early fascination with surrealism, science fiction and biology as aesthetic experiences led him to enroll in FCC’s Drawing I course at age 17. There, he studied under Cynthia Baush and recalls receiving a second place award from Wendell Poindexter in the 2006 juried art show.
With Baush’s help developing his portfolio slides, Connors applied to and was accepted at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he studied illustration. His interest in biomorphic abstraction over narrative storytelling later took him to California, where he earned his Master of Fine Art from ArtCenter College of Design in 2015. It was at ArtCenter that Connors began creating immersive installations and fabricating complex textures.
Since 2011, Connors has exhibited his work across the United States, as well as in the United Kingdom, Korea and Japan. Since returning to Maryland, his work has been shown at the Delaplaine Arts Center, Vault of Visions Art Gallery and FCC. Created between 2020 and 2026, “Space Jockey” expands the formal language of his drawing practice through themes of transformation and growth. Inspired by molted cicada shells, the urgency of spider webs and the anticipation of space travel, the exhibition offers a multimedia experience of hope as a living — and at times alien — aesthetic.
At 37, Connors now finds himself following in his late mentor’s footsteps, serving as an elementary art teacher. When he is not instilling confidence in children through art, he can often be found wearing a respirator while working with resin, learning to weld or imagining how to turn his backyard into a foundry. More information can be found on Instagram @jamesconnorsart or at jamesconnorsart.com.
The show remains on view through March 4.
The Mary Condon Hodgson Art Gallery, located in the Visual and Performing Arts Center on the Frederick Community College campus, is open to the public Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and closed Sundays.
For more information, contact gallery manager Wendell Poindexter at 301-846-2513 or wpoindexter@frederick.edu
2026
The Molting
Ready to Molt each day.
Following the dots marked by predecessors, individual acts of perception draw-in the world, outlining the collective Drawing we know as Reality.
Let us co-create with suppositions:
Reality: a co-construct to support the depth of our unlimited potential, it is but the scaffolding of our perception.
Consciousness: A negotiation of variability and order; self-organization and entropy, emerged within nature to interpret its own complexity. God-willing, our work will never be complete.
Drawing: to pull from our cumulative imagination, pictures, feelings and ideas and grasp them. It is a psychophysical analog to thinking. Let us draw ever towards futurity, the unbecome.
A series of poems concerned with genesis, my work uses texture as syntax, color as substance. Through production I accept my unfolding into the gnosis of autopoiesis✱
The scaffolds that restricted my growth wrinkles.
My works are records of my impassioned writhing and reaching.
Here lies my shell, encrusted with brilliance.
✱ Refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts.
2024
Cosmic Giggle
On view at the Delaplaine Arts Center January 3rd-30th local elementary art teacher James Connors unveils a hand-drawn universe meticulously crafted over the last decade. Evoking the visual language of microbiology, cartography, and meteorology, the rhythmic lines of his exhibit “Cosmic Giggle” draws the viewers into the surface to explore. Fascinated by the emergence of life, order, and patterns out of seeming randomness, Connors invites viewers to let their eyes wander and discover, and in so doing, “co-create” new intimate realities.
2022
Futurity Dredge
The pulling, dragging forth of stimuli for the mind to grasp, the action of perception is a drawing. Following the dots marked by predecessors, one draws the external world, living through it and repainting it with forms and ideas. Comprising the whole of reality, Henri Bergson declared that ideas are “the stable view taken” of nature, creating a “equilibrium of being” out of its chaotic “perpetual flux of things.” [i] If individual acts of perception draw the world according to pre-existing dots, reality is collective drawing from which my practice deliberately withdraws the stability needed for ideation.
Perpetuating our perceptual scaffolding is one’s expectation and intention. A balance of variability and order; self-organization and entropy, consciousness emerged with nature to interpret its own complexity via what quantum physicists’ term ‘collapsing the wave function.’ The Wave-Particle Duality demonstrates that the will and prior expectation of an observer, whether intended or not, has a direct influence on what one sees. Only behaving as solid (particles) once observed, waves are not bound by our reality, but subject to it, prompting neuroscientists to consider reality to be a shared hallucination.[ii] What happens when enough observers agree they see the same thing? It becomes real, the drawing achieves a communal experiential duration and becomes drawn; new dots marked, scaffolding amended.
When looking for faces in clouds, one is reaching through the scaffold. The percipients’ intention permits the sensorial information previously ‘drawn’ as cloud to be interpreted as a face. While this drawing, i.e., reality is fleeting, the arrow between the “E” and “X” of the FedEx logo proves difficult to be unseen. Both are real, both can be considered hallucinations. Forgoing the durability of intent, my practice presents durations of reach. Drawing a suspended state of turbulence, the eye is released exercise its predisposition, it’s innate desire to draw-out complexity. As wrinkles form on a hand submerged in water, percipients are invited to co-create realities, to dredge up futurities not yet drawn.
[i] Bergson, H. (1911). Creative Evolution. NY: Republished, Dover Publications.
[ii] Seth, A. (2018, March 28). A neuroscientist explains why reality may just be a hallucination. Retrieved from Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/neuroscientist-explains-why-realityhallucination-meaning-2018-3
2019