I’m not sure what I expected when I went to the opening of Simultaneous at Phyllis Weston Gallery in O’Bryonville on Thursday night, but certainly not a “crowdfunded” art installation. The show features some interesting work in collage by Jonathan Gibson and Philip Lavelle. As I was leaving, I noticed this piece by Gibson, which already had several “buyers,” whose names were projected onto the “canvas.” He has a unique project called “Art of Parts,” in which he has crafted a collage by using his own computer program to manipulate an image — in this case, a lovely young woman — and its pieces are then transposed into a new work of art. The most innovative part is that anyone may buy a piece of the work for a price, as small as $10. At the end of the evening, Gibson planned to cut it up and divvy out the pieces. He explained that each piece would be unique, unlike a Jackson Pollock work of art, in which there wouldn’t be much variety if you cut it up.

I took a special 9-year-old to the exhibition opening (her first), and she enjoyed using a stylus to manipulate images on his laptop, which was there to demonstrate the technique. On the way home, we had an interesting discussion on how this was quite different from “dead guys” like Van Gogh. She liked it.