LEWISTON – Artist Dudley Zopp asks this question: “How does one leap off the cliff of geologic reality into an ephemeral world where articulated paper only indexes geological forces?

Her new exhibition at the Atrium Art Gallery at the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College asks this same question.

“Erratic Locations,” an installation of huge sheets of builders paper – about 500 feet of it – makes reference to the geological forces of boulders left at random by the receding Laurentide Ice Sheet about 12,000 years ago.

Zopp’s “boulders” remind us of the erratic stones that identify much of Maine’s landscapes. They are made of paper, crumpled, written, painted and marked on, to mimic masses that run and spill across the walls and floor. The Atrium Art Gallery’s 28-feet high walls become a background for them, like a vertical field or side of a hill.

The exhibition begins Thursday, Jan. 19, with a reception, free and open to the public, from 5 to 7 p.m.

“This particular installation addresses subject matter that has interested me since we studied the geological ages of the earth in grade school,” commented Zopp, a Belfast resident who has created site-specific installations in museums and galleries since 1994. As a painter and installation artist, her work often includes text as a visual element combined with organic forms and environmental themes.

“Erratic Locations” is the third in a series of installations addressing a philosophy of time as revealed by geological events. Other sites for “Erratic Locations” have been the Center for Maine Contemporary Art and the Portland Museum of Art.

Zopp received an Individual Artist’s Fellowship awarded by the Maine Arts Commission in 2002. She has exhibited her work in solo shows, most recently at the University of Maine at Presque Isle (2004), and in a two-person show, “Discovering the Physical,” at The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (2004). Recent group shows include “Contemporary Drawing 2005” (T. W. Wood Gallery, Union Institute and University, Montpelier, Vt.) and the 2004 Biennial Juried Exhibition at the Center For Maine Contemporary Art.

Zopp’s work has been collected by museums, universities and corporations, including the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, the Boston Athenaeum, the University of Chicago Library, and NoxBox in Mainz, Germany. As co-founder of The Circadia Project, an environmental installation and teaching program in the Ducktrap River watershed in Knox and Waldo counties, Zopp brings together alternative education students and conservationists.

In 2001, she collaborated with 10 national and international artists on “Art in Nature,” a series of environmental installations at the Arts Center at Kingdom Falls in Montville. In 1997, she was awarded a studio residency by the Pouch Cove Foundation, Saint Johns, Newfoundland.

Zopp was born in Lexington, Ky., in 1941, and did post-graduate work at the Allen R. Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville (1986-1991). She maintains studios in Belfast and in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The exhibition continues until March 4. Lewiston-Auburn College is at 51 Westminster St. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Friday; and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. For more information, call Robyn Holman at 753-6554; send an e-mail to [email protected]; or go online to usm.maine.edu/lac/art/zopp.