Mad Art Gallery will host an opening reception for Past/Passed by Robots, an exhibit by Jeffrey Sass featuring Keith Buchholz at 7 p.m. tonight, Aug. 5. The gallery is at 2727 S. 12th St.

According to the Mad Art Gallery site:

This exhibit examines the year long exploration/collaboration by artists Keith Buchholz and Jeffrey Sass. Over the past year, Buchholz and Sass have developed a travelogue, using a small toy robot’s journey of discovery on Route 66 as metaphor for the homogenization of the American cultural, historical, and mental landscape. The works are intermedia based, ranging from painting and collage to artists books, boxworks and sculpture, to create works that both reflect on and develop an alternate history of the fabled road.

Jeffrey Sass’ work reflects his distaste for the homogenizing of America and a nostalgic longing for the era in which each town or area had its unique features that made it special. His lifelong love and study of traditional photography has developed into a unique process that begins with pinhole Polaroid photography using a camera of his own construction. Sass has shown his work extensively in the St. Louis area and has work archived in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute in Chicago, as well as the EAA museum in Wisconsin.