Proximity Index is an exhibition that drifts between what is visible and what remains quietly held beneath the surface. This exhibition is an homage to the teachings of artist Ron Bechet, an artist whose practice roots itself in the material and metaphoric life of trees, and whose charcoal and chalk drawings return wood to its own origins. Within Bechet’s work, the landscapes, branches, and tangled ecologies he renders are inseparable from the very substances used to depict them. Each drawing becomes a gesture of returning.

‍The artists gathered in Proximity Index: Angel Perdomo, DiQuan Forcell, Gabrielle Tolliver, Irvin Washington Jr.,Joshua Casimier, and Steve Gilliland, bring forward their own responses to Bechet’s influence. As former students, mentees, colleagues, or collaborators within the Contemporary Arts Center, their works carry traces of shared lineage while asserting distinct creative vocabularies. Paintings, poetry, scenes of nature, works on wood, and sound-based environments all become avenues through which his approach is echoed and reimagined. Each artist charts a path that is both connected to and distinct from Bechet’s. Each piece becomes a continuation, reinterpretation, or gentle divergence from the sensibilities that shaped their artistic foundations.

Proximity Index invites viewers to consider how influence is absorbed, transformed, and passed on, how trees seed forests, how mentorship shapes practice, and how the materials and relationships that ground an artist’s work extend outward in unexpected, ever-branching