The Goldmark Cultural Center’s Norman Brown Gallery is proud to present “Pseudo-Sentient”, a solo exhibition featuring sculptural furniture works by TWU art professor Colby Parsons.

The exhibition is on display in the Goldmark Cultural Center’s Norman Brown Gallery from 9 November to 18 December 2026.

The exhibition’s reception is on Saturday, 21 November 2026 from 2:00pm to 4:00pm. The reception is a great opportunity to view the exhibition, meet the artist, and learn about the artwork.

About the Exhibition

My current works are objects I conceive of as sculptural, futuristic furniture. These forms start out in my imagination and are first developed as sketches based in part on a fantasy of how furniture might design itself if it were sentient in some way. In my internal narrative, these entities only partially understand the human needs and purposes that drive the design of more typical versions of such things, and they operate with different logic, methods, and perspectives. The resulting forms include structural solutions that are unusual, and sometimes out of proportion to their purpose. They also have qualities that mimic natural forms, implying legs, tentacles, branches, roots, etc.

Once sketched, these forms are developed though personally constructed algorithmic designs using parametric modeling software, and the physical versions are milled out of wood using a computer-controlled router (CNC) before hand-finishing. To be clear, these designs are not created by AI, but by painstaking intentional work, both on the computer and in the physical construction and finishing. The sense of materiality to the final forms is very important to me – embodying a dialogue between human intention and machine logic, between designed parameters and emergent properties.

About the Artist

Colby Parsons is a Full Professor and Division Head of Visual Arts at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, where he teaches Ceramics and Digital Craft. Parsons has been with TWU Visual Arts for over 27 years. Parsons earned a BPh with a focus in Ceramics at Miami University in Oxford Ohio in 1991, and an MFA in Ceramics from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale Illinois in 1998. Parsons’ work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues including Navy Pier in Chicago, the Taipei County Yingge Ceramics Museum; the International Ceramic Research Center in Denmark; the Cameron Art Museum in North Carolina; the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Ana, California; the University of Pennsylvania Art Museum; and in Dallas at the Craighead Green Gallery, the Pawn Gallery, and 500X. He was awarded the Zanesville Art Prize in 2015, the largest ceramics prize offered in the western hemisphere.

Over the years, Parsons’ work has made use of ceramics, sculpture, projected video, 3D printing, CNC milling, laser cutting, and interactive digital elements. His current work utilizes algorithmic design software to create a variety of functional and sculptural forms. Though the work employs digital processes including digital fabrication methods, it is rooted in a sense of materiality derived from craft, and usually requires hand working processes for surfacing, finishing, fitting, and in some cases for elements of the form.