The new “With The Grain” exhibit at the Houston Community College- Central Art Gallery discusses the possibilities of engineered wood after it no longer serves its original purpose.

Wood has been an important construction material since humans first built shelters, tools, and furniture. Yet no structure can last forever, and once a building has fallen, or a table is no longer suitable, the materials are tossed aside, discarded.

There they lay to deteriorate, unless broken down and used as raw material for another purpose. “With The Grain” is an exhibition about that repurposing.

Eight artists, Raina Chamberlain, Dan Havel, Alex Larsen, Jesse Lott, Edward Lane McCartney, Page Piland, Patrick Renner and Dean Ruck, use reclaimed wood to recontextualize our interaction with the product. The materials are given a new life in the public space.

A number of significant pieces fill the room. Center stage greeting every visitor of the exhibition stands “Blake’s Griffin”, a mythical griffin with a long beak and tail.

Jesse Lott, an artist with a long and wide-ranging record in Houston, designed this creature with table legs and furniture fragments. Lott has a history of using recycled urban material to create fictional creatures and startling human figures. Lott also has two other pieces on display, “Self Portrait” and “Shame Faced Woman”.

Behind “Blake’s Griffin”, begging for closer examination is Patrick Renners “new range”, an abstract wall sculpture composed of painted hardwood strips. The strips run from each side merging in the center at a crest which rises off of the wall in the shape of a long bulging wave.

Adjacent to this piece and also bulging from its wall hanging is “Extrusion Study: untitled” a sculpture which seems to be destroying itself from the inside out. The supporting base is filled with cement which is bursting against the thin wooden strips holding it together.

The wood is from Larsen’s grandfather’s barn, which was completely torn down some time ago, but Larson had developed a sentiment for the place and wanted give the material a functional reassignment. He acknowledges the previous history of the piece, and also comments on the practice of using reclaimed wood. “It’s easier to find something and make things out of it than to sit around and make things from scratch.”

Each of the pieces in both rooms has a specific style of repurposing, and each reflects a separate theory on preservation and demolition art. From Page Piland’s textured juxtaposition of wood and canvas, to Edward Lane’s accordioned bookshelf of building materials. Lane’s work was the driving force for this show.

Last school year during “MAPPED” a contemporary jewelry exhibition, Lane used reclaimed wood from fallen homes in the Heights to make a necklace. He wore that necklace to the opening for this show, and Co-Curator Bennie Flores Ansell noted its importance.

With the Grain runs Aug. 25 through Sept. 23 at Houston Community College-Central’s art gallery.