? All San Jacinto College Gallery exhibitions

Camaro Lucinda is a solo exhibition of new sculpture and video-based work by interdisciplinary artist Justin Plakas. On view August 31 through December 3, 2026, the exhibition brings together cast concrete, salvaged wood, painted panels, and handmade props into installations that use humor as a way into difficult subjects: perception, memory, impermanence, and death.

Plakas’s practice combines digital technologies with handcrafted processes to create immersive works that examine how contemporary life is shaped by rapidly evolving technology. Humor is central to how the work operates. Playful and often absurd on the surface, it opens the door to quieter reflections on entropy, mortality, and the strange contradictions of everyday life. Everyday objects and gestures become installations that are, at once, entertaining, unsettling, and deeply human.

“Almost every piece of art I’ve ever made is about death. Mostly, probably…” Plakas says of a practice built on the idea that humor and grief often exist side by side, creating space for connection in polarizing times. That belief drives his ongoing Joke Room project, which began at the University of Arkansas when Plakas turned his office hours into open sessions for students and faculty to gather, eat, and pitch ideas, sessions one regular participant described as “a comedic support group.” It’s an approach Plakas traces back to something his late father used to say: you gotta laugh to keep from crying.

Plakas has exhibited and screened his work nationally and internationally and has participated in artist residencies including the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He earned a B.A. from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an M.F.A. from the University of Georgia, and is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of Arkansas School of Art.