On Thursday, Sept. 25, the Rose Art Museum will celebrate the opening of its three new shows, "Invisible Rays: The Surrealism Legacy," "Project for a New American Century" and "Drawing on Film." "Invisible Rays: The Surrealism Legacy" showcases both the works of famous surrealist artists and more contemporary artists who have been influenced by surrealist ideas in a specially designed surrealist-inspired environment. "Project for a New American Century" debuts many of the contemporary works acquired by the Rose in the past year, while "Drawing on Film" presents a wide survey of art that directly manipulates film to create moving images. All the exhibits are free and open to the public. They will run through Dec. 14."Project for a New American Century" hangs in the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg and Lower Rose Galleries of the Museum. Guest curator Randi Hopkins selected the works for this show from the Rose Museum's recent acquisitions. Hopkins chose to name the show "Project for a New American Century" after a 2004 work on paper of the same title by Dominic McGill, as the title is "open-ended and a comment on where we are." Hopkins explained that the show consists of work that has come to the Rose in the past year and that McGill's work serves as an interesting centerpiece. All the works in the show were made around the turn of the 21st century. The McGill piece has a particularly interesting relationship to the century because it looks backward on history and forward to the future even if that future involves "no fun, no future, no oil," one of the messages drawn with pencil on the 80-inch by 60-foot coil of paper hung from the ceiling. Walking through the coil, she described how the viewer can enter it, engage with it, and get lost in it. All over the work, words and images bring up many divisive issues, such as guns, drugs and poverty. This creates an overwhelming environment and forces us to search for a way out of this loop of history.

By trying to escape this loop, artists of this century are rethinking their methods of operation. Hopkins explained that in this century artists are losing the confidence that they demonstrated in the abstract expressionist era of the 1940s and 1950s. Toward the end of the century, artists began reflecting on the past and started rethinking whether their works still had meaning and personal value. The McGill piece is wordy and noisy, with no particular point except to bombard the viewer with information. It expresses the idea that we don't know where we are. Hopkins went on to say that many contemporary artists, instead of inventing their own imagery, scavenge from the real world. They try to find a new angle on what already exists. As Americans, we are rethinking what we thought we knew. Old ways of doing things and of making art don't express who we are anymore. In the 1960s minimalism was confident and macho. It was industrial, cold and architectural. It searched for an absolute within the vocabulary of high modernism. By the turn of the century many artists, some of them female, took that vocabulary and made it more personal, irregular and idiosyncratic, claiming, "The cube is mine too." Downstairs in the main gallery, there is a minimalist monochrome piece made of eye shadow created by Rachel Lachowicz.

The majority of the formalist works are downstairs. The artists here are have taken moments in recent art history and looked at them differently, reinventing what made art what it is. Hopkins explained that in general the works the Rose has recently acquired move away from abstraction and more toward a personal viewpoint. Much of the work is from the late 1990s and seems to show a fear about the coming century. The work is humble and uncertain. It is rickety. It is trying to rebuild us, but it is shaky. We are moving forward with hesitation.

In the surrealism show "Invisible Rays: The Surrealism Legacy," brought to us by curator Michael Rush in the Lois Foster Wing, the enduring ideals of surrealism-"disjunctions, altered perceptions and a triumph of the unconscious"-are celebrated. The title of this exhibition comes from a quote from the famous surrealist author André Breton, who said that "Surrealism is the Invisible Ray which will one day enable us to win out over our opponents."

The Rose will be given a surreal, dreamy atmosphere lit only by small hanging light bulbs. The ground will be strewn with autumn leaves. This environment references the surrealist exhibitions of the 1930s, specifically that from the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris; the exhibit was overseen by Marcel Duchamp who, in addition to dim lighting and leaves, dispersed hanging sacks of coal and mannequins amid the crowds. "Invisible Rays" tries to capture that eccentric, whimsical spirit and suggests the altered state of a dream. The exhibition is about the process of walking through a gallery and viewing everybody else viewing the paintings. Visitors will be given flashlights to light their journey through the shadowy gallery, making everyone's sightlines visible. This show is just as much about atmosphere as it is about the individual works. That being said, the show has many amazing works including those by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Jackson Pollock, Fred Tomaselli, Tracey Moffatt and Philip Taffe, among others. Rush brought many works out of the Rose collection for this show.

Contemporary works are paired with ones to which they owe their surrealist influence. All of the artists in the show are in some way interested in the subconscious, dreamlike states and the place between dream and reality. The centerpiece of the show is Roberto Matta's monumental 1952 "Untitled," made just after he was expelled from the surrealist circle. His work was shown at the original 1938 International Surrealist show, and the piece shown is based on the surrealist technique of automatic drawing, something akin to absentminded doodling. This work hasn't been shown for many years; it was stretched (that is, the canvas was put onto a wood frame) especially for this show.

Starting on Sept. 25 the Herbert and Mildred Lee gallery will turn in to a screening room for the exhibit "Drawing on Film" organized by The Drawing Center in New York and curated by Joao Ribas. This show offers a variety of excellent examples of the unique technique of creating images directly on film without using a camera. This is often done by drawing, scratching, or otherwise manipulating the film. These films are then played through a projector, creating a type of animation. This process raises questions about technology in art and reclaims some human and unique qualities from an otherwise standard and mechanical practice. The works in this exhibition span from the 1930s to the present, covering both the start of this experimental genre and its most contemporary outputs.

Many works will be shown here for the first time. This technique of direct film began with Len Lye and his 1935 "A Colour Box," which projects a swirl of colorful lines and squiggles to a pulsing Cuban beat. The 1960s and 1970s brought forth a renewed interest in direct film which persists today. A 74-minute program of films by 11 artists will be screened several times daily in the Lee Gallery of the Rose, and a separate evening screening of work by Stan Brakage will be shown in 16-mm format on Oct. 30. On Oct. 2 Amy Granat will screen her scratch films as part of a live performance and collaboration with composer Stefan Tcherepnin.