The DePaul University Art Museum, 2350 N. Kenmore Ave., will open its fall season with Ken Butler’s sensational one-man show that combines performance, hybrid musical instruments and three-dimensional collages.

“Anxious Objects” opens with a reception Sept.10 and runs through Nov. 24. The opening reception will be held from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public. Butler will provide a musical performance at 6 p.m.

A visionary artist and musician, Butler began creating musical instruments out of unlikely objects in 1978 when he transformed an axe into a violin, which he ultimately played in scores of performances. He studied viola as a child and maintained an interest in music while studying visual arts in France, at Colorado College, and at Portland State University, where he completed his master of fine arts degree in painting in 1977.

Butler has created more than 400 hybrid instruments – turning sleds into cellos, chessboards into guitars and bicycle seats into violins. Clocks, vinyl records, boots and even animal remains are but a few of the objects that he ingeniously reassembles as musical instruments. He has compiled a number of grand-piano style, interactive keyboards, including one that contains several radios that offer up varying genres of music depending on which key is struck.

Referring to himself as a “bricoleur,” which means “handyman” in French, Butler has described the unique medium he creates as a place where “function and form collide in the intersection of art and music.” As for the social context in which his work exists, Butler comments, “Contemporary urban life is a bewildering collage of multiple images, ideas, sounds and objects in a constant state of flux; from this storehouse of forsaken objects and hardware, I further dismantle and reassemble the consumer society into functional assemblages.”

“Butler’s work is at the intersection of art and music, and is both gleeful and dead serious,” said Louise Lincoln, director of the museum. “His forms challenge our assumptions about sculpture, and his performances expand our ideas of what ‘music’ can sound like.”

Butler’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He has exhibited throughout Europe, including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Podewil in Berlin, as well as venues in Canada, South America, Thailand and Japan.

Butler-the-musician has performed with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Butch Morris, the Soldier String Quartet, the Tonight Show Band and the Master Gnawa musicians of Morocco.

“Anxious Objects” is co-sponsored by DePaul’s School of Music, art department and Humanities Center. Museum hours are: Mon. – Thurs., 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Fri., 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., noon to 5 p.m. For more information about “Anxious Objects” and future exhibitions of the DePaul Art Museum, call 773/325-7506 or visit the Web site at museums.depaul.edu/artwebsite.

Editors’ Note: Digital images of Butler’s work are available upon request.