ST. LOUIS — The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis kicked off their Summer 2015 season Saturday, which includes four separate exhibitions that fill the front room and main gallery of the museum.

Occupational Therapy, organized by Kelly Schindler, Associate Curator, encompasses a wide range of media—including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, installation, performance, and video—from the 1960s to the present.

The exhibit expresses and addresses a variety of psychological conditions, both real and imagined, made manifest by artistic practice. The exhibition features artwork by twenty renowned artists: John Baldessari, Martin Brief, Tammy Rae Carland, Rochelle Feinstein, Karl Holmqvist, Christian Jankowski, Martin Kippenberger, Yayoi Kusama, Maria Lassnig, Lee Lozano, Bruce Nauman, Carl Pope, William Powhida, Pedro Reyes, Deb Sokolow, Buzz Spector, Frances Stark, William Wegman, and Andrew Norman Wilson and Nick Bastis.

“In coming up with the name Occupational Therapy, I was thinking about art as this throughway, as a kind of crucible that leads you in which things magically happen or are transformed, and so this idea of therapy came to mind,” associate curator Schindler said. “Then the idea of art making by artists as their own therapy, it just kind of came together from there.”

Sincere, cynical, and humorous in equal measure, the works on view engage the complexities and challenges of being an artist. Featured artists inhabit a variety of roles, from therapist, director, and narrator to patient, actor, and subject. Debunking the notion of the artist as enlightened genius, the exhibition aims to humanize the creative process.

“The whole idea of art as a way of processing grief and more difficult emotions and also the idea in doing things and making things everyday — that that gives your life meaning,” Celine Dammond, occupational therapist student said. “So people who are artists use art as every day in their daily lives in order to bring meaning and purpose to their own lives and sharing it with people as a way to connect to them.”

A large part of Occupational Therapy is a living artwork by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes that explores art and psychology, called Sanatorium. This transient clinic provides short “therapies,” using a combination of ritual, play, and experimentation, by volunteer “therapists” who are trained through a program designed by the artist. CAM’s presentation marks the Midwestern premiere of Sanatorium, which was first presented by the Guggenheim Museum (2011) and was included in the most recent Documenta in Kassel, Germany (2012).

In another exhibition for CAM’s summer season, Laurie Simmons: Two Boys and the Love Doll displays the first Midwestern solo museum exhibition of American photographer Laurie Simmons. It features two recent bodies of work that use dolls—male CPR dummies and female love dolls—as their subject.

If the intention of inert CPR dummies is to operate as teaching tools for artificial resuscitation, then Simmons’s photographs question who or what must be metaphorically brought back to life. Our contemporary era offers the illusory promise of constant connection—we are only a click away from human interaction—yet blurs the line between the virtual and the real. In both series of photographs, Simmons asserts the doll as neither a solution for loneliness nor a replacement for bodily contact; instead her photographs offer a complex look into our current lack of real world connectivity.

Located in the front room of the Contemporary Art Museum, Michael Staniak: Img_ works intentionally confuse the digital with the handmade, scrutinizing the role of technology today. Staniak’s paintings’ uncanny texture, trompe l’oeil effects, and hyper-saturated pigments can appear as flat when viewed online, or even as if created by 3-D printers or Epson inkjets.

However, the work is entirely made by hand; the viewer is required to experience the work in person to fully understand its complex physical depth. Staniak’s conceptually prescient and materially innovative paintings envelop the viewer in an opposition between aesthetic beauty and the numbing effects of our digitized world.

Don’t forget to check out New Art in the Neighborhood (NAN), CAM’S flagship education program, upstairs. For this exhibition, NAN students worked with Screwed Arts Collective, employing spray paint and street art imagery to create a large-scale moveable mural using small individual canvases. Taking inspiration from renowned video artists Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Pipilotti Rist, St. Louis artist Jennifer Baker guided students to produce abstract videos with footage sourced from the Web as well as made on-site.

With Ameli Skoglund Blaser, they used found material to recreate modes of dress from various cultures and historical moments with a contemporary sensibility. NAN also collaborated with teens from St. Louis ArtWorks and artists Sarah Paulsen and Adam Hogan to create a stop-motion animation film about their hopes, dreams, and futures.

For more information, hours of operation, or to volunteer for Sanitorium, go to www.camstl.org.