Lyons' work is a commentary on how the appearance of authority seduces the audience to believe. Playful and tongue-in-cheek, his work is a parody of science, history and art that challenges the popular tendency to exoticize the past.

The show, titled "Reconstruction of an Aazudian Temple," will be on exhibit Nov. 16 through Dec. 15 in the UB Art Department Gallery in the Center for the Arts on UB's North Campus. The exhibit is free of charge and open to the public. Gallery hours are Tuesdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Wednesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

An opening reception for the artist will be held on Thursday, Nov. 16, from 5-7 p.m. and Lyons will present a public lecture, "The Politics of Parody," that day at 3:30 p.m. in the Screening Room (Room 112) of the Center for the Arts.

The exhibit and the Aazudian culture itself were conjured up in the mind of Lyons, who is the director of the Hokes Archives, a repository of archaeological recreations at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he is an associate professor of art. The name "Hokes" is no accident.

Lyons has been creating and presenting mock documentations of imaginary cultures for the last 14 years. In this traveling exhibit, which has been shown in university galleries throughout the nation, he brings us the imaginary Mideastern "Aazud" culture as "documented" by dozens of meticulously fabricated artifacts, ceramics, photographs and hieroglyphs, along with documents that describe faux archaeological excavations.