In more ways than one, Robin Hill is "casting a net."

That’s the title of the UC Davis art professor’s exhibition at the Davis Art Center and how she describes moving from New York City where she lived for 25 years to Northern California in 2001. "Casting a Net" features a 19th-century photographic process known as "cyanotype" and sculpture, and runs through Feb. 7 at the art center on 1919 F St.

It’s also a state of mind for Hill.

"In New York, you tumble out of bed in the morning and bump into an art scene of some type," Hill said. "In Davis, I’ve been learning how to find the art and everything that goes with it – sort of like casting a net."

That means Hill makes a concerted effort to seek out artists and exhibitions while also encouraging her students to discover art.

The challenge is that Davis is not known as the art capital of the world, despite the art department’s rich history and many strides in recent years on that front. So artists like Hill become even more resourceful in making artistic connections. "I’m now looking at the whole world instead of just one city," Hill explains.

Hill talks about catching "wayward moments of beauty" in the debris of "everyday life." And she’s not kidding. Her Davis Art Center exhibition includes 1,500 disposable plastic cups, 200 feet of Christmas tree netting, and a 1,200 foot-long photogram image of the cups and netting.

One of her art heroes is the artist Marcel Duchamp, a French Dada artist who influenced avant-garde and pioneered the art of everyday objects, such as a urinal, piece of glass and a bottle rack.

"It’s not about the plastic cups," said Hill. "It’s about the transformation that occurs between the material and how it is used – the result being an opportunity to shift one’s perception to embrace small as big, simple as complex, ordinary as elegant, low-end as high-end, easy as difficult, accidental as purposeful, incidental as noteworthy. "

Hill has held exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston and Baltimore. She is looking forward to opening solo exhibitions in Monterey and Houston, and she is a fellow this year at the Humanities Institute, conducting research on "the poetics and politics of place."

Hill came to Davis just 16 days before 9/11.

"That event changes the way we see everything today," she said. "Now when you see two tall objects – like the silos on highway 113 between Woodland and Davis – they become the two World Trade Center towers. There’s also the powerful image of papers fluttering and dust spreading everywhere, everywhere. It’s transformed us all."

As Hill said, "everybody started over again that day."

She believes that "ideas are about perception" and the "re-ordering of accumulated detail." She is fond of quoting the poet Saul Williams who once said, "Whatever you are looking for is looking for you, too."

UC Davis came looking for her all right, recruiting her at a time when she had no inclination to leave behind her familiar East Coast stomping grounds. As part of the deal, Hill’s husband, Tom Bills, is now a professor in the art department. The couple and their children live in Woodland. "We love the industrial grit of that town," Hill said. Sadie attends the Waldorf School in Davis and Wheeler goes to a Montessori school in Woodland.

"We certainly left behind the headaches of traffic in New York and figuring out what schools to get the kids in based on what zone you live in," Hill said. "Now, I hear roosters in the morning, and my family and I love the beauty of the fields and landscape as we drive in to campus every day."

Hill was born in Houston, a self-described "university brat" who hop scotched the country with her father, an architect, and her mother, a social worker. They taught Hill many things about life, and one of them was to see the magnificence within the ordinary.

"My work is about the challenge of translating qualities that are perfect in the form that I first find them in, into something that can be suspended in time and seen by others."

She believes art is about tuning in to the frequency of daily life and seeing things as they truly are. "Ideas are encountered, rather than gotten."

For Hill, artistic ideas are everywhere – in New York or Davis, and right in front of us.