The Hope Narrative: Finding Resilience in Contemporary Photography and Family Photo Archives is the signature exhibition at REFUGE, which redefines the waiting room experience of the Health Hub. Artist Emily Hanako Momohara worked with a team of youth apprentices to make artwork for and about the community at Academy of World Languages and its new adjacent Health Hub. This artwork creates a welcoming, safe, and community-reflective atmosphere for clients and patients in the lobby and hallway areas, with a public component on view in Washington Park.

The inspiration for each of the works comes from interviews and personal artifacts from Academy of World Languages families and Evanston residents. Momohara and the apprentices interviewed families representing the diverse backgrounds and familial structures of future Health Hub clients. Their stories of cultural activities and wellness practices; family photos; and heirlooms are used to create the artworks through collage. There are multiple photo collage pieces representing the interviewed families’ unique stories of how they spent time together, particularly outdoors, which highlight the similarities and connections between families. These pieces are a combination of photography, collage, and textiles specific to the community’s stories. The artworks are for, and inspired by, the community, designed to break down barriers and increase cultural connections.

Mickalene Thomas challenges current standards and asserts new definitions of beauty and inspiration through her groundbreaking photographs in Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and companion exhibition, tête-à-tête. Identifying photography as a touchstone for her practice, much of her work functions as an act of deconstruction and appropriation—she draws inspiration widely, borrowing various visual motifs including 1970s black-is-beautiful imagery, 19th-century French painting, and 20th-century studio portraiture.

Equally important, the photographs presented reflect a personal community of inspiration—a collection of muses that includes Thomas herself and her mother, friends, and lovers. These muses emphasize the communal and social aspects of art-making and creativity that pervade her work. Nearly 50 artworks are highlighted in Muse, including a three-dimensional tableau reminiscent of a seventies-era domestic space, replicating the studio installation where Thomas and her models collaborate.

Communities of inspiration are further highlighted in tête-à-tête, an exhibition curated by Thomas. This mini-exhibition within the larger Muse show includes works by ten artists that have inspired Thomas. Placed consciously in dialogue with her own work, these artists contend with many of the same themes central to Thomas’ practice.

Together, these exhibitions create a robust visual conversation about representation of the black body in today’s society and provide opportunities for guests to reflect on how various forms of visual culture help shape their own identities and how they, too, collect and process information.

Exhibition is organized by Aperture Foundation, New York.

Highlighting uncertainty and contradiction, Truth or Dare emphasizes the importance of questioning both knowledge and belief by featuring artists that utilize illusion to entice, entertain, and explore the slippery terrain between fact and fiction, presence and absence, and reality and imagination. The suspension of disbelief is invoked in works that simulate games, maps, and tricks of the eye and hand—not to deceive, but to engage and connect. Today, cartography is a relic, replaced with global positioning systems that describe geography through virtual, screen-based information that appears and disappears in a keystroke. If maps have outlived their original use, what truth might they still tell? In contemporary art, maps, along with books and other printed texts, remain potent sources of inspiration for exploring the intersections of knowledge and fantasy, and of experience and imagination.

Facing continuing global strife, political instability, and economic disparity, the artworks featured in Truth or Dare speak truth to power through unconventional, often playful juxtapositions of imagery and materials, asking viewers to look and think—and question—twice. At a time when alternate facts equate to misrepresentations of truth, the alternate fictions of art may speak more honest, deeper truths. The alternative reality of the 21st-century artist’s imaginative universe may offer the ideal arena in which to confront the present and envision the future.

Featured Artists: Slater Bradley, Nick Brandt, Sebastiaan Bremer, Alain Declercq, Adonis Flores, Anthony Goicolea, Luis Gonzalez Palma, Ann Hamilton, Miler Lagos, Yousseff Nabil, Paolo Ventura, Federico Somi

Also on view –  Spotlight: LaToya Ruby Frazier

Massive global migrations have changed our psychological landscape and the ideas we have about place. These dislocations—as much mental and physical as geographic—have transformed ways of life in both places of origin and the new places of migratory settlement. In this installation, the idea of territoriality or lack thereof, of belonging or not, does not allude to a particular culture but to the symbolic spaces of common reference of disparate cultures. Displacement: Collective Practice to Recover Memory explores the use of historic personal and collective archives that today condition and shape the territory of Kettering and the greater Dayton area.

Displacement: Collective Practice to Recover Memory is a site-specific multi-media installation and collaboration with artist Juan-Sí González, Rosewood Arts Centre, the City of Kettering, and area residents. Through research and the review of visual memory items such as individual and family photographs, as well as Kettering and Dayton’s historical archives, the project developed into a multi-media installation.

Interdisciplinary artist Juan-Sí González was born in Cuba. He has lived in Ohio since 2003, during which time he received three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards. His work was included in Memoria: Cuban Art of the 20th Century, has been exhibited at many prominent museums and institutions, and is included in several private and public collections.

Impression is an archive of photos captured during a ten-month long public installation in which participants were invited to sit in front of a mirror, reflect, look into their own eyes, lean in for a kiss, and knowingly be photographed.

The imagery in this collection is an experiment in human nature: showing people in various expressions of joy, disgust, exhibitionism, love, embarrassment, and confusion. Artists Janet Creekmore and Ben Jason Neal use a low-tech HD camera and high-tech, pixel-sensitive software for the project. This conceptual, social-practice work pushes boundaries and tests the limits of what people are willing to do in a public or a private space, evoking a voyeuristic feeling in the viewer, where the documentation of the experience and the photographic results explores ideas of sexuality, gender, self, cultures and identity.

The Cincinnati Art Museum presents the region’s first major exhibition featuring the British conceptual artist Gillian Wearing, whose work is widely regarded as being among the most significant artistic statements of our time. Since her emergence in the London art scene of the 1990s, Wearing has taken as her subject nothing less than the experience of being human. Her photographs, videos, and sculptures illuminate unspoken dimensions of our most common relationships and acts, shedding light on the ways we inhabit personae and expose or conceal interior thoughts and desires. Life: Gillian Wearing includes a concise selection of the artist’s iconic lens-based works along with three new projects receiving their world premiere in Cincinnati.

Wearing, who won the Turner Prize in 1997 and was appointed O.B.E. in 2011 for services to art, is best known for documenting strangers’ thoughts and confessions through film and photography, as well as re-presenting herself as other artists or family members through the use of masks and elaborate staging. The video installations and still photographs on view at the Museum chart new territory in the artist’s engagement with identity, self-revelation, and contemporary media culture, exploring tensions between public and private life, the drive to tell our own secrets and know the secrets of others, and the blurry line between documentation and a constructed point of view.

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of Isaac Julien’s landmark 1989 film Looking for Langston, the Columbus Museum of Art presents an installation of the film alongside a selection of related photographic works. Made at the height of the AIDS epidemic in London and New York, Looking for Langston is composed of archival moving images and original footage that reimagines on the life of poet Langston Hughes and a community of gay artists during the Harlem Renaissance. The film collapses both time and geography, mixing the words of Hughes, James Baldwin, and Essex Hemphill and the sounds of blues, jazz, and 1980s house music.

While some photographic works distill the narrative of the film, others reflect upon its own making and artistic lineages. Julien’s sumptuous monochrome images consciously mine the aesthetics of black and queer histories, from James VanDerZee’s funerary and studio portraits of Harlem residents during the 1920s and 1930s, to George Platt Lynes’s male nudes during the 1930s, to Robert Mapplethorpe’s erotized photographs of black men during the 1980s. Foregrounding black, queer experiences within both an American and international context, the work maintains its urgency today.

Isaac Julien: Looking for Langston will be presented in conjunction with I, Too, Sing America, a major survey exhibition of painting, sculpture, photography, literature, music, and film made in Harlem and beyond during the 1920s and 1930s, including 40 photographs by James VanDerZee.

Domus Oculi, House of Eyes, is a contemporary interpretation of a camera obscura created for the FotoFocus Biennial 2018 by Cincinnati artist Erin Taylor. It is a freestanding structure housing a collection of camera obscura viewing devices made from lenses repurposed from film cameras and slide projectors—traditional capture and viewing devices that have become antiquated in today’s digital age. By appropriating the lenses, this work gives a new life to analog technologies. Each lens has unique properties and varying brightness, sharpness, angle of view, and focal length. Domus Oculi provides real-time views of lighting conditions, weather, and pedestrian and automobile traffic.

This work acts as a counterpoint to the deluge of images we encounter in our digital world and redirects our attention to the world around us. Simultaneously, Domus Oculi acts as a transitory archive of the Camp Washington neighborhood, connecting the viewer to this often overlooked city fabric. Domus Oculi expands lens-based art into the realm of installation, while acknowledging photography’s historic origins.

Taylor’s artistic practice is a culmination of years of experience in photography, architecture, wood-working, metal-working, installation, sculpture, and glass. His work references pre-film and pre-cinematic concepts and devices. He is an Adjunct Professor and Digital Fabrication Specialist at the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning.

Extension Viewing Dates:
November 10th-11th, 2018 from Noon – 4PM
November 17th-18th, 2018 from Noon – 4PM

The present seems to flow ceaselessly through the tiny sliver of memory nature allotted us—memories we try to hold onto (if only for a moment) in their vast immensity. It is this ineptness of memory, the apparent smallness of it, that has motivated people throughout history to try and capture it with more permanent and capable mediums. We attempt to hold on to the artifacts of experience by inscribing them on everything around us—on cave walls, stone tablets, animal hides, trees, electrical currents, even the binary spins of electrons themselves.

In Place of Forgetting is an interactive multi-channel audio-visual installation exploring the contemporary overabundance of memory and its impact on the quality of the experiences we attempt to remember. With each repost, recontextualization, reiteration, or translation, a connection to the original moment is further obscured. Viewers traverse this sense of iterative loss through their physical interactions, shaping their experience by sifting through and reassembling text and images sourced from an archive of historical Cincinnati postcards collected by Mark Rohling, Senior Exhibition Designer/Chief Preparator at the Taft Museum of Art. By influencing which fragments of the audio archive are amplified through their action, the visitors evoke new and unique relationships between them, continuously transforming their context. One box tells a story, while its companions speak in counterpoint and a pair on the side hold a conversation. A trio sing in harmony together, their voices echoing the marks of handwriting scribed on the back of each postcard.

Intermedio also presents Mid-Day Ghost, a collaborative composition combining spoken word, stories, and experimental vocal sounds with interactive multichannel audio, performed by multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Jennifer Simone and saxophonist Om Srivastava. Through interactions with the installation In Place of Forgetting, Mid-Day Ghost explores the ephemerality of our contemporary experiences and how they are shaped by memories of the past—what we keep and what we leave behind.

Download the INTERMEDIO: In Place of Forgetting Gallery Guide as a PDF.

The works created for the REFUGE waiting room and corridors will be displayed publicly to raise awareness about the Health Hub and break down barriers to cultural connection. In partnership with the exhibition at the Health Hub, Emily Hanako Momohara and six ArtWorks Apprentices created photo collages through collaboration with refugee families in the Evanston and Walnut Hills neighborhoods that are on display within the new Health Hub, next to the Academy of World Languages in Evanston. The public component in Washington Park makes the work accessible to a wider audience and opens up conversations about family histories, cultural connections, and our universal similarities.