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.

Is it possible to create a narrative of a life lived from saved (but long-forgotten) photos, slides, negatives, documents, and objects kept for safekeeping in an old children’s bank—one looking like a miniature safe with a combination lock—the combination for which is lost and must be broken into?

Evidence (of a life lived) presents this “archive” as a series of questions. Do the images, documents, and mementos one saves contain enough information in themselves to construct a narrative of a life lived? Do they contain evidence of the broader picture, the times in which they were created? The place they were created? What do they say about what one saves for an unknown future, and why? Will the viewer find their own meaning in the images and construct a different narrative of a life lived through the anonymous archive presented?

Artists Lorena Molina, Gina Osterloh, and Carman Winant form the foundation for this group show that portrays the female experience though photographs, videos, film, and performance.

Capturing and Archiving the Female Experience also includes a reading room with the latest and most respected photography publications, specifically focused on books about photography by and of women that convey the feminine experience in either the past or the present as part of the exhibition. Active programming in the space such as coffee and tea service and artist and student-led discussion groups are important to the exhibition’s impact and meaning. Conversations and connections made in real time are an essential component of the exhibition. At the close of the exhibition, the reading room materials will become part of the permanent collection of the UC DAAP Library, and will be a valuable resource for the faculty, students and community members.

Vanguard composer and pianist Vijay Iyer and Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole perform the powerful interdisciplinary collaboration Blind Spot at Cincinnati’s historic Memorial Hall. Cole’s striking photography and spoken words are accompanied by a live score performed by Iyer’s adept trio—Okkyung Lee (cello), Patricia Brennan (vibes and marimba), Stephan Crump (bass)—for a musical investigation of humanity’s voluntary blindness to tragedy and injustice throughout history.

Introduction by Drew Klein, FotoFocus Guest Curator and Contemporary Arts Center Performing Arts Director, Cincinnati, OH

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

Painters often draw from 
existing visual materials, such as photographs and reproductions of past works of art, to inspire and construct their work. Swedish artist Mamma Andersson (born 1962)—known for her dreamlike, faintly narrative compositions inspired by Nordic painting, folk art, newspaper photographs, and cinema—is no exception.

But Andersson takes this process a step or two further, importing images of stacks of books and stray photographs, clipped from various sources, directly into her painted compositions. With careful observation, Andersson’s dreamy landscapes and interiors (often combined) slowly come to reveal common imagery and accumulated biblio-ephemera filtered through, and sharing space with, the artist’s muted palette, melancholic scenery, and textural paint. Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks focuses on this aspect of Andersson’s painting practice, exploring how her use of appropriated imagery and collaged elements charges her paintings with an eerie, uncanny sense of familiarity while indulging in wholehearted fantasy and suggestive narrative.

Karin Mamma Andersson was born in 1962 in Luleå, Sweden. She studied at the Royal College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where she continues to live and work. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany; the Aspen Art Museum; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In 2003, she represented the Nordic Pavilion in the 50th Venice Biennale. In addition to Memory Banks, she is the 2018 recipient of the Guerlain Drawing Prize, Paris, and a participant in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo.

Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks (Damiani) is published on the occasion of the FotoFocus Biennial 2018 and Andersson’s exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.

Download the Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks Gallery Guide as a PDF.

Acclaimed Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari combines the roles of image-maker, archivist, curator, filmmaker, and critical theorist to explore the performative role photography plays in fashioning identity. As one of a handful of young artists who emerged from fifteen years of civil war and a short-lived era of experimentation in Lebanon’s television industry, his work demonstrates an enduring appreciation for amateur, journalistic, and commercial photographic practices. Zaatari is also a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), an organization established in Beirut to preserve, study, and exhibit photographs from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora from the 19th-century to today. Within this endeavor Zaatari discovered the photographs of Hashem El Madani (1928–2017), who recorded the lives of everyday individuals inside and outside his humble Saida studio in the late 1940s and 1950s. These photos are deceptively factual in appearance, sliding between demure documentation and revealing displays of subconscious desire that exceed the capacity of the lens.

In an interdisciplinary practice that thereby positions lens-based media as both specimen and subterfuge, Zaatari participates in the discourse against photography and its complex archival legacy. For this exhibition he positions the seemingly simple fold as a narrative form, a reorganization, an enduring obfuscation, and the memory of material. In his words, “a photograph captures space and folds it into a flat image, turning parts of a scene against others, covering them entirely. Every photograph hides parts to reveal others… What a photograph missed and that was present at the time of exposure will remain inaccessible. In those folds lies a history, many histories.” The work on display will attempt to uncover and imagine these stories, undertaking a provocative archaeology that peers into the fissures, scratches, erosion, and that which archives previously shed. Surveying the fertile interstices, Zaatari explains, “Unfolding is undoing, deconstructing, turning material back to its initial form.”

Download the Akram Zaatari: The Fold – Space, time and the image Gallery Guide as a PDF.