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

BasketShop Gallery presents the work of Chivas Clem. After more than a decade living in New York, where he garnered international esteem as a multi-media artist, Clem moved back to his hometown of Paris, Texas. While documenting a bookstore in the small town, he befriended many of the transient men residing there and started to form an emotional bond with them. He describes them as “…drifting through life on the fringes. They represent a kind of rugged masculinity that is connected to the myths of the American West—but what were once ‘cowboys’ have mutated into ‘rednecks’—used in the pejorative to describe a certain kind of hyper-masculine terror. It connotes racism and homophobia: a scene of jacked-up trucks covered in confederate flags.” Clem says, “I grew up gay in this place—small town, deep south—and these were the kinds of men that made my life miserable. Now they are the only people I relate to, as they are outsiders themselves. I can now reconcile the twin feelings of desire and fear that gave them so much psychic power in my youth.”

Clem’s focus is on documenting the environment around this maligned subgroup of Americans—disenfranchised, heterosexual, white men. Through their own hubris, they have had to sustain a type of social armor from a heritage that is too complex to serve them. Clem’s photography searches beyond the guarding that these men endure and adorns them with an intimate portrayal of their frailties.

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.

Artist Emily Hanako Momohara investigates themes of immigration, identity, and labor within the framework of her own family narrative: from a famine entrenched Okinawa, Japan to Hawaii’s mainland America. In Hawaii, her great-grandparents worked on a pineapple plantation. They toiled through the day, grooming and harvesting the fields, at times with a child wrapped to their backs. Eventually, they were able to build their own three-room house. It was within the confines of those three rooms where the family of 11 grew, struggled, and thrived. While pineapples from the Hawaiian Islands were shipped to the mainland as luxury items, this exotic fruit is symbolic for the complex geographic and social paths her family has taken from immigrant farm work to consumers of luxury goods. Using imagery of agriculture and migration to unpack her personal and family story, Momohara allows one to critically reflect on the diverse experiences of immigrants in America.

Whitney Hubbs uses non-traditional portraiture to address representation of the female body. She photographs other women, as stand-ins for herself, in awkward and physically uncomfortable positions—domestic figures with textiles or green cleaning gloves combined with poses of the objectified female body from both art history and popular culture. Hubbs references headless busts from global antiquity and mannequins from department stores while asserting control over how a woman’s body is seen.

Within the archive of female bodies throughout art history, men have been the dictators. A scolding of modern photography’s use of objectified women was the inspiration for Body Doubles. Hubbs directly responds to Edward Weston’s nude images of his wife, with the word “woman” and a number, referencing Willem de Kooning’s “Woman I” and “Woman II,” which notoriously render a woman’s single breast larger than her head. Carol Duncan’s 1989 article “MOMA’s Hot Mommas” from Art Journal, says of “Woman I:” “de Kooning knowingly and assertively exercises his patriarchal privilege of objectifying male sexual fantasy as high culture.” Hubbs reclaims ownership of the female figure. She challenges the male gaze and subverts tradition by directing the viewer to a woman’s response to art historical poses and representations of the body.

In this divided era, where world powers openly threaten to unleash enormous nuclear arsenals, Nuclear Fallout: The Bomb in Three Archives excavates the collective memory of the effects and aftermath of nuclear war. This interdisciplinary collaboration re-examines archival slides, photographs, 16mm films, objects, and documents from three markedly different archives: the U.S. National Archives military training films, multimedia materials from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Memorial Collection of the Wilmington College Peace Resource Center, and the ideologically sanitized exhibits of the National Museum of the United States Air Force, which spotlight Bocks Car—the B-29 bomber that dropped the plutonium Fat Man bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. Embedded in the project are two renowned Japanese-American artists Kei Ito and Migiwa Orimo, working within the three archives to create installations responding to the conceptual “scotomas,” gaps, blurrings, and erasures that exist in our faded recollections of these events in history. Through this collaboration, Nuclear Fallout asks its audiences to critically consider the way war is curated in our cultural telling—asking who creates the narrative, whose stories are missing, and who is no longer alive to tell it.

Nuclear Fallout is organized by Jennifer Wenker, curator and creative director of the Herndon Gallery at Antioch College; Tanya Maus (Ph.D., Japanese History), director of the Peace Resource Center; Migiwa Orimo, four-time recipient of the OAC Individual Excellence Award; Charles Fairbanks, Guggenheim fellow, award-winning filmmaker, and Assistant Professor of Media Art at Antioch College; and the students critically engaged in collaboration with these academic mentors.

Social Medium exhibits and facilitates projects that create archives of communities made collaboratively with the communities being documented. Artists have made a place for themselves in the world of social work, being recognized as instigators for community redevelopment and for being able to build communication and collaboration in communities through creative means. Photography in particular has been used to create, document, and share communities, and as with the majority of art practices, in most photographic processes there is the artist, and then there is the subject.

In the world of social-practice art, where the aim is to create community and enact social change, the dynamic between photographer and model, artist and subject, can be problematic. Are we creating community or simply documenting it? Celebrating and bringing attention to populations or exploiting them? In response to this conflict of interest and the struggle of well-intentioned social-practice photographers to find the balance between using a camera to tell a story versus creating a new one, there has been a surge of photographic experiments that blur the lines between photographer and subject, artist and community.

Social Medium displays the results of several of these collaborative approaches to photography, and sees a shared, community-based photography project come to fruition with our own community.

Featured Artists: Eliza Gregory, Gemma-Rose Turnbull, Rebecca Hackemann, Mark Strandquist, Jason Lazarus, Chris Johnson, Hank Willis Thomas, Bayete Ross Smith, Kamal Sinclair, C. Jacqueline Wood, Natalie Mancino