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.

Dye Transfer: The Eastman Kodak Company ceased production of Pan Matrix Film, which was required to produce a dye transfer print in 1991 and by 1994 the company did away with all other dye transfer materials. Today, the dye transfer process is nearly a lost art. Popularized by famed photographers such as Irving Penn, William Eggleston, and Robert Mapplethorpe, the medium of dye transfer is very different from modern color print processes. Dye transfer is an incredibly detailed and exceptionally difficult process and the degree of skill required to make a successful image is unique to very few photographers working today. Utilizing the exact machine previously-owned and operated by Irving Penn, Tyler Shields uses the dye transfer process to produce an unparalleled colored image that is the absolute finest quality in color printing and attempts to create the largest dye transfer print ever made.

Platinum Palladium: In the late 19^th-century, this printing process used palladium rather than silver as the light sensitive material required to develop an image. Ed Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, and Paul Strand were supporters of the technique, but due to the exorbitant material costs, palladium printing fell out of fashion. Tyler uses the palladium printing process to produce unique works that possess incredible depth and beauty. As with his dye transfer prints, Tyler hopes to create the largest palladium photographs ever made with the medium. Tyler’s ambitious work makes immortal the important processes of photography’s past.

Also on view: Interactive Dark Room Installation.

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

The exhibition is a celebration of residents working to create a greater sense of community in the city of Mason, which has experienced a rapid rise in residents over the past 20 years. A once small and sleepy farm town has morphed into suburban sprawl with more than 30,000 residents. In a place where, not very long ago, everyone knew everyone, there is now a large contingent of people who are transient; residing only for a few years before they move on. As a result, the city struggles to create a sense of community and bridge the line between Old Mason and New Mason. In celebration of those residents striving to build a greater sense of community, local artists were invited to take their portraits. These artists honor those individuals and their contributions to increasing the well-being of the community. The portraits are the backbone of the exhibit, surrounded by photo-booth style images of the greater community. The exhibition is intended to encourage and inspire communication and interaction throughout the community of Mason.

Featured Artists: Tracy Doyle, Chrystal Scanlon, Kim Kalo, William Northern, Tracy Fitch, Jon Williams

In the not-too-distant past, the world waited and watched with bated breath as space travel developed before their eyes. Outside/In/Inside/Out explores various archives that have documented these ventures into the great unknown. Through the astronaut’s lens we are presented with our planet’s vulnerable beauty. Photos from the Mercury 7 and Apollo 11 missions are represented in this exhibition, with early, grainy photographs documenting man’s first glimpses of the earth taken by hand-held cameras.

Alongside these historic and iconic images are more recent photographs of galaxies taken with high-powered telescopes equipped with the most advanced photographic technology, like the Hubble Space Telescope. Outside/In/Inside/Out takes a glimpse into these important astronomical moments from past and recent human history and emphasizes the need for these recorded images to be seen and preserved for future generations.

Outside/In/Inside/Out is curated by Michael Stillion.

Featured Artists: TBA

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.

The ARCHIVE [negative] project includes the work of roughly a dozen regional and/or national photographers selected by Manifest Resident Instructor and Photographer Michael Wilson. Public demonstration days led up to the exhibition allowing the public to observe and interact with Wilson in a laboratory-like collaboration. Wilson worked with the negatives provided by each participating photographer and printed them in the Manifest darkroom.

Featured Artists: Matthew Albritton, Barry Andersen, Gordon Baer, Maureen France, Melvin Grier, Barbara Houghton, Cal Kowal, Guennadi Maslov, Maurice Mattei, Nancy Rexroth, Gregory Rust, Brad Smith, Jane Alden Stevens, Connie Sullivan

As a part of New York’s blossoming art community in the early 1960s, Peter Moore (1932–1993) began what was to become an unmatched photographic archive of the defiance and spirit of the era’s Fluxus, Judson Dance Theater, and countless other happenings and performances. Moore’s work documents that heated moment in the art world when experimental performance, music, dance, and visual art intersected in radical and transformative ways.

Among the most radical were those staged by female artists, poetically preserved through Moore’s thoughtful eye. His photographs are often the sole visual records of the ephemeral events choreographed by artists like Charlotte Moorman, Lucinda Childs, Simone Forti, Anna Halprin, Deborah Hay, Joan Jonas, Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, and Jackie Winsor.

Forty years later, Carl Solway Gallery presents Moore’s photographs as a pivotal historical recollection of the artists at the forefront of avant-garde experimentation during the late ’60s. Selected from his archive of more than a half-million photographs, this show presents iconic images of Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, and Yoko Ono. Conceived in collaboration with Barbara Moore, the show includes black and white as well as color photographs.

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?

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.