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

In #cloudingjudgements, Joel Armor examines his personal collection of cell phone photos and calls on individuals from the surrounding community to examine their own. Armor analyzes the impact that photographic accessibility and infinite storage archives have on each of us, as we repeatedly point and shoot with our phones. Through a variety of outreach programs that include a lecture on memory and mindfulness, a technology detox workshop, and a community-based catalog, participants are asked to consider the effects that these tools impart on our daily psyche, relationships, and personal memory. Armor extends the question into the often invisible and endless archival cloud-based storage system, and the consequences it places on our mental and emotional well-being, as we reconcile the role of hierarchy and space through what he describes as mental hoarding.

Featuring images of Sharonville and locations within five miles, from the perspectives of five artists, Sharonville +5: Then, Now, and Interpreted looks at a community’s history interpreted from the past through the present and how to save it for the future. Five photographers were invited to review local archival images for inspiration and identify images and places that resonated with them. The challenge was to then record their community including significant landmarks that have been documented in the archives of the Society of Historic Sharonville, Gorman Heritage Farm, Heritage Village Museum and Educational Center, and Great Parks of Hamilton County. This exercise is both an artistic reflection of and response to the community of Sharonville.

Featured Artists: Joseph John Bayer, West Chester; Bernadette Clemens-Walatka, Blue Ash; Susan Ernst, Sharonville; Becky Linhardt, Sharonville; Lynda Rust, Mt. Healthy

ARCHIVE [photo] brings together works of photographic and lens-based art that in one way or another, literally or figuratively, represents the concept of archive. As an accumulation of records or the place they are located, archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization’s lifetime and are kept (or presented) to show the function of that person or organization. Manifest’s mission, as a nonprofit entity, is to function as an organizational archive of the artwork and artists’ histories it presents and interacts with. This juried exhibition, along with the other exhibitions on view at Manifest, provides a comparison between photo and non-photo approaches and inspires consideration of the role of visual art in the process of housing, presenting, and preserving primary source information—and of one’s part in the process of interpreting or feeding into the archive.

Featured Artists: Mike Callaghan, Alyse Delaney, Karen Hillier, Jieun Beth Kim, David Knox, Kent Krugh, Isabella La Rocca, William Nourse, Vesna Pavlovic, Crystal Tursich, Jenny Zeller

Also on view: Four additional exhibitions on view during the FotoFocus 2018 Biennial at Manifest Creative Research Gallery. Three solo photography shows and one ARCHIVE (non photo) themed show. The Photo Solo exhibitions will include works by Wes Battoclette, Greg Sand, and Dominic Lippillo.

A series of abstract, color-driven photographs and micro-videos by Joshua Kessler serve as a meditation on how technology has so fundamentally changed the way that we consume and experience imagery. Since the first recorded image ever taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, the basic elements of photography have not changed. In its most reductive form, photography is a study of light, shadow, and shape. What has evolved is how we view the resulting images, whether they are daguerreotypes nestled in a velvet box, framed salt prints, or, most recently, pixels on a screen. Frame Rate is a meditation on the pure joy of experiencing light, shadow, and shape while commenting on the way we encounter imagery today—whether it be a single-framed photograph, an Instagram-style grid, the liquid flow of a Facebook feed, or snappy micro-videos. The essential DNA of image-making has stayed the same, but the volume and speed with which we consume it has changed.

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

First appearing on earth in 2012, the Forealism Tribe hails from another dimension. This group of inter-dimensional travelers are tourists of earth and observers of the human condition. Functioning as quasi-anthropologists, they travel earth to seek out, discover, view, participate in, and learn from human activities, rituals, events, and environments. Throughout their existence, the Forealisms and the humans that they have befriended have documented their travels, appearances, and adventures in both photographs and video.

For the first time anywhere in the universe, The Forealism Files presents their collected documents and artifacts in an anthropological museum display that includes large-format “portrait” photographs of key characters; a selection of images documenting interactions and performances; edited video footage of Forealism activities; rotating displays of the character suits; live performances; and lectures.

Forealisms have visited and documented Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany; Skulptur Projekte, Münster, Germany; Art Basel, Miami Beach 2016; Houston, Texas; St. Louis, Missouri; numerous locations around Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky; and other locations in and outside the galaxy.