Four Lens-Based Shows To See This Fall

The idea of fall arts seasons may feel like a hazy dream from another lifetime, but take heart, dear Queen City: There are several exhibitions in the region you won’t want to miss this fall — listed in order of closing date.

RESIDUE, The Carnegie

A group show curated by Maria Seda Reeder, RESIDUE considers the relationship between art and audience — and how that engagement intertwines with, and changes, the work. Or in their words: “While artists act to create objects and images for us to experience, audiences co-create meaning through the lens of our lived, visceral encounters with it—and that resulting residue created within the viewer likewise becomes part of the work’s resulting meaning.

The work of 11 artists, including photographers Lara Aguilar and Nona Faustine, fills the gallery. And should you pass by after dark, you’ll be privy to a video projection by Empire Citizens on The Carnegie’s exterior windows. Take a virtual walk-through of the exhibition, then get off your screen, put on your mask, and go see it IRL.

June 17–October 2, Thursday–Saturday 12–5pm and by appointment.

AMERICA REIMAGINED, Kennedy Heights Arts Center

Seventy-six photographs and four photographic essays from the Boyd’s Station online collection of photojournalism are, for the first time, being printed and shown publicly. The mission? “To document a country in transition and create a documentary collection in the American story.” Boyd’s Station, a nonprofit arts and journalism residency in Harrison County, Kentucky, partnered with American Reportage to mentor and showcase emerging photojournalists, while also showing work from their archives.

The result: “an intimate look at the ways Americans are grappling with, and adjusting to, this disruptive moment in history [that] documents how life reacts and evolves with each new challenge, from the COVID-19 pandemic which pushed the country into its homes and social distancing to the fight for social justice which reunited millions in protest and solidarity in streets.” 

September 4–October 30, Kennedy Gallery: Tuesday–Friday 10 am–5 pm, Saturday 11 am–4 pm. Opening reception Saturday, September 4, 6–8 pm.

Bruce Bennett: Love II and Kandice Odister: The Barbie is Her/Me: A Reflection of Black Women during Quarantine, Weston Art Gallery

Two exhibitions forthcoming at Weston Art Gallery use alternative — and varying degrees of uncanny — modes of exploring home life: the mirror, and the dollhouse vignette.

Bruce Bennett’s large-scale black-and-white photographs, shot as the reflection in a mirror, are “a visual representation of Black Love from the perspective of the artist and his partner captured in intimate and informal self-portraits within their home environment.”

Cincinnati artist Kandice Odister turned to her camera and her collection of Black Barbies during lockdown “to create vignettes and photographs in a visual depiction of the lives of several Black women who’ve inspired the artist during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Catch the Gallery Talk with Bruce Bennett Saturday, November 20, and the Gallery Talk with Kandice Odister on Tuesday, December 14.

November 19–January 16, Wednesday–Saturday, 11 am–4 pm.

Sreshta Rit Premnath, CAC

If uncertainty and waiting sound, um, familiar, consider Sreshta Rit Premnath’s exhibition a chance for catharsis. Through sculpture, video, photography, and installations, he creates works “that draw on the formal legacies of minimalism and conceptualism to think through the politics of boundaries, bodies, and labor.”

This exhibition of his, in particular, “foreground[s] the conditions of those who were already living a precarious and disenfranchised existence … alluding to oppressive regimes through time and space that conspire against vulnerable people and populations through modes of incarceration, bureaucratic delay, or chronic waiting.”

September 17–February 27, Wednesday 10 am–7 pm, Thursday & Friday 12–7 pm, Saturday 10 am–4pm.

With any luck (and masks and vaccinations), this is just a small sample of the in-person arts exhibitions and events returning to the region, this fall and beyond.