The Lens

Water remains our most elemental unknown. It is a trans-cultural and historical symbol of mythologies ranging from childbirth, miracles, purification and healing rituals, to mysterious sea creatures, falling icicles, and invisible toxins. Belief in water is strong and its powers both benevolent and deadly. Water can wash away sins, cure disease, and offer eternal youth. Or it can harbor “blobsters,” freeze explorers, and swamp cities, depending on the teller and the listener, the fraudster and the rube.

Crossing Neptune is an exhibition featuring archival works on the theme of water from the personal collection of artist Tony Oursler—photographs, mostly... Continue reading Tony Oursler: Crossing Neptune

FotoFocus and Weston Gallery present Liz Roberts: Post Blonde at CampSITE Sculpture Park. Post Blonde brings together new iterations of two works. In this site-specific work, the auto is immobilized and repeatedly disembodied to form a large movie screen made from salvaged windshields. The video projections in car windows and on screen question the notion of an afterward and what it means to try and create a record through video documentation.

Download the Liz Roberts: Post Blonde Gallery Guide as a PDF.

Continue reading Liz Roberts: Post Blonde

This exhibition highlights works concerned with the ebb and flow of social, political, and artistic trends and how these tropes and themes can return with differing focus and intensity. Presenting the swell of ideas, explorations, and concerns of emerging photographers from within the Midwest, the exhibition demonstrates how they see, process, and contextualize the recurrence and reemergence of social, political, and artistic trends in their own practices that establishes a new World Record. This exhibition serves as an artistic interpretation of world events/records from the perspective of emerging artists from across the Midwest. New Tides Continue reading New Tides

Baseera Khan shifts seamlessly between media to explore the interconnectedness of capital, politics, and the body. Their work in video, photography, sculpture, and performance creates spaces of reprieve, beauty, and safety, while also critiquing power structures and knowledge systems that systematically exclude or misrepresent marginalized populations. For their first solo exhibition in the Midwest, Khan brings together new and recent collages, sculptures, and video, alongside a major new commission that responds to architectural signifiers of power. Monumental in scale, Painful Arc (Shoulder-High) (2022), features a classical Islamic arch clad with custom pictographic paneling inscribed with loaded cultural... Continue reading Baseera Khan: Weight on History

What is the relationship between the natural world and civilization? Is it a battle between human creation and the natural world, an intense struggle to dominate the land? Or a soft, sad lullaby, pushing and pulling slowly like the tide between the two forces? This relationship is varied and nuanced from societal to personal disruptions. Nature responds, reclaiming its space after the impact of human life. The artists in I Don’t Know How to Love You: The Relationship Between Humans and Nature challenge the construction of narratives around this relationship. Sayler/Morris, a... Continue reading I Don’t Know How to Love You: The Relationship Between Humans and Nature