The Lens

1,000 miles per hour; the approximate speed of the Earth’s rotation at the equator. Two milestone projects of design from the 1970s, Voyager Golden Record and Powers of Ten, act as pivot points for a collection of works by contemporary artists that take on the challenge of recording our world.

Throughout this exhibition, featuring artworks from the collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, the vantage points and relative scale shift. Several artworks relate more clearly through a shared relationship to space, beyond... Continue reading 1,000 miles per hour

The exhibition It Is What lt Is (Subject to Change) consists of five artists who explore the mutability of video, with approaches ranging from the documentary to the poetic. Diana Duncan Holmes uses a low res, almost primitive video to document a Shaker Village and at the same time answer questions about favorites in life (animals, authors, etc.). Russel Johnson documents the process of turning the sap of maple trees into syrup, boiling something down to its essence. Mark Patsfall inserts myriad video records into static paintings, changing the meanings of both. Charles Woodman collaborates with... Continue reading It Is What It Is (Subject to Change)

All houses, once lived in, have stories. Some are mere whispers, others scream. A home’s visual history interprets the movements of its residents, through time. Like us, houses breathe and have lives. In Mature, the images of the Stair House capture the passage of time before the transformation into a new chapter arrives. This new chapter is coupled with the passing of Marie Ward (1927–2020), who lived in the house for the past 50 years, and speaks to the Appalachian-migration experience of Cincinnati in the mid-20th century. A video interview with Ward speaks to the experience of living... Continue reading Mature

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

The Maidens of the Cosmic Body Running use media as a performance of desire, perpetuating delusional relationships with the natural world. Their work is presented as a fictional “record” of natural space, reduced to a slick and seductive surface. The Maidens are the Summit Hotel’s year-long artists-in-residence. Hotels are powerful sites for the Maidens. Often situated near places of natural beauty (the Summit sits near the confluence of the Little Miami and Ohio Rivers), they provide a clean, safe home base from which one can fantasize about the idealized natural world ‘just over there.’ The Maidens’ project, inspired by the romantic... Continue reading Better Close Than Never