The Lens

Artist and activist Felipe Rivas San Martín’s multimedia practice fuses artistic representation with technology. In 1999, homosexuality was decriminalized in the artist’s home country, Chile. Since this shift in legality, Rivas San Martín’s work explores the existence of sexual diversity, while being critical of the notion that certain sexualities are inherently “deviant.”

In the series A Non-Existent Queer Archive, Rivas San Martín employs artificial intelligence to generate photographs of homosexual couples, resulting in sepia-toned portraits. In the absence of a long-documented queer history within his culture, Rivas San Martín creates his own records, stories, and visual markers of pasts... Continue reading Spotlight: Felipe Rivas San Martín

Artist Gary Beeber tells stories of people who have unique perspectives, typically contrary to social norms. In Michael Malone: A Portrait of an American Organic Farmer, Beeber’s film and photographs, taken between 2022 and 2023, showcase the life of Michael Malone, capturing the demands of routine farm life and how they conflict with the artist’s initial perception of Malone’s character. Beeber’s playful work highlights Malone’s personality, with the works providing a glimpse into Michael’s connection with the local Dayton-Centerville farming community, his relationship to organic food, and his views on the larger agricultural industry in America.

This exhibition explores invented, poetic spaces examining astronomical phenomena and the communicative nature of the heavens. Using a scanner as the lens, digital collages are constructed to suggest a fabricated reality exploring mysticism and creation through imagery related to the celestial, landscape, body, and mind. Taking inspiration from the classic zodiac and tales of the constellations, which some believe provide insight into a person’s history and future, an imaginary pictorial map is drawn. 

Analogous to how myths provided explanations to natural and perceived experiences, this work draws the viewer into a sphere of lore... Continue reading Tracy Longley-Cook: Paths of the Ecliptic

Sean Wilkinson’s exhibition meditates on one of the primary functions that has developed within the zeitgeist of photography: the significance of objects, places, and histories that are often left unseen. Wilkinson has developed his own style from the complicated act of seeing, where images are deliberately shot out of focus, pointing out the lack of detail and opposing one of the most convincing virtues of photography: clear focus.

As the image is blurred, the viewer has to identify the subject to understand the meaning. Since the immeasurable detail of a photograph has astonishing power,... Continue reading Sean Wilkinson

In 2023, UNESCO designated World Heritage Site status to a group of four Hopewell sites in Ohio, adding them to the ranks of the Taj Mahal, Stonehenge, and Machu Picchu as places of “outstanding value to humanity.” This extraordinary group of Hopewell earthworks represents a tiny portion of the approximately 10,000 Adena, Hopewell, and Fort Ancient Earthworks that dotted the Ohio Valley at the end of the 18th century. Today, fewer than 1,000 earthworks remain. In the 250 years since European-American settlers made their unrelenting push into the Ohio Valley woodlands, many of the tall conical mounds, long ridges, and geometric... Continue reading Cultural Exchange:: What Remains: A Contemporary Interpretation of Native American Earthworks in The Ohio Valley