Past Exhibitions

2023

LATERAL PERSPECTIVE
A solo exhibition by Ethan Samaha
DECEMBER 9 - February 5

Kaiser Gallery presents 'Lateral perspective' a solo exhibition by Ethan Samaha. 'Lateral perspective' explores perception and perspective using wall based neon designs. The works question what’s in-front, behind, top, and bottom. Changing the viewer’s perspective as they traverse the space. Exploring the relations of color and form, these designs will range from monochrome to saturated, and will display subtle color shifts.

Check out the feature about this exhibit by Shawn Mishak in Cleveland Scene.

About Ethan Samaha
ETHAN SAMAHA is a visual artist working within light and space. Utilizing neon and sculpture to get an understanding of time, space, and perceptions in installations. He received a BFA in Sculpture and Dimensional Studies with minors in Performance Design & Technology and Dance from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2021.

Recent exhibitions/publications include The Hum and The Buzz, Neolite Gallery, St. Peters, Australia; 8th Annual Glass National Juried Exhibition, Workhouse Arts Center, Lorton, VA; Limitless, Florence Contemporary Gallery, Florence, Italy; New Glass Review, Issue 41, The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY

2022

"exhibition view" by Morgan Bukovec

SERVICE INDUSTRY STITCH PROJECT
today’s special: misogyny with a slice of sexism
Morgan Bukovec
November 11 - December 4

"SERVICE INDUSTRY STITCH PROJECT, today’s special: misogyny with a slice of sexism" invites viewers on a raw and emotional journey when exploring Morgan Bukovec's special installation project, a result of her decade-long work in the service industry. Kaiser Gallery will host an opening reception of Morgan’s new exhibition on Friday, November 11 from 6-9 p.m. at our location at 2418 Professor Avenue.

This series breathes with intention. Morgan works with found objects across mediums including collage, textiles, and installation, focusing on the themes of identity, storytelling, and fleeting moments and objects across time. The guest checkbooks featured in the installation, made their way into Morgan’s life when she unconsciously brought them home, accumulating them over the years of serving and bartending. Morgan stitches the words said to her by men that cannot be erased or undone. The sharp point of the sewing needle is a metaphor for the pain of microaggressions that slowly and unconsciously reveals themselves and worsen through repeated infliction. Her needle, sewing thread, and guest checkbooks act as tools of meditative resistance while referencing the historically rooted practice of cross-stitching and needlework as “women’s work.”

The SERVICE INDUSTRY STITCH PROJECT has grown into one-hundred works over the past 2 years that individually and collectively question the patriarchal dominated society we live in. This series acts as a living force of personal release, healing, and ownership of Morgan’s female form.

ARTIST BIO:
Morgan Bukovec (b. 1996) is a mixed media artist, educator, and collector of things from Cleveland, Ohio. In 2018, she was awarded bachelors degrees in both Fine Arts and Arts Education from the University of Dayton and since has worked with several community art spaces in Cleveland including moCa Cleveland, Spaces, Community Arts Center, Kaiser Gallery and Headspace Gallery, providing art engagement and workshops. Bukovec is interested in how art builds empathy through storytelling, which inspires her interdisciplinary art practice. Bukovec works with found objects across mediums including collage, textiles, and installation, focusing on the themes of identity, storytelling, and fleeting moments and objects across time. Recent invitational exhibitions include; solo exhibition, SERVICE INDUSTRY STITCH PROJECT, today’s special: misogyny with a slice of sexism at Kaiser Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio, two-person exhibition, Taking Up Space at Malone Art Gallery in Canton, Ohio, and Women’s Work: New Takes On Textile Art at Reeves House in Woodstock, Georgia.

Bukovec was recently awarded a gift grant by the Kanyer Art Collection to complete her 100 work series: SERVICE INDUSTRY STITCH PROJECT (@serviceindustrystitchproject). This series is the result of the past decade of her work in the service industry, aiming to highlight the power of words and personal reclamation. She recently moved back to Ohio from Prague, Czech Republic where she spent time teaching, exploring, and making art. She plans to further expand her creative endeavors, while planning for her next travel adventure.

LEIGH BROOKLYN: ALL OF ME
A solo exhibit by Leigh Brooklyn
October 7 - November 6

ARTIST STATEMENT
Specializing in figurative painting and drawing, my practice originates from an intense drive to create compelling images and stories meant to inspire and give hope. I have studied realism my entire life, dedicating my education to learning how to recreate what I observe with accurate detail.

My earlier work was created with the intention to give a voice to the voiceless, creating compelling portraits and figurative-based narrative paintings and drawings to provide representation for underrepresented communities and people. My education as a medical Illustrator has informed much of my practice with a concern for details and observation, but my work evolved to focus on stories and people. My passion for activism led me to paint stories imbued with causes like women’s rights, LGBTQ equality and acceptance, anti-racism, homelessness, gun reform, disability awareness, and many other subjects.

Although my current body of work still focuses on stories and people, I have now narrowed my focus toward women. Inspired largely by personal experiences and partly by the military presence in my family, my new body of work is focused on building an army of women warriors, armed and ready to defend the good in the world. One soldier at a time, I am creating a female militia to unite, overcome, uplift and fight for ourselves and each other. This army of diverse women are survivors who will overcome all battles, together and alone.

I want to contribute to this world while I am here, and my art is the way that I can do that. Guided by the tumultuous times in our culture, as well as my own personal battles, my work must uplift and motivate awareness and change. Through my work, I want to capture the issues that are important to our collective community, and inspire others with my symbolic soldiers.

LEIGH BROOKLYN BIOGRAPHY
Leigh Brooklyn, was born in 1987 outside of Cleveland, Ohio. In 2006 Brooklyn enrolled into the Columbus College of Art and Design. Later she transferred to The Cleveland Institute of Art after being inspired by the work of forensic artists who helped in a missing-person’s case. She earned her degree in Biomedical Illustration in 2011. Brooklyn worked with several hospitals, museums, and research facilities including the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, The Cleveland Botanical Gardens, The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Case Western Reserve University, and Novelmed Therapeutics.

After 2011 Brooklyn moved throughout the country gaining artistic inspiration from various individuals she met through her pursuit of street photography. After hearing all the incredible stories of those she encountered and drawing from her own personal experiences Brooklyn decided to switch her work’s focus back to her roots of figurative drawing and oil painting, eventually narrowing her focus on women empowerment after facing a personal upheaval.

In 2019 Brooklyn understudied a nationally acclaimed figurative sculptor where she learned techniques for creating large scale sculptures out of oil-based clay to be cast in bronze. That same year Brooklyn began learning various welding and fabrication techniques eventually earning a lifetime certification for 3G MIG welding in 2021.

Brooklyn has won a variety of awards for her art since 2004. She recently was a semi-finalist for Figurtivas at the MEAM in Barcelona, Spain and was a top artist and winner in the Boynes International Emerging Artist Awards in Melbourne, Australia. Her work has been displayed in galleries and museums all over the country including the Medici Museum of Art, the Makeshift Museum, the U.S. Capitol Building and Corcoran Museum, the Diane von Furstenberg Studios, along with many national galleries and international art fairs. She currently resides in her hometown of Cleveland and is represented by D. Colabella Fine Art Gallery, Art Unified, and District Gallery. She plans to further expand her artistic and humanitarian endeavors in the local, national, and international community.

Borderlands
September 9 - October 2, 2022
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, Sept 9, 6 PM - 9PM
Guest curator Karen Petkovic of BAYarts

Borderlands is an exhibition exploring themes of the vast unknown, asking artists to navigate the fine line between frontier and wasteland – both deal with the extremes of that which is barren and undeveloped-are these places either physically or theoretically empty or are they hopeful – on the brink of something – perhaps understanding.

Presenting the works of David Borawski, Brut Carniollus, Michael Greenwald, Scott Groeniger, Jeremy Jones, Eric Kunsman, Anne Manley, Raheleh Mohammad, Lily Rodriguez, Kritsen R. Simonsen, Kimberly Wetzel, Will Wilson, & Kristen T. Woodward.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

DAVID BORAWSKI
Artist Statement
"I create conceptually driven work comprised of sculpture, video, drawing and digital prints. the work reflects upon iconic cultural and societal events or moments that have influenced major shifts in our collective consciousness, but now may be near the point of forgetting.

For each exhibition, I combine and arrange multiple elements and mediums, which invoke visual and cognitive signs, or “clues”, that elicit a (sub)conscious nostalgia, building multiple layers of information to be considered and processed.

Both expressed and implied references to pop culture, social justice, art history and the dark alleys of society, all the while drawing upon lived personal experience, suggest connections and idiosyncrasies while exposing them as uncanny precursors to present-day realities.

BRUT CARINOLLUS
Brut Carniollus is a visual artist and photographer specialized in photography based digital collage and digital graphics executed as original digital UV prints. His approach tends to be reductional, deconstructional and minimalist. His work is exhibited and awarded worldwide. Since 2012 he also serves as official paparazzi of renowned international artist symposium Slovenia Open To Art. He is a member of The Slovenian Association of Fine Arts Societies and represented by Gallery 5'14, 10dence Gallery and Singulart. Lives and works in Radovljica, Slovenia, EU as a self-amployed artist.

MICHAEL GREENWALD
Artist Statement
I am attracted to vast, open spaces and the meeting of land, sea and sky. These paintings are an attempt to distill the world into its basic elements of land, water and atmosphere. Horizons and skies are dominant features. I typically paint undeveloped and unpopulated places, presenting a stripped version of the world with no evidence of man’s influence and too few details to warrant a narrative. The paintings are meditative, quiet and still.

My landscape works are loosely based on photos I take, often when traveling. The photos serve as a jumping off point to help me get started on a new painting. Once underway I try to consult the reference photos as little as possible. I want the painting to develop organically with the painting process and my imagination influencing the direction of the work more than the reference photos. When painting a specific place, It’s not my intention to recreate a photograph or scene. My aim is to capture a feeling or sense of place. I think about spending time there, what it felt like, what I was doing or feeling. I try not to get caught up and overwhelmed in the details. My hope is that the viewer feels invited in, where the eyes can rest on the horizon and the mind is allowed to wander.

SCOTT GROENIGER
Scott Groeniger is a Scott Groeniger is a multimedia artist working in a range of media including printmaking, sound design, drawing, photography and video. Recent exhibitions/performances include: Drones for Peace, Colorado Modular Synth Society, Sound Design Live, Bas Bookshop and Gallery, Honolulu, HI, Bitfactory Gallery, Denver, CO, SITE: Brooklyn Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, Niza Knoll Gallery, Denver, CO, Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Gimpo, South Korea, Lawrence Arts Center, Lawrence KS, Target Gallery, Torpedo Factory, Alexandria, VA, Galerie 103, Kauai, HI, University of Hawaii at Manoa Art Gallery, Honolulu, HI, White Box Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, Pacific Rim International Print Exhibition, Christchurch, New Zealand, Boston Printmakers North American Print Biennial, 808 Gallery at Boston University, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI, The Residence Gallery, London, UK, AC [Chapel] Gallery, New York, NY, Beijing Studio Center Gallery, Beijing, PRC, and Open Source Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Groeniger is an Associate Professor of Digital Imaging and Chair of Printmedia in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is also the co-founder of the experimental printmaking collective known as the Lithopixel Refactory Collective. Groeniger was born in 1968 in Columbus, OH and currently lives in Honolulu, HI.

Groeniger's current visual artwork is focused on several major themes: the drawing of fictional maps referencing the recent discoveries of earth-like planets, long term generational space exploration, off-Earth architecture, methods of transoceanic navigation, the future of human life on other planets, and the extinction of humans on their current home planet, Earth. Much of his work also visualizes future designs and development of collective off-world colonies as humans begin to migrate to off-Earth living environments. The maps he renders reference the works of early cartographers, and he makes hybrid prints that combine traditional materials with digital technologies. Groeniger is also a sound designer, and modular synth artist, performing under the moniker Elasticlimit.

JEREMY JONES
Jeremy Jones is originally from Casper, WY and received a BFA in ceramics and sculpture from the University of Wyoming in 2006 and an MFA in sculpture from Wichita State University in 2012. Jones works in a variety of mediums including ceramics, woodcarving, welding, casting/mold making, found objects and with digital processes. Jones has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally and had reviews in The Nashville Scene, Nashville Arts Magazine and Peripheral ARTeries Contemporary Art Review. Jones has taught ceramics, sculpture and facilitated artmaking at several universities and is currently a ceramics instructor at Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts in St. Paul, MN.

Artist Statement
I work intuitively with clay, and utilize the plasticity of the material to create my haunting and gestural figures. My clay vessels are loosely formed with coils; I then push and pull the material until a face emerges. The faces seem to manifest from an unknown space, as if I’m channeling a “being” into existence. The void inside of the vessel symbolizes the consciousness; the vast, invisible and largely unknown space of the mind.

ERIC KUNSMAN
Felicific Calculus: Technology as a Social Marker of Class, Race, & Economics in Rochester, NY
The felicific calculus is an algorithm formulated by jurist and reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) for calculating the moral rightness of an action by balancing the probable pleasures and pains that it would produce. Bentham, a utilitarian philosopher, believed this calculus could, in principle, help determine the moral status of any considered act.

In 2017, I relocated my studio to a different part of Rochester, NY. Colleagues immediately started making comments along the lines of: “...that area's a war zone.” My experience with the new neighborhood was positive, so I wanted to discover what visual cues others might be seeing as indicators of a dangerous environment. Several people had mentioned the number of payphones in the area, inferring that only criminals use payphones these days. There really were a lot of payphones in my neighborhood. I began documenting them, and quickly saw that far from being used by criminals, these phones served as a lifeline for some of the poorest residents in the area. Looking deeper, I found the story behind Rochester's payphones reflected an unusually altruistic 'felicific calculus' by Frontier Communications. Instead of focusing on profits, they had decided to maintain the payphones in poorer neighborhoods for the good of the community.
Many policymakers have opted to view payphones as a social indicator of crime, unfortunately leading to ignorant or even dangerous decisions.

In Detroit, Michigan, politicians had all public payphones removed without studying or surveying their actual use. They simply assumed the criminal connection. This decision was based on a further assumption that everyone today must own a mobile phone. Decision-makers lacking facts or any real understanding of issues facing citizens from a different economic class just acted on a misperception.
Witnessing that type of reflexive judgment from my colleagues drove me to educate myself. I photographed payphones and mapped their locations, then overlaid them with census maps showing economic status, ethnicity, age and sex, and the city crime map. There was an immediate, direct correlation between the poverty level and location of the payphones. Areas with the most payphones coincided with Rochester neighborhoods where the average family incomes are lower than $20,000 annually. There was also no correlation with high crime neighborhoods.

Through Felicific Calculus I hope to challenge negative perceptions of social markers that conflate poverty with crime. Though they are relics.

ANNE MANLEY
Born and raised in rural Maryland, Anne Manley is a gifted painter whose work captures the physical and emotional landscapes around her as well as the human connections she experiences.

After receiving her Bachelor's degree in Visual Communications and Photography from Towson State University, Ms. Manley lived and worked in Washington, DC, Miami, Baltimore, St. Louis and is now based in Cleveland, Ohio.

The changing natural world, as well as her spiritual beliefs are the cornerstones of her artistic inspiration and the source of her creativity. Ms. Manley was primarily drawn to photography early on in her career because of the precise technical detail she could achieve through that medium.

Very quickly, however, she transitioned to painting, as she was drawn to the deeper emotional resonance she could create on canvas. Both Ms. Manley and her work are engaging on many levels. She is adept at instilling emotional timbre in her paintings, and pastel pieces and is deeply interested in the feelings they inspire in others. Her landscapes range from serene to stormy and
from bright to brooding.

Her emergence as a strong and thoughtful painter has earned her much notice and acclaim in the Baltimore/Washington area and in Cleveland. Since deciding to work full time as an artist in 2005, she has had a number of very successful shows with Gallery plan b in Washington, DC. and in 2013 and 2014 her work was selected for the Choice Art at the Contemporary Art Museum
St. Louis. Since moving to Cleveland in June 2018 she has exhibited her work with the Erie Art Museum, Erie, Pennsylvania, Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio and produced a body of work for her a solo show in July 2020 with BayArts in Cleveland, Ohio. Her current work is large scale paintings with a reflection of her emotional & physical connection to the natural world.

Commissioned works by Ms. Manley are held in private collections in: Birmingham & London, England, Miami, Florida, New York City, Washington, DC, Baltimore, MD, Cleveland, OH and Pittsburgh, PA.

Artist Statement
"My studio practice is a physical meditation of the way that the natural world moves me emotionally. There is a deep curiosity that fills me in the early morning and evening hours when the moon and sun are sharing visual space in the sky. The balance and tension that is ever-changing is what finds me in the studio striving to connect with my inner being and the world outside of myself.
The natural world around me fills me with awe and allows me to distill my emotions onto the canvas. There is an escape and a relief in building my paintings, striving to connect with a ubiquitous knowledge of the eternal, ever changing landscapes of the sky, the water, the heart.
My work is a place for me to unify my mind and body, to question and to wonder at the power of a glimpse, a moment, a lifetime. I strive to create wondrous images that can offer a space for contemplation, transformation and awe.

RAHELEH MOHAMMAD
Raheleh Mohammad is an Iranian born computer scientist who currently lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Although she has had her formal education in the engineering discipline as a self-taught photographer, she has been doing photography for more than 10 years.
Life for her is like a long continuous picture, emerging frame after frame, which she sometimes borrows, to hold on to, to appreciate more deeply, to share with others and to interact with people she would otherwise not be able to engage with. Photography for her is a visual experience, which allows her to capture the moments that could convey either a narrative or a fading reality in a poetic interpretation.
She uses traditional (Analog and Digital), alternative photographic processes and mixed media to explore how the
effects and marks of memories, emotions, experiences and thoughts could shape who we are.

Artist Statement
"Are dreams the reflections of reality? What are their effects on reality? Could one become a reality? What is it about them, which leaves such lingering impact?
Do we all live in an unrealized dream? We sure can wake up from one to reality but is the other way around possible, waking up from the reality into a dream?
In my ongoing series ""A Borderland of Dream and Reality"", I’d like to challenge the notions of dreams and reality in a photographic-poetic narrative with the hope of uncovering the fascinating, yet hidden stories of human in pursuit of the ultimate search for true pleasure.
All images are initially intentionally printed on paper and the leaves are then added later on; these works are re-photographed for the final presentation. The grainy images represent the ambiguous line between reality and dreams with the natural leaves as symbols of true and organic emotions."

LILY RODRIGUEZ
Lily Rodriguez is a Cuban-born artist based in Los Angeles, California. Much of her work engages Latinx identity, often in the context of memory and forgetting, migration and exile, and re-imagined practices of home and community. In 1998 Rodriguez returned to Cuba for the first time since her early childhood, and the experience was revelatory. During this return she began to make sense of the memories she had constructed from secondhand stories and old photographs from Cuba. The findings and visceral responses are recorded in the form of photographs in the Cuba portfolio, exhibited in photographs, installation and film. During her return to Cuba, Rodriguez found herself utterly overwhelmed by the quality of light and by the way the sun saturated every surface, and she began, for the first time in years of practice, to work with color film. As if color was entirely new to her senses or returned to her by some alchemy of place and memory. A vivid and unique use of color remains a hallmark of her practice, as well as a deep curiosity and exploration of the history and memory embedded in discarded and/or forgotten objects, places and people. My work in the Salton Sea is an exploration of how a whittled, rotted, and abandoned resort called Bombay Beach has gone from apocalyptic wasteland to an offbeat art hub, and still holds the thriving energy of a bustling vacation destination in the objects left behind.

Rodriguez graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology & Sociology and worked with LGBTQ adolescents and runaway/homeless street youth as counselor, interviewer, and HIV/AIDS researcher. In 1996 Rodriguez returned to photography full time and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. After completing her MFA, Rodriguez worked as a photographer and artist at the Exploratorium, an internationally recognized premier art, science and human perception museum in San Francisco and traveled as a freelance photojournalist for Oxfam America.

Rodriguez has received several awards, among them: The Photo Review International Photography Award, En Foco New Works Award, Artlink Sotheby’s International Youth Art and the Gordon Parks Photography Award. Rodriguez’s photography has been featured in various publications such as The Photo Review, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Where San Francisco Magazine, numerous Oxfam America and Exploratorium publications and public works, and Lehigh University’s Viajeros: North American Artist/Photographers Images of Cuba. Rodriguez collaborated and co-curated the Photographer’s in Film Series with Liz Keim; a film series, installation, and panel discussion for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, as well as presented her photographic work in conjunction with AB Huber’s presentation featuring photographs from the Cuba portfolio/ ”One of You Forever” at the University of British Columbia symposium/The Fading Image: Visual Culture and the Transformation of Memory. Rodriguez has exhibited work nationally through multiple venues both traditional and experimental, among them Lehigh University Art Galleries/Bethlehem Penn, Restoration Skylight Gallery/Brooklyn NY, Galeria De La Raza/San Francisco CA, Southern Exposure Gallery/San Francisco CA, Remote Lounge/NYC, Diego Rivera Gallery/San Francisco CA, Walter McBean Gallery/San Francisco CA, Woman Made Gallery/Chicago IL and the Exploratorium/San Francisco CA. Rodriguez currently lives and works in Los Angeles as a photo-based artist and after earning her Master of Science degree in Marriage and Family Therapy and School Counseling in the Department of Education at California State University, Northridge, she serves as a psychotherapist at California Institute of the Arts.

KIRSTEN R. SIMONSEN
Kirsten Rae Simonsen was born in Montana and received her MFA from the University of Chicago after studying traditional painting in Bali, Indonesia. She has shown her work nationally and internationally at the LA Art Show, BG Gallery in Santa Monica, Root Division in San Francisco, Pterodactyl Gallery in Philadelphia, Artspace Gallery in New Haven, Peter Miller Gallery in Chicago, and The Residence Gallery in London, among others. She has created drawing installations for the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai and the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts. Her work has been published by FreshPaint (juried by Danielle Krysa, the Jealous Curator), Prompt Press, Itch magazine (South Africa), and Black Lawrence Press in New York, NY (artwork on cover of Lost Letter & Other Animals). Awards include SFCA (State Foundation on Culture and Arts) Recognition Awards and the Marley Irons Award for Printmaking; both of these awards are given in the Honolulu Printmaker’s annual exhibition. Her work is in the collection of the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, the Brooklyn Art Library, the Hawai’i State Art Museum, and in private collections across the United States and Europe. Simonsen’s artwork is influenced by her travels in Europe and North America, and by her Midwestern suburban childhood. She
lives in Honolulu, Hawaii with her husband, dog and bird.

Artist Statement
"My work reflects to my own nomadic lifestyle and a search for home. I am interested in decentralized and rootless communities that have fallen or begun to fall, and I try to create an ambiguous, driftless, in-between space in my works so that the unexpected can occur.

I have an ongoing interest in what I like to call ""the spectacle."" Amusement parks, circuses, carnivals, festivals, and roadside attractions often involve temporary structures and rules, and become utopian (or dystopian) spaces for the public to visit. These zones are often self-sufficient and offer recreation and celebration, but are nomadic and perhaps fleeting. They have their own temporary borders and rules which are disbanded and rendered irrelevant when the event comes down. My sparse, uninhabited, and often futuristic landscapes host itinerant creatures or decrepit structures that suggest some previous event. The motives of the creatures and the purposes of the structures are usually unclear and in flux. The animals are often in impossible surroundings, such as beneath a sky of falling flowers.

My vision of a utopian/dystopian present/future is partly inspired by futurists such as Buckminster Fuller and experimental communities like Drop City, Colorado (circa 1960-1979), Auroville (India), Biosphere 2 (Arizona), and the Eden Project in Cornwall, UK. I also am influenced by various collectives and temporary artistic communities (such as Burning Man, Glastonbury, and smaller English summer festivals) that I participated in in Europe and North America in the years leading up to the dawn of the 21st century. As a child of the Midwestern suburbs, I felt a sort of defocused ennui and groundlessness growing up. These communities provided me with welcoming, yet still rootless, temporary homes. In a way, the animals are self portraits and portraits of those I met along the way.

KIMBERLY WETZEL
Kimberly Wetzel is a painting and drawing focused 2D artist working out of St. Paul, Minnesota. She graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2017 with a BFA in Painting/Drawing. She has exhibited in many group shows throughout Minnesota, Illinois, and North Dakota in galleries including From + Content Gallery, The Show Gallery, Fresh Eye Gallery and Altered Esthetics. At the start of 2021, she received a Creative Business Grant from Ramsey County. In July of 2021, she had her first full body of work, “The Wind Holds Us Together” on display alongside three other artists at The Northfield Arts Guild. Most recently, she was selected to be an Artist-in-Residence through The Tides Institute and Museum of Art StudioWorks program in Eastport, Maine, that she completed throughout the month of June this year.

Artist Statement
I am a Minneapolis College of Art and Design graduate and fine artist creating abstract works on canvas and paper, currently residing in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Growing up in North Dakota, landscape had the capability to be still and expansive while routinely wielding harsh winters and dry summers. The prairies moved slowly while the weather created chaos. This land moves in a state of duality. I pull from its contrasting elements of tranquility and disruption to inform the work I make.

My current work depicts abandoned spaces at the intersection of shared history and personal experience. My research of bird flight patterns informs my mark-making. The way that birds interact with their surroundings, migrating up to thousands of miles and making home in many places is a revisited idea throughout my work. Through the use of charcoal powder washes overlaid with quick, gestural marks, my drawings redefine landscapes into non-spaces, becoming new entities with no distinct location. These landscapes feel familiar, but the view you have of them is a shadow of its actual existence. You are left with the memory of happenings in these spaces, resulting in an abandoned space with a life of its own."

WILL WILSON
Artist Statement
"The piece, Tribal Borders, questions our tribal nature and its value. When we choose to commune only with those who are most like ourselves we form smaller and smaller groups, cut off from other people's perspectives and values. This not only results in conflict between groups, it also robs us of potential wisdom, culture, and experience. There are many human frontiers around us. Experiencing different cultures, engaging with new people, and keeping your mind open to trying to see things through another person's perspective are frontiers worth engaging with.

KRISTEN WOODWARD
Kristen T. Woodward received her BFA in Printmaking from Syracuse University, and her MFA in Studio Art from Clemson University. Her mixed media paintings combine encaustic and print processes, and often utilize found collage materials. Woodward is a
Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Albright College, teaching drawing, painting, printmaking, and gender and the visual arts. Currently, she is collaborating with an environmental biologist to explore tropical ecosystems in Central America.
Woodward serves as is Resident Curator for Artists2Artists.net.

Artist Statement
Woven throughout my art practice over the past ten or more years has been dichotomy in regard to the destructive and creative forces of environmental and technological frontiers. As stewards of nature, ethics and culture, we are faced with conflicting solutions to ethical problems. The result has been an influx of incongruent ideologies perpetuating violence and destruction, often motivated by profit. The idea of frontiers- past and present, is threaded through human interactions with nature.

Having grown up in upstate New York on an old apple orchard, I am struck by the number of apple varieties that have disappeared. I started researching and painting these vanishing heirloom varieties- they serve as everyday reminders of environmental selectivity and choice.

Journey to Harvest
August 12 - September 4, 2022
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, AUG 12, 6 PM - 9PM

Kaiser Gallery presents Journey to Harvest a special solo exhibition by Kubra Al Hilali in partnership with Building Hope in The City, on view at Kaiser Gallery from August 12 - September 4. Kubra Al Hilali is an Iraqi immigrant and artist based in Cleveland and uses the medium of painting to express messages of hope and justice that speak to our collective human longings. Building Hope in the City selected Kubra as their artist-in-residence for the Creative Fusion program because of her work through their Hope Center for Immigrants & Refugees. They were drawn to Kubra's desire to create beautiful, Iraqi-inspired art while also elevating the civic and creative voice of youth in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood.

Artist Statement:
My journey is through circles and lines, like birds and fish; sometimes flying between endless spaces and sometimes diving through the depths of seas and oceans. I roam in the midsts of its lands, and around its people. I go round and round… ad my harvest is in your hands; in colors and pictures…

SOLO SHOW SELECTION 2022
Handful of Dream-Dust
June 10 - August 7, 2022

Kaiser Gallery presents Handful of Dream-Dust a solo exhibit by Cleveland artist Jonah Jacobs, on view at Kaiser Gallery from June 10 to August 7.

A local treasure within Cleveland’s art scene, Jonah Jacobs, explores themes of beauty, complexity, and eco-consciousness to create works that are simultaneously thought-provoking and visually stunning. Born in Denmark, and a graduate of Antioch College, he is also an Army veteran who served in S. Korea and in the 82nd Airborne Division, gaining invaluable experience and insight into different perspectives and ways of thinking.

Jacobs’ large-scale pieces combine thousands of individual geometric shapes to create mesmerizing forms that reference fractal patterns, bio colonies, and other complex systems. Jacobs merges creativity with science in an innovative way, to create artworks that explore ideas about order, chaos, growth, decay, and life cycles - the pervasive yet elusive forces that shape our world. Jacobs also treats every exhibition as an opportunity to teach and inspire others how to create artwork that is more environmentally friendly by utilizing unexpected materials for his large-scale art installations, such as cardboard, egg cartons, yarn, quinoa, oatmeal, dryer sheets, and other textiles to name a few.

Silent Fields
April 8 - June 5, 2022

Kaiser Gallery's Silent Fields is a thought-provoking exhibition that will make you stop and think about the consequences of human activity on bees. Pollinators are necessary for the world's food security, yet humans are directly harming these delicate insects. Silent Fields is an exhibition that raises awareness of the importance of pollinators and the need to protect them. Silent Fields exhibition raises awareness for how important it is to protect pollinators and showcases them in a new light.

Presenting the works of Melissa Harvey, Maggie Latham, Kimit Menapace, Georgio Sabino III, and David Straange.

Additional information
The honey bee is possibly the most known pollinating species. Native species of bees and different bugs are fundamental to our food supply. Without these species, 70% of flora would be unable to reproduce or furnish food. Affected crops include many of our fruits, vegetables, and nuts that we are dependent on for our meals. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, of the 100 crops that grant 90% of the world’s food, 71 are pollinated by bees.

Currently, pollinators are declining at alarming rates. The number of honey bee colonies managed in the U.S. dropped from approximately 6 million in 1947 to less than 2.5 million today.

For more information about the pollination crisis, please visit https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/issues/304/pollinators-and-pesticides/impacts-on-the-food-supply

Still from Héloïse Roueau's video installation, 'Morgane' (2018).

Coveted II
February 11 - April 3, 2022

Kaiser Gallery’s annual exhibition Coveted seeks to represent the perspectives of those that are not easily accessible in mainstream culture, while representations of the male gaze can be found in abundance. This year's theme highlights the experiences of the 'othered' within spirituality, religion, and the occult. The spiritual journey can be difficult when looking for acceptance from oneself or from communities.

There is a long history of exclusion of women and persons who identified as LGBTQ+ from religious institutions. However, with the rise of feminism, there is a movement to open these religious institutions to include women and those who are a part of the LGBTQ+ community in all aspects of spiritual practice. This includes things like leading prayer services or being able to become priests, and incorporating feminine energy into religious ceremonies and rituals.

However, religion inclusion is still not universal at this time within all religious institutions, and many find themselves looking in from the outside in the role of the other. These persons can develop a tenuous relationship with religion, as they are forced to participate, knowing they are not entirely accepted.

The resurgence of the occult in modern-day times places women in positions of power within the coven structure and allows women to be healers and leaders. The occult rejects the universal 'he' and offers women and nonbinary people a feminist-friendly alternative in their search for spirituality.

The occult draws on practices that date back to the dawn of time and has been practiced by women for generations. For centuries, it was forbidden for women to hold any agency as healers or religious leaders. As a result, they were burned at the stake and declared witches. But as history tells us, those days are long gone, and now we have feminist witch covens dedicated to inclusion.

Spirituality is a personal journey for acceptance of oneself. Finding a spiritual path or community to support that can be trying. In the feminist movement, there is a place for everyone regardless of their path. Opening doors within religion that previously seemed inaccessible.

Presenting the artworks of Courtney Alnutt, Tanya Kaiser, Natalie Lambert, Vic Liu, Jess Niemeyer, & Héloïse Roueau.

2021

Future Resonance
December 3, 2021 - February 6, 2022

Opening Reception: Saturday, December 4, 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

This year's Future Resonance exhibition seeks to explore technology as an aspect of human expression - how technology can push our thoughts into new horizons while creating avenues for artistic visionaries to express themselves.

The annual art and technology exhibition returns to Kaiser Gallery. This year Future Resonance presents yet another amazing batch of artists and creators who explore the field of sound and light as a universal media. The exhibition is an invitation to explore the ways in which technology and artistic practices converge. See the synchronicity of these artists as they change the way we see the world.

It is not a coincidence that art and technology have been declared as the theme for our annual exhibition. Technology has become a significant part of our lives – it permeates all aspects of it, from entertainment to medicine. With technology quickly evolving into an essential aspect of our lives, technology is no longer considered a novelty or a luxury. Instead, it's becoming a necessity for the human race. Technology has also increased our appetite for artistry because technology feeds the imagination with its expansive capabilities and unlimited horizons - resulting in ever more ambitious creations that give us elevated perspectives on human achievement.

With technology being a necessary part of life, it has also become a source for artistic inspiration. Technology seeps through the boundaries between science and art. It is no longer something seen as separate from or even opposed to art – technology has become one of the most influential forces behind modern art because tech does not simply illustrate an idea, technology makes it happen.

The human interaction with technology is a major aspect of modern art - because technology has become a part of who we are as a people. It is a cultural force that constantly evolves and will continue to do so until there is no distinction between technology and life. Some believe this shift towards technology couldn't have happened without the emergence of digital technology - that technological jump from analog to digital brought about changes in how things were created and experienced, such as sound and light.

Sound & Light: Now more than ever we can understand music and other forms of sound by seeing them – the visual representation of the elements creates a new lens through which we can experience these phenomena.

Presenting the works of Mike Bruckman, Jeremy Davis, Jeremy Newman, Thea Reid, Ethan Samaha, Dustin Steuck, and Anna Thorne.

Cut From the Same Cloth

October 16 - November 28, 2021

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE CLEVELAND INSTITUTE OF ART: CREATIVITY WORKS
ARTIST TALK SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 21 AT 6 PM

Kaiser Gallery presents 'Cut From The Same Cloth' on view October 16 through November 28. This exhibit features the mixed media works of Cleveland Institute of Art students Ewuresi Archer and Crystal Miller. The vibrant artworks in this series draw directly from the artists' African American and African cultures, offering a dialect and a conversation between the two experiences.

"We come from two different backgrounds and are of the same race. There are a lot of differences and similarities between us as humans but also between our cultures. As a result, the work depicts our hopefulness and pride in our cultures. Rooted in cultural experiences, the hair salon, music, and home life, these experiences bring us together. While this may not be the lifestyle for every black person, we hope, in some way, a connection can be made.

The paintings depict physical spaces that we have been in and or are a place we call home. The textures, patterns, and gem-like motifs represent the continuous black lifestyle. The color combination is used to represent black skin but also celebrate black lives and transform these spaces and demonstrate an experience.

Overall the series invites the viewer to reflect on these spaces, and look into our lives, and appreciate our culture for what it is."

Ewuresi Archer

Ewuresi Archer is an artist currently living and working in Cleveland Ohio. She is pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Her paintings utilize fluorescent colors and distorted shapes to create unnatural environments. In using distorted shapes and colors, she creates spaces that have viewers questioning and wondering about the nature of reality, and how it is constantly slipping through our fingers.

Crystal Miller

Crystal Miller is an interdisciplinary mixed media artist currently living and working in Cleveland, Ohio. She has an Associates in Graphic Design and is on her way to get a Bachelors in Fine Arts in Painting, Sculpture and Expanded Media at The Cleveland Institute of Art. Her paintings and sculptures explore the ideas and concepts of beauty through unconventional materials such as beads, yarn, rhinestones, and foam. Her main focus is to create an individualized aesthetic that represents her blackness and personal experiences with hair.

Andrew Ellis Johnson "Insurrection" (2020) Ink on paper. 50 x 113 inches

The Weight of Time

August 14 - October 10, 2021
Opening reception on August 14, 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm

'The Weight of Time' is an exhibition that explores the surrealism of a very real global pandemic through introspective works. The novel virus COVID-19 threw the world as we knew it into a situation that we've never seen before. The global pandemic and the shutdowns that followed created disorientating challenges for various people to navigate in different ways while further exposing broken government infrastructure and community ramifications for a world that was not prepared to stop.

Presenting the works of Chad Eby, Danny Greene, Andrew Ellis Johnson, Matt Milligan, Haumed Rahmani, and Nowhere Mountain.

*Don't miss the upcoming virtual artist talk on September 30 with Chad Eby, Andrew Ellis Johnson, Matt Milligan and Nowhere Mountain.
Then join us for the closing reception on October 10 featuring local artists Danny Greene and Haumed Rahmani.

Artist Statements & Bios

Chad Eby

Chad Eby is a Lexington Kentucky-based multidisciplinary artist, designer and educator working with light, sound, and code to engage with the grain of digital technologies.

Eby creates work, by turns stark and whimsical, that explores humanity's fraught relationship with made objects using sound, light, and digital fabrication techniques.

His research interests revolve around the peculiar relationship between digital and physical: especially the residue-loss, surplus and corruption-that results from moving back and forth between atoms and bits, map and territory, description and thing.
Part of the faculty of University of Kentucky's School of Visual Art Studies since 2019, Chad previously served at the Herron School of Art and Design at IUPUI in Indianapolis, Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (the Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm, and Florida State University in Tallahassee. He was awarded the Frank C. Springer Family Faculty Innovation Award in 2017.
Chad's work has been shown at the Tekniska Museet (the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology) in Stockholm, Sweden, Generative Art XXII in Rome, Italy, New Media Fest in Valencia, Spain, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, TAG at the University of Western Florida, the Columbia College Center for Book and Paper and various local venues across the United States. He has attended competitive residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Elsewhere, and was selected for the inaugural Space Art Summer School hosted at the Russian Museum of Cosmonautics.

Artist Statement
Parallel to the spread of the COVID-19 virus, and greatly facilitating that spread, a virulent strain of Bad Ideas also swept the globe. A surge of mis- and disinformation promulgated by a strange mix of opportunists, true believers, state actors and lulzers, and amplified by an army of COVID-19 sequestered thumb-clickers: fever dreams featuring bats, billionaires, 5G, tracking chips, and the soul-damaged vaccinated who, by succumbing to media-driven fear, lost their opportunity to "ascend." Disinformation Containment Unit D6 is an equally irrational alternative. Inspired by quack 5G and chemtrail protective devices, it is a fantastical electro-spiritual information appliance—ready for field deployment—imagined to detect and neutralize nearby disinformation. Driven by a WiFi-emitting ESP8266 chip and not-very-sophisticated cellular automata simulation, it's twin OLED displays give continuous animated feedback on its progress.

Danny Greene

Danny Greene (°1977, Honolulu ) makes paintings and paintings. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, his paintings references post-punk theory as well as the avant-garde or the degeneracy of the post-modern world. His paintings are often classified as part of the new romantic movement because of the desire for the local in the unfolding globalized technocracy. However, this reference is not intentional, as this kind of art is part of the collective memory. By referencing romanticism, grand-guignolesque black humour and symbolism, he creates work through labour-intensive processes which can be seen explicitly as a personal exorcism ritual. They are inspired by a nineteenth-century tradition of works, in which an ideal of ‘Fulfilled Absence’ was seen as the pinnacle. His works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By choosin mainly formal solutions, he tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations. His works are based on formal associations which open a unique poetic vein. Multilayered images arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality is questioned. Danny Greene currently lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio.

Andrew Ellis Johnson

Andrew Ellis Johnson’s work has appeared in galleries, festivals, public collaborations, conferences, and publications in the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has performed as co-founder of the collective PED in Buffalo, Belfast, Chongqing, Rio de Janeiro, St. John’s, and Toronto. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA) and Carnegie Mellon University (MFA) in Pittsburgh, where he is Associate Professor of Art. Residencies and exchanges over the last decade include those at: Korean National University of the Arts, Seoul; Blue Mountain Center, New York; University of the Arts London, Camberwell; Fayoum International Art Center, Egypt; Sites of Passage in Jerusalem/Ramallah/ Pittsburgh; and Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Recent two-person exhibits include RESORT at Kendall College of Art & Design and McDonough Museum of Art and GETTING THERE at Gettysburg College and this fall at Stockton University. His most recent solo show was FOUNDER at SUNY Cortland’s Dowd Gallery.

Artist Statement
This statement and the poem below were written in July 2020. Insurrection features a man in full PPE reading while reclining comfortably on his living room couch. A cat purrs in his lap. In the safe seclusion of his own home, he is over-protected. Others, however, are not. Not George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Brionna Taylor and too many other people who were shopping, running, sleeping—simply living, while black. Their deaths are painfully singular, but their cumulative toll constitutes a persistent pandemic of racism. Another pandemic rages as people rage in the streets. The death count from Covid-19 has now climbed over 100,000 in four months. Fallow Trench In the exceptional Nation State of One, the novel plague, first declared nonexistent, then decried as sophic, was ultimately decreed ‘Democratic’. It was. Though itself invisible to the naked eye, the virus, though little, spread by aspirational spittle, magnified divisions and bonds. Manufacturers mandated. Distributors consolidated. Liberators looted. Suppliers hoarded. Senators sanctioned. the unaffordable could be bought again. Sacrificial heroes, ill-suited, staved, for another quarter, the essential economy. Perhaps. Routines were screened. Meetings multiplied and merged. Unemployment ranks swelled. Curves flattened; feeds fed. Appropriations diverted. Tweet-enlisted fascists drilled. Unmasked. Indisposed Justice meted black breath no repose. The State of Stasis is fought within, and without.

Matt Milligan

Matt Milligan (b. 1973) is an artist based in New York City working in digital and film photography. His work explores identity and its connections with home and community. Originally from Dallas, Texas, he holds a degree in musicology from the University of North Texas. Having always been attracted to how music conveys meaning, he carries that theoretical approach into his photography. Milligan's work was recently included in Scopio's "Rethinking, Questioning Urban Realities through Photography in the Age of COVID-19," in Porto, Portugal.

Artist Statement
The Things We Must Face When news of the shutdowns started to make the rounds, I was in the office—three floors of what had become an eerie and quiet building occupied, at that time, by me and, occasionally, the cleaning guy. It had been that way for a week or so. Almost everyone who had the means was leaving or preparing to leave the city, and my office was no exception. The sudden exit of those who wanted to escape and could also afford to leave was the first visible division. And it was this class separation that would, at least for me, expose the rest of what was to come as a series of interlopers—unwanted visitors that keep showing up at the doorstep of America. This all reminded me of something James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” Despite what we frequently read in the media, there is nothing unprecedented about 2020. We are experiencing problems that have been with us for generations, problems that stem from divisions. And those divisions are rooted in money, politics, religion, race, and other things one should not talk about in polite company. But these social taboos are the very things we must talk about—and face—as Mr. Baldwin also famously said, or they will keep splitting us in two over and over again. A couple of weeks after the stay-at-home order went into effect, the half of us who remained in the city had to navigate a familiar but unknown landscape. My neighborhood was as empty and quiet as my office had been. When I went on walks or the occasional errand, I photographed the changes I saw. I also turned my camera inside (because we were inside all the time!); it was a natural response to the confinement. I began to see repeated images and symbols, sometimes subtle and sometimes overt. I realized that if I was sensitive to them, they could bolster the symbols of the past that Baldwin talked about and help me navigate what I was encountering and feeling. As Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, said, “the true symbol does not merely point to something else. It contains in itself a structure which awakens our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and of reality itself.” Making these photographs was a cathartic experience for me. It brought to the surface my human “constant preoccupation with pleasure and pain... our pursuit of this happiness,” as fourteenth-century Japanese writer Yoshida Kenko said. It also—thankfully—brings Merton’s new awareness that, without his and Baldwin’s help, I would not have found. This process and these writers taught me that before I say anything about the problems I see out in the world, I must first look inside and face myself.

Haumed Rahmani

Straddling creative, scientific, and digital frameworks, Haumed Rahmani spends their time thinking of questions that lead to better questions. Their code is being used by the likes of Cornell University and the Max Planck Institute, and they’re slated to present at the International Liquid Crystal Conference in 2022. With work ranging from microscope imaging to generative weaving and projection art, Haumed is foremost a toolbuilder and communicator. They currently focus their art on using math, light & time as ingredients, and on building out their open-source design framework, the aeiyou glitchkit, which was used to create this piece (and can be found online.)
Follow more of their work on Instagram at @Haumed.

Artist Statement
This piece offers a space to reckon with our mortalities, the branching of time, and the ever-present hand of chance that mold our identities. After it all, what is truly ours?

The weaving appears grey at a distance, but up close the threads are revealed to be vibrantly colorful; and as one moves around the weaving, they catch not only a shifting moiré pattern, but also their own fractured reflection. The weave structure was created generatively using code and a microscope image of a liquid crystal.

This is among my first set of weavings, as I reoriented my entire life during the pandemic, quitting school and seriously beginning my art practice. While the year delivered tremendous growth, I found many opportunities and even people slipping through my fingertips, forever lost to time and entropy. Death was brought to the forefront of my thoughts, and it questioned life itself. I found some peace through the clock-like act of weaving, which can be a meditation.

Nowhere Mountain

Nowhere Mountain is an art collaborative made up of St. Louis, Missouri based visual artist Mark Regester and Salt Lake City, Utah based composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, sound-artist and mad scientist Dave Madden.

Artist Statement
Nowhere Mountain is an imagined geographical landmark that lies between two specific points on a map.
It's where the magic happens.
Nowhere Mountain is pure, organic collaboration.
Nowhere Mountain is creation for creation's sake.

Derick Decario Ladale Whitson's Sugar (Chapter II)

SOLO SHOW SELECTION 2021
June 12 - August 8, 2021

On June 12, Kaiser Gallery presents SUGAR (Chapter II), a solo exhibition by Derick Decario Ladale Whitson. Whitson (b. 1991 Mansfield, Ohio) is an artist currently living and working in NYC. Working primarily in photography and video, Whitson explores the history and relationships of clowning, drag queens and black/white face to explore the social constructs of race, gender, and sexuality.

Derick Decario Ladale Whitson has attended artist residencies at AICAD New York Studio Residency Program, NY; Mass MoCA, Massachusetts; The Fountainhead, Miami, FL; and The Galveston Artist Residency. His work has recently been exhibited at Art Basel, Miami, FL; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO. Whitson is also a current recipient of the Foundation For Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, the 2019 Enfoco Photography Fellowship, & The 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Photography Fellowship. Whitson received his MFA at Columbia University and BFA from Columbus College of Art & Design.

Read Whitson's Bio and Artist Statement

Derick Decario Ladale Whitson (b. 1991, Mansfield, Ohio) lives & works in New York City. Earned his MFA at Columbia University & BFA from Columbus College of Art & Design. Working within the realms of Photography, Video & Performance. Whitson’s work has been published in Miami New Times, Huffington Post, The Advocate Magazine, & Photo-Emphasis. Whitson has participated in many residencies across the U.S., including programs at Mass MoCA, The Fountainhead (Miami), and the AICAD/New York Studio Residency Program. Whitson is also a current recipient of the Foundation For Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, the 2019 Enfoco Photography Fellowship, & The 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Photography Fellowship.

Artist Statement

This is your Ego: Words, two words, made up of two words. I’ve waited on the smell of beef stew and the taste of the burned garlic that sizzles the throat. My throat has held tension, it could be the tightness from allergies or the 3 legged dog pose that has become impossible to comfortably release. I’ve found moments of silence, maybe only two, but the background noise of television, irritates my thoughts on the search for a job that will convert me into a citizen. Theres been no quench of my thirst, theres no physical metaphor or reason to continue slurping orange juice. My belly is bloated, it’s beyond the american cheese and meat lovers pizza. The anxiety holds tight onto the gas that introduces itself to my neighbors. Maybe I waited for this? Waited to find that my true lover is longing and the potential, to make believe and form surrealist dreams that remind me of the bones in my sleeves. I have two treasure chests, one in my pores and the other in the sheets when I allow one sock to go because of a fungus thats beneath one curled toe. I had a dream of painting, navigating color relationships on a canvas. I also dreamed of riding my bicycle down a hill that was so steep I could barely break. Ellen is the name, she’s my divination tarot card reader. I’ve never seen her, I’ve never spoken to her, but she reveals a path. Sometimes I hear my own thoughts like a bell, the bell from the toaster oven that invented itself? Is it really true that I could be a combination of everything and every one else, am I made up of other peoples thoughts. There’s something to the color mint green, the green influences my sickness, almost like a tooth decaying in response to a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone. I’ve loved once before, he was kind, gentle, sweet, the production of him happened in my dreams. I’ve thought about my dreams once before, they told me theres something to the color yellow, they said it’s like a stench in the air that’s only tainted by the sun. Running doesn’t get me high, it only forces me to create a amount of sympathy, sympathy for my insecurities. I’ve seen this chevron pattern once before, it follows the stripes that mask themselves in red & white, but this time in cotton. Cotton has become a symbol, I’m not sure of what, maybe it’s the mucus that drowned itself in my skin. A rose also carries it’s own symbol, and I don’t mean a projected symbol that signifies the artificial lighting from Christmas lights. I’ve learned two things about breathing, only one represents life. Calvin, what a lovely name, is that because it’s attached to my suit case, or my white underwear that rises in my shorts. I’ve found solace in my longing, time in my heart beat, and a tremor in my waken state. Lets hope my ego has found peace also.

Exhibition Statement

Black face subsided while white face remains as the main representation of clowning. Between 1830’s-1910 across the US were performances of minstrel showings, these shows became mainstream in 1848. The minstrel shows lampooned black individuals with modern stereotypes. Othello, originated in London, by Shakespeare, is known as the most famous performance of white males performing both gendered roles and in blackface. Shakespeare also employed jesters & clowns, the first play was Lord Chamberlain’s Men. 1980’s and early 90’s we have a resurgence of the Club Kid Culture scene, that was comprised of wealthy white individuals, that then leads us to contemporary platforms like Rupaul’s Drag Race. As a spectator of such platforms and histories, levels of performance and masking are metaphoric representations of the repression of race and gender. The white clown face is blackface in disguise. Blackface which originated through clowning created new stereotypes and perpetuated mistreatment and racist behaviors years to come.

In 1865 Slavery was abolished in Texas, and Galveston had an illegal slave trade through the Gulf of Mexico starting in 1816. By becoming an active member of the community in Texas, and an outsider responding to the context and history of repression and abuse in America, Sugar (Chapter II) becomes an extension of my natural responses to the people I’ve met and the nonliving extended experiences, by being on their territory. My time in Galveston is a recent endeavor, a temporary exploration of a town that cultivated a haunting. There are pioneers, subcultures, and individuals that are transforming, and questioning the roles of identity through race in makeup, gender through costuming, and humor/entertainment through pain. The different levels of engagement and influence hold a large amount of information in standards of beauty traced from all over the world.

I use photography to create a new form of identification through methods of masking. This is a form of representation, as an explorative generation of power through image-making. There’s a need to deconstruct ideologies based on appearance through imagery. I am dissecting the levels of masking. This photographic amalgamation is political, subversive, and affirmative imagery that forms a racial & gender non-conforming empathetic utopia. During the course of the past 3 years, I have been working on a new project titled Sugar (Chapter II). Sugar (Chapter II) is a series of photographs and video that will be displayed inside a full-colored installation. Created are staged photographs that are in response to my living locations.

DomesticLands

April 9 - June 6, 2021

The home is a place that fosters our understanding of relationships. During the early years of childhood is when we develop socially and emotionally. Later in life, these early years will impact our ability to foster relationships, empathize, and how to interact with others. When revisiting memories of home, it is important to teeter on the edge of both joy and trauma as this duality defines us. There are nurturing memories that offer safety and warmth. However, for others, the home can represent pain where a moment of trauma is forever encased in time. Home can be a physical location, associated with the material, or defined within one's self. This cultivation of objects and relationships defines who we are.

Presenting works by Morgan Bukovec, Gary Sczerbaniewicz, and Allison M. Walters.

Artist Statements & Bios

Morgan Bukovec

“common thread”
This site-specific installation investigates the relationship of materials and memory in the domestic spaces we call home. Domestic fabrics (quilts, blankets, sheets, linens, etc.) activate stories and cultivate feelings of connection through generations. The found fabrics, suspended from the ceiling, respond to the architecture of the space and create a feeling of openness that draws in a delicate and airy quality. The fabrics are draped physically close and are connected through seamless ties that cultivate the feeling of intimacy, while the various textures and patterns of these fabrics evoke a sense of familiarity. Collected stories, submitted by strangers and the owners of the work’s fabrics, have been catalogued by a storyteller, the recordings are available via a phone number provided in the gallery. The intent of this work is to invite viewers to slow down, look closely at the materials, listen to the stories of strangers, and cultivate their own meaning and narrative through reflection, imagination, and memory. Viewers will have an opportunity to submit their own stories connected to domestic fabrics and memory.

collage works
This series of mixed media collage works are driven by my desire to understand and contextualize the experience of living female through material, content, and process. The long, narrative titles of each work aim to spark a story, while exploring and questioning the roles and relationships within the domestic space. These works are filled with opportunities for viewers to investigate the materials used, examine the story that was delicately created, then reflect on one’s own role and identity within the domestic space.

Morgan Bukovec is a mixed media artist, educator, storyteller and collector of things from Cleveland, Ohio. Having received a bachelor's degree in Fine Art and Art Education from the University of Dayton, her studio practice is interdisciplinary with a focus on themes of identity, storytelling, fleeting moments and objects across time. Recent group exhibitions include: /DIFFERENT STROKES/, Female Artist Club, Belgium, Boundaries, Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, and Waterloo Arts Juried Exhibition, Waterloo Art Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio. Morgan works as a bartender at the local pub, a server at her grandpa’s butcher shop, as well as a Thoma Engagement Guide Apprentice at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.

Gary Sczerbaniewicz

My approach to the concept of Home is to document the unheimlich or un-homely. This contrarian position has been gleaned from numerous experiences in which the safety, security, and intimacy normally associated with the concept of home has been subverted or dismantled (often by intangible forces), yielding spaces which are mere remnants of their once vigorous nature. Growing up at the end of the Cold War in suburban New York State in a Catholic family- my childhood was generally happy but always laced with a sense of existential dread from invisible sources ranging from spiritual retribution to literal annihilation by radioactive cloud. The resulting effect of this struggle between security/ insecurity has impacted my thinking, research, and practice to yield a permanent sense of what scholar Ruth Ronen describes as an ‘aesthetics of anxiety’. These four works comprise the first part in a series of eight which depict related wall sections of an old domestic space that have been ruptured by some unknown trauma. This trauma is perhaps hinted at in the acronym titles which refer to a Catholic nighttime prayer recited often in my childhood: *'(NILM) Now I Lay Me...... (DTS) Down To Sleep'…..(IPTL) I Pray The Lord…..(MSTK) My Soul To Keep.’

Gary Sczerbaniewicz was born in Upstate NY, received his BFA in Sculpture from Alfred University and his MFA in Sculpture & Installation from the University at Buffalo in 2013. Sczerbaniewicz is a 2016 NYFA fellow in Architecture/ Environmental Structures / Design from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and has completed residencies at Yaddo (2017), the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts (2016), and Sculpture Space (2013). Sczerbaniewicz recently served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Notre Dame. Gary is represented by Anna Kaplan Contemporary, Buffalo, NY.

Allison Walters

I'm a person who makes things and loves people. My work deals with what it means to be human, with what it means to be imperfect. I study the imperfection within myself, and I broadcast that into the world so that others may relate and feel closer to me and to one another, as imperfect human beings. I am most interested in communication between humans, and the failure of that communication. What happens when we love too much, and our feelings become warped or perverted? What happens when we want to get close, but we cannot? I deal with emptiness, fullness, lust, love, and abuse. I am interested in happiness, and subsequently images, text, and ideas that are connected to happiness, especially ones that have been deprived of context or emotion. Ultimately, I want to share feelings with people.

Allison Walters is a person who makes art. She works in photography, painting, video, digital art, and conceptual art. Her work deals with being human and sharing complex feelings with others. She has an MFA from Stony Brook University, where she studied Studio Art from 2014–2017. She also works as a web and graphic designer at the College Art Association, a nonprofit arts organization based in New York City.

Coveted.

February 13 - April 4, 2021

Laura Mulvey, Scholar, and Filmmaker introduced the term "the male gaze" in her 1975 essay. The male gaze represents the perspective of a heterosexual male viewer, along with the perspective of the heterosexual male character and the heterosexual male creator of the film. The male gaze also primarily depicts women as sexual objects for the sole pleasure of the male viewer.

While representations of the male gaze can be found in abundance when exploring themes of love, relationships, and desires, Coveted features works that offer a range of perspectives that are not easily accessible in mainstream culture. Featured works by Stefani Byrd (Fayetteville, AR), Dani Clauson (Portland, OR), Leiyana Gonzales (Cleveland, OH), Sydney Kleinrock (Long Island, NY), Megan Lubey (Cleveland, OH), Olga Nazarenko (Cleveland, OH), and Rebecca Poarch (Long Island, NY).

Read DRB's review of Coveted on the CAN Blog.

CAN Blog: DRB review of 'Coveted'
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Read Artist Bios

Stefani Byrd

Stefani Byrd’s art practice includes video, new media, and interactive technologies. Byrd’s early work addressed social justice issues in the form of interactive temporary public art installations that created role reversal, or "empathy training,” experiences for the audience. Her current work focuses on creating psychologically charged immersive media environments addressing topics such as digital feminism, gun
violence, and how technology impacts empathy in digitally mediated spaces.

Her work has been exhibited at places such as the CICA Museum (South Korea), the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego (San Diego), the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Atlanta Film Festival, and the Hunter Museum of American Art. She has received grants and support from groups such as: Creative Capital of New York, Flux Projects, Atlanta Celebrates Photography, and Idea Capital. Byrd's work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and the Columbus Museum of American Art.

She received her BFA degree in Photography from Georgia State University. She holds a Masters Degree in Visual Art from the University of California San Diego. Byrd is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas.

Artist Statement
A visual tone poem inspired by the beautiful, but potentially tragic, mating ritual of the American Bald Eagle. The two soar up to high altitudes, lock talons, and spiral towards the earth. If they release in time and complete the courtship ritual, they become a bonded pair for life. If they don’t release from one another in time, both will crash into the ground and die. This act creates a tension between succeeding with their mate and maintaining their own survival. The score for the video comes from the infamous song “True Love Waits” by the band Radiohead. The song was written 21 years before it was recorded and released on a studio album. It began as a hopeful and proud love song at the beginning of the relationship between lead singer Thom Yorke and artist/scholar Rachel Owen. The two would later marry and have two children. The song was finally recorded and released in 2016 as a resigned and melancholy ballad after their divorce and her subsequent death from cancer. The song refers to the same relationship, but in its two stages, chronicling its aging and eventual deterioration. This piece is inspired by the notion of tragedy, abandonment, loss, and the gap between the ideals and actualities of romantic love.

Dani Clauson

Dani Clauson is a queer trans/non-binary ceramics artist, who has been utilizing art as a mode of ‘speaking’ since they were a child. Dani utilizes their past experiences of domestic memories, trauma, and relationships to influence their work. They found clay as a freshman attending the University Of Montana, and have been touched by the materials empathy, reciprocation, and bodily metaphor ever since. Clay has been crucial to healing and expressing their struggle with bodily connection and sense of safety. From the University of Washington they have received a BA with honors in 3D4M, alongside a minor in Art History. They utilize their art history education to strengthen their art objects to speak upon the history of violence against the Feminine and its effects upon queer identity and gender.

Artist Statement
“If I were to write to you To tell you something Or create some visual you can place hands upon Some textural tactile technique How naked should I become? [do you fetishize my flesh?] These domestic recesses of my mind, Where the boundaries of body, emptiness of self Reveal themselves behind the curtain, [I seem obsessed with the perforated line that seems to divide But suggests to cut open. To be so vulnerable yet suggestive of barriers.] Do you remember what they told you, about becoming a ‘woman’? Can’t you see, I’m not one? (don’t)(touch me) I’ll keep these restless hands digging through clay To find an empty state To find acceptance / rejection Of objectification / subjectification To find my voice To find my body.” With its own sense of body, touch and memory, as well as its transformative nature from ephemeral to permanent, ceramics holds a metaphor of trauma and its lasting effects. The ceramic forms I create are reflective of the Abject Body-the traumatized body-the Queer body. They expose distortion and fragmentation that compel the viewer to meet both discomfort and familiarity. Being trans/nonbinary, I have spent my life distant from my own body. ‘Love’ within a Queer body is an abject experience, a reckoning with the body one exists in and the desires that are under the surface. Finding embodiment in physicality is a gentle process-a painful endeavor-leaving voids and a hollowing from residual trauma to try and find that sense of safety and comfort. Through use of washes and glaze, the textured surface reveals marks of erosion, scaring, discoloration, and tearing. The bodily forms are placed upon built settings that are rendered domestically familiar to reveal the origins of these physical disruptions. These ceramic renderings/ramblings understand the physical feeling of Body from the perspective of the Emotive-Self. Through this voice, validation, and vulnerability, my work aims to acknowledge trauma and bring forth a grieving space that is sensitive, healing, and Queer.

Leiyana Gonzales

Leiyana Gonzales is an interdisciplinary digital artist based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work is rooted in the details and emphasizes saturated, vibrant colors that dance across your mind. Leiyana focuses on creating pieces that effortlessly portray familiarity while embodying otherworldly elements. She has been creating on digital platforms since 2018, after spending her early life sketching and painting with graphite and acrylic mediums. Her work intends to inspire her audience to see magic in the mundane and transport them into another world.

Artist Statement
I intend for my art to feel like a dream you don’t want to wake up from. Shapes, colors and motifs dance across your mind just waiting to be decoded. My creativity is mine, but it exists on its own. It is up for your interpretation. I want my art to stay with my audience and speak to their soul. About the submitted collection: Being desirable and being loved are not synonymous. As young women we unknowingly conflate the two, breaking our own hearts in the process. Black women are often viewed only as objects to be desired. Our bodies are so much more than just desirable. Our bodies are portals into our minds and souls, they hold the very essence that is us. My collection invites you to look at a black body beyond desire, beyond the surface, and into the essence that is me. Hopefully inspiring others to do the same.

Sydney Kleinrock

Sydney Kleinrock is a painter and textile artist born in Long Island, New York. She received her Associates Degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology, and graduated in 2018 with a BFA from Hampshire College, studying visual arts and sustainability. In her last year at school, she exhibited a gallery show of her thesis artwork which examined the role of clothing in everyday life as well as its larger, cross-cultural impact on the global environment. Recently, she has done a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and shown work at the Untitled Space in tribeca. She currently works out of her studio in Greenfield, MA.

Artist Statement
My practice incorporates painting and drawing with textile art processes to explore themes of queerness, identity and internal landscapes in the context of greater cultural surroundings. I explore the variation of texture and dimension that is added when textile elements are combined with painting. The imagery in my work is drawn from a combination of memory, imagination, and moments captured from life. Often reflective objects are transformed into a vessel for refracting the fleeting moment that is presented before the surface. Recognizable figures are distorted through a reflective surface or the ever-shifting perspective of memory and emotion. Through the use of oversaturated colors and loosely-rendered space, everyday scenes and memories become surreal and dream-like; sometimes breaking objects and subjects away from a fixed sense of space entirely. Distanced perspectives are captured through the frame of up close objects, creating a layered effect that hints at the transitory nature of reality and the ever-fluctuating presence of internal and outer life.

Megan Lubey

Originally from Buffalo, NY, Megan Lubey is a young artist currently studying painting and creative writing at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Her work often explores unconventional, ‘crafty’ media and how it interacts with more traditional aspects of painting. Lubey’s paintings range from observational to non-objective, repeatedly incorporating unexpected saturation of color and gestural expression. Her work considers themes such as comfort, domesticity, girlhood, shame, and sexuality. These pieces tend to reflect on personal experiences and their ability to resonate within others when stripped down to their core emotions or when evoking a visceral feeling.

Artist Statement
This series of three explores the artist's relationship with the social construct of virginity. In adolescence we are generally taught that virginity is lost when a penis enters a vagina and a hymen breaks. This definition feels incredibly far removed from the expansiveness that is the practice of sexuality and is dangerously hetero-normative. This interpretation directly caters to cis straight males and perpetuates the idea that while men are gaining something from engaging in sex, women are losing something. The loss of a boy’s virginity is something that is often congratulated or is considered a right of passage. This is almost never the case with a woman or non-binary individual. There is a pressure specifically put on young girls to stay abstinent that is often perpetuated by family, teachers, and religious organizations. At the same time, there is an equally present pressure from their male counterparts and media to become sexual and that pushes sexuality upon girls before they get the chance to decide to partake in it themselves. These notions result in feelings of shame and regret in young women and perpetuate rape culture.

This series depicts the artist’s personal disconnect between the feelings involved with a so-called “first time” and its standard definition as well as the shame and pain that intertwines with discovering sexuality and deviating from the standard. “The First Time” represents the feeling of becoming sexually active despite not having the desire to. There is a very specific pain that is endured when the body is engaging in something that mind is against. This piece is an abstract representation of physical pain, confusion in disdain, coercion, and an attempt to adhere to expectations and social norms. The first time is forced heterosexuality, it is unwelcome. “The Second Time” is an abstract depiction of a hymenectomy. This is a medical procedure that occurs when an individual’s hymen has developed in a way in which it is unable to break naturally and results in extreme pain and discomfort when there is an attempt to penetrate. In regards to the biological definition that includes the breaking of the hymen as the loss of virginity, this is an extremely unconventional way to do so. The second time is blacked out under amnesia, it is sterile and scheduled. “The Third Time” is virginity in the way that the artist would prefer to define it. This depicts an experience that is both wanted and welcome, yet conflicted. In a hetero-normative and religious environment there is a sense of shame in being a queer woman. In a patriarchal society there is a feeling of inadequacy and anxiety in being a queer women and living in a way that does not involve nor benefit the cis male. A concept of virginity without a hypothetical man is both seldom heard and unpopular yet extremely necessary and valid. The third time does not involve standards or medicine, it is queer, messy, and spontaneous.

Olga Nazarenko

Olga Nazarenko is a Russian-American interdisciplinary mixed media artist currently based in Cleveland. Nazarenko documents the transience of experience through a sensorial and culturally-guided lens. Nazarenko uses a variety of visual, auditory, and tactile artistic mediums to shape works that comment on the narratives that shape human identity, the relationship between humans and nature, and the rituals that connect humans to the divine.

Since 2019, Nazarenko has been experimenting with mediums that liberate and engage the senses. As a filmmaker, Nazarenko uses sensory ethnography and experimental documentary styles to shape new forms of visual communication and to explore human
sense-making. In addition to analog and digital film and audio as mediums, Nazarenko uses three-dimensional materials to create physical objects that tell a story or comment on cultural customs. By using cement sculpture and ceramics, Nazarenko shapes forms that allow audiences to relate to the world as a child does, with a free and exploratory mind. By connecting the intuitive world of the three-dimensional with the visual narratives of the two-dimensional, Nazarenko suggests new ways to view our realities and the narratives we build in our own lives.

Artist Statement
Olga Nazarenko (b. 1994) is an interdisciplinary mixed media artist documenting the transience of experience through a sensorial and culturally-guided lens. Nazarenko uses a variety of visual, auditory, and tactile artistic mediums to shape works that comment on the narratives that shape human identity, the relationship between humans and nature, and the rituals that connect humans to the divine. In the infamous 1972 article “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture”, anthropologist Sherry Ortner explored the universality of female subordination by arguing that women are identified with and are a symbol of nature; while, men are symbolized by humanity’s culture. Cacophony (2020) is a short sensory ethnographical film exploring humanity’s complex relationship to nature, and the power dynamics that shape this relationship. By analyzing the age old war between anthropocentric human superiority and to-be-tamed nature, this film seeks to illuminate the tension that exists in mainstream heterosexual desire and sexuality using sensorial experience as its language.

Rebecca Poarch

Rebecca Poarch is a 22-year-old artist from Long Island, New York. She recently graduated from the Pennsylvania State University after pursing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art with her concentration in Painting & Drawing. Rebecca was awarded the 2019 Margaret Giffen Schoenfelder Memorial Scholarship by Penn State School of Visual Arts to recognize her as an exceptional forth-year painter. Rebecca has shown at Greenpoint Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, Radiator Gallery in Queens, New York, and with the Garment District Alliance in New York, New York. Rebecca has worked as a Curatorial Assistant at Isabella Garrucho Fine Art in Greenwich, Connecticut and as a Curatorial Assistant at the Art Alliance of Central Pennsylvania in State College, Pennsylvania.

Artist Statement
With vivid colors and dream-like scenes, my work aims to realize the blurred line between the body and its lived experiences, in conjunction with these developing ideas in the contemporary art world. My work aims to tell stories of girlhood, love, loss, sexuality, and other physical and emotional experiences, creating a personal mythology and diaristic narrative. Through painting a dreamland of hyper-femininity, I am creating a world of bright light from darkness, or a utopia from a place of vulnerability. After a surgery that caused me to think about my relationship to femininity and sensuality, my most recent works have used a process of taking photos of myself, cutting and manipulating these images in photoshop, and transferring these compositions to a painting. This bridged my thoughts on the cutting and healing process my body physically has undergone and its relation to my femininity and that which makes me feel beautiful. Through my painting process, I am able to accept and adapt to the bodily changes I have experienced, confront my constant need to make myself feel beautiful, and connect to a deeper personal sense of sensuality and femininity. Most recently, my work has contemplated how painting can act as performance in my life, particularly in my everyday ritualistic beauty routines. Sewing together my used makeup wipes as material to paint on has caused me to merge my self-care practices and my painting practices to find fulfillment in both performances simultaneously. I hope to address questions of growth and self-acceptance, coming from a place of vulnerability, to then create soft, ephemeral, and hyper-feminine works that speak to not only my personal experiences, but also political and social issues at a greater scale. I hope to find oneness, beauty, and strength in the elasticity and morphing of the physical and emotional self, particularly while living in the body of a girl who is becoming a woman.

2020

SWITCH

December 18, 2020 - February 7, 2021

Kaiser Gallery is proud to feature artists and creatives from the art and technology sectors who utilize light as their medium and source of inspiration. The evolution of art has led it to become more and more intertwined with technology and reshaping the definition of what we consider art along the way. SWITCH features a wide variety of artists and creators who challenge art in different directions through the implementation of technology. Artists and creators alike explore different expressions of light through multidimensional studies, including but not limited to, sculptural works, printmaking, projection art, and virtual reality. The blending of different types of media through innovative practices may even provide a glimpse into the future.

Presenting works by Laura Bigger, Emily Dzieweczynski, GIBSON + RECODER, Carol Anne McChrystal, Haumed Rahmani, Joseph Santarpia, and HR-Stamenov.

Read Artist Statements & Bios

Laura Bigger

My work explores the relationships that exist among humans, animals, and ecosystems, particularly in terms of the food chain, raw materials, and the human tendency to exert control over natural systems. It explores existential quandaries such as what it means to be a human today, how we can live in the world responsibly, and what our obligation is to do so. As a multimedia artist, I question anthropocentric viewpoints and interpret the man made environment primarily through print, drawing and installation. Celestial Bodies is a series of prints that uses symbolism to articulate the concept of a tipping point. Some works portray the point at which light approaching a black hole changes direction, having been drawn toward the black hole’s mass. Others portray light emerging carelessly from a prism with no obstacles. Components such as slices of water are either upright, indicating an expected stasis, or upside-down, hinting at an eerie world with laws of nature unfathomable to us. While this series is more abstracted than much of my recent work, it manifests an environmental concern and a visual experimentation with balance, optimism, pessimism, and escapism.

Laura Bigger 'Constellations' (2019) Monoprint: intaglio & relief with copper leaf and reflective glass beads. 10.5" x 14.5”

Laura Bigger Bio
Laura Bigger is an Assistant Professor of Art and runs the printmaking area at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO. She has previously taught at the University of Nevada, Reno and Augsburg College, in Minneapolis, MN. Originally from Boulder, CO, Bigger received a BA in Studio Art and Hispanic Studies from Colorado College in 2008 and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2013. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions nationally.

Emily Dzieweczynski

I’m curious about empathy. My portfolio moves between science, art, and technology. It questions the lengths and limitations of these fields when they intersect at the concept of empathy. This interest in empathy comes from equal parts hope, stubbornness, and cynicism. I wanted to understand what could make people do good. The research began by studying Daniel Batson’s Empathy-Altruism hypothesis. This hypothesis states that the more empathic concern we feel towards an entity, the more altruistic motivation is experienced. Empathy is facilitated by both understanding or sharing emotional remembrances and one’s ability to project and experience bodily sensations in relation to another entity. My work is interdisciplinary. Psychological literature informs art making decisions, bringing something that is analyzed into something that is felt. I conduct research through data collection and documentation. Work in two-dimensional or new media functions as empathic stimuli, questioning how we connect and experience empathy. Ultimately, your reality is vastly different than mine and I want to understand that.

Emily Dzieweczynski 'An Audio Analysis of Home' (2020) 3D Rendering, Ambisonic Sound, and VR. 3:50 min

Emily Dzieweczynski is a multimedia artist, creative researcher, designer, and educator. She is interested in the intersection of science and art, particularly where they meet at the concept of empathy. Emily is a graduate from Gustavus Adolphus College, holding Bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art and Psychological Science, and studied Fine Arts Media at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her work takes the form of drawing, printmaking, writing, and new media; including code, virtual reality, 3D modeling, web-based media, sound, and video.

Emily’s work has been shown at venues such as the Target Gallery, the American Swedish Institute, Rosalux Gallery, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Gustavus Adolphus College, and the Children’s Museum of Minnesota. She has received funding through the National Science Foundation, an Arts and Cultural Heritage Grant, the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council, and Gustavus Adolphus College.

GIBSON + RECODER

Coming Attraction GIBSON + RECODER In our installation work, we use projected light to articulate space and time. Film projectors and celluloid are the material base of our constructions in light and shadow, the elemental properties of cinema. These things are deeply imbued with a history of viewership in the dark of the theater. To remove it from darkness is to flood this history and cast a certain illumination upon it. A certain exposure. Light spills in the shifting of film from its native darkness in enclosed chambers (camera obscura) to the uncanny openness and defamiliarized illumination of installation. We are exploring the shift, elaborating the displacement, recasting the light mechanics of a peculiar estrangement of the medium. The art of cinema, yes. But more timely: the becoming cinema of art. That is the coming attraction for us.

Gibson + Recoder 'Solid Light Film' (2017) 16mm film projectors, acrylic cylinder, and hardware. 14" x 41" x 13"

Collaborating artists Sandra Gibson (b. 1968, Portland, OR) and Luis Recoder (b. 1971, San Francisco, CA) have been exhibiting their expanded cinema installations and projection performances since 2000. Their works are in the permanent collections of major art museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, and Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany. Artist awards and commissions include the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy, National Endowment for the Art’s U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, and Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Mad. Sq. Art in New York. Lecturing appointments include both long and short-term teaching residencies in the media departments of the University of Colorado Boulder, Denison University in Ohio, and California Institute for the Arts. They are featured artists and research associates of RESET THE APPARATUS! A Survey of the Photographic and the Filmic in Contemporary Art, hosted by the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. Gibson + Recoder live and work in New York.

Carol Anne McChrystal

My materially-driven sculptures work through chemical processes and labor-intensive hand-making to explore the legacies of colonialism and trade, as well as the ways in which the climate catastrophe has compounded these histories of inequity. Inhabiting a tension between Earth’s immense geological history and the absurd everyday experience of plastic and labor, I consolidate the painstakingly hand-made with mass-produced consumables to pry open a speculative space to resist the means-ends rationale of late capitalism.

Carol Anne McChrystal 'Media Archaeology I' (2020) Dual layer DVD-Rs, kernite, dye, and copper nails. 60" x 60"

Born into the dual diaspora of the Philippines and Ireland, Carol Anne McChrystal is a Los Angeles–based artist and designer. Her materially-driven sculpture and videos work through chemical processes and labor-intensive hand-making to explore the legacy of colonialism and trade, as well as the ways in which the climate catastrophe has compounded these histories of inequity. Inhabiting the tension between Earth’s immense history and the absurdly mundane everyday experience of plastic and labor, her practice consolidates painstakingly hand-made and mass-produced consumables in order to pry open a speculative space in which to resist the means-ends rationale of late capitalism.

As part of the collaborative duo Nightmare City, she has created immersive environments that have been exhibited at Alter Space in San Francisco, The Luminary in St. Louis, and Horse and Pony in Berlin, and has shown video works at Essex Flowers in New York, MASS Gallery in Austin, and ACRETV in Chicago. Her writing has been published in critical arts publications like Art Practical and Temporary, and she recently self-published a collection of poetry titled, “Entropical Latitudes.” In tandem with her art practice, she organizes within the local Filipino community in Los Angeles with GABRIELA, the anti-imperialist Filipino women’s group.

Haumed Rahmani

Just as we learn who we are through the process of self reflection, so too does this projection piece form its own emotions, memories, and identity by seeing itself through itself. The camera, projector, and cross-dichroic prism act as the organs of a feedback loop of converging and diverging light, always recreating the present as a fractalized view of the past. In this way, the system hopes to achieve some internal meaning.

Every word in the dictionary
is defined by other words in the dictionary,
like every moment in time
is defined by other moments:

a language of fractals,
only ever returning to itself.

Haumed Rahmani 'Self-Reflection' (2020) digital projection and prism.

Straddling creative, scientific, and digital frameworks, Haumed Rahmani spends his time thinking about questions that lead to better questions, in hopes of finding a guiding compass through the future. His code is being used by the likes of Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and the Max Planck Institute, and he’s slated to present at the International Liquid Crystal Conference 2022. With work ranging from microscope imaging to generative weaving and short film, Haumed is foremost a toolbuilder and communicator. He is currently working toward his PhD in Chemical Physics at the Advanced Materials & Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University.

Joseph Santarpia

My practice captures a stark contrast of darkness and luminosity, referencing both a sense of visceral interiority and expansive space in order to address curiosities regarding embodiment and release, and autopoiesis and sympoiesis. I achieve a range of abstracted and representational imagery using pigment and fluid on paper along with monotype printing and photographic processes. Through series’ of ink and watercolor paintings, collages, cyanotypes, and some 3 and 4D pieces, my work indexes the comparability of and transitory nature between interiority, flesh, bodily mechanics, and corporeal structure, to that of the expanse of space into which bodily actions extend. My materials interact through varying ratios of fluid, light, and object. The cyanotype process is fundamentally photography and printmaking—chemical exposure to UV light and transferring objects onto paper. The creative capacity of the chemicals, light, and objects on the paper surface allow this media to be treated painterly, as my "Scope" and "Range" series are. Evoking the aesthetics of medical imagery (MRI and X-ray) and using exercise equipment as the subject of the image transfer, this work is imbued with a context of medicalization and rehabilitation.

Joseph Santarpia 'BOUND vi' (2020) Cyanotype. 45" x 33"

Joseph Santarpia's work leverages autopoiesis—the self-creative capacity of material—to explore questions of release, embodiment, and landscape. He received his MFA from Stony Brook University in 2020, and a bachelors degree in Visual Art Education from SUNY New Paltz in 2017. He's shown in galleries across the United States, including: Small Green Door, East Los Angeles, CA; Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; LIC Arts Open, Long Island City, NY; The Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition, Brooklyn, NY; Limner Gallery, Hudson NY; The Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Stony Brook, NY; Gallery North, Setauket, NY. He is the recipient of awards including The Goldberger Fellowship and the Dorothy L. Memorial Purchase Prize. Santarpia is also an active, New York State certified art educator currently working for the Lowville Academy & Central School District and previously for the Gallery North ArtVentures Program and Stony Brook University’s Studio Art Program.

At age 18, Santarpia had a spinal fusion of his L5, S1 vertebrae, altering his bodily reality. Because of this, he has grown to be intensely attentive to his bodily sensations. The lived experience and physical consequences of this procedure have since informed his life and art practice greatly. The two main components from which Santarpia’s practice manifest are (1) material approach and process, and (2) conceptual and biographical context. Both his material approach and the spinal fusion surgery he underwent, rely on systems of collaborative creativity (autopoiesis/sympoiesis). The fusion surgery uses bone graft, which is essentially a glue that hardens or fuses into bone over time. The procedure sets a rigid ground using rods and screws along and into the vertebrae for bodily regeneration to take its course. Similarly, Santarpia’s art practice facilitates a system of interaction: the flow of liquids and sediments; gravitational forces; evaporation; crystallization; state changes of liquids, gasses, and solids; UV light; emulsification; muscle contraction; respiration; cognition.

HR Stamenov

HR-Stamenov was born in 1981 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. In 2007 he obtained his Master’s Degree in Painting from Academia di Belle Arti di Carrara, Italy in the class of professor Omar Galliani. HR-Stamenov work combines technology, new media, video, traditional oil paintings, and site-specific light Installations.

HR-Stamenov exhibited in: Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy, (2009); Lu.C.C.A. Museum - Center Of Contemporary Art, Italy (2011); Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia, Bulgaria (2011); La Triennale di Milano (2009 ,2018); Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk, Poland (2012); Sofia Arsenal - Museum for Contemporary Art (2012); Sofia City Art Gallery (2009,10,11,12,13,14); Museum of Contemporary Art of Istria (2015) Structura Gallery, Sofia (2017); Galleria di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Viareggio, Italy (2018); CAMeC, La Spezia, Italy (2020) Æter Haga, The Hague, Netherlands (2020).

HR Stamenov 'We need miracles' (2020) Video, loop, silent.

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