Riffe presents works by 11 Ohio artists
Artists are often the first to recognize and respond to cultural shifts in the world. So says the curator’s statement for the current exhibit Downtown at the Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery.
“Shift: Thinking Globally/acting Locally” presents the works of 11 Ohio artists who, according to curator Maria Seda-reeder, “are not just experiencing history … but helping us shape and create the future.”
That said, works in this unusual and diverse exhibit are focused on issues of social justice, environmental protection and concepts of home and survival, especially during the pandemic.
Cincinnati artist Terence Hammonds pays homage to the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and ‘70s with his miniature dance floor of birch and walnut plywood.
“You Have to Get Up to Get Down,” accompanied by music via a QR code on the information panel. His four screen prints in “The Beat, It Will Always Save Us,” show couples dancing on the moon. In the artist’s words, the work “is a love letter to Black joy which is so big and boundless that it could possibly have its own orbit.”
Among the eight works of Franklin Township’s Kevin Harris is a haunting, layered digital acrylic print portrait of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old shot in Florida in 2012.
In her handsome woven photograph collages, Cleveland artist Lauren Davies considers abandoned industrial sites and Ohio prisons. She cuts apart and reassembles tapestries originally decorated with photographs of Ohio locations, simultaneously finding in them beauty and regret.
Tracy Featherstone of Hamilton, Ohio, also uses fabric: recycled blue jeans in “Working Yantra” and recycled canvas in “Red Stripe Yantra,” a tribute to the glory and fragility of coral reefs.
Found objects also play in the wall installation “Two Broken Arms and a Spider” by Danielle Julian Norton of Columbus.
The Salvadoran-born Lorena Molina poses questions about freedom and safety in her installation of raspberry plants growing from a mattress. During
the El Salvadoran Civil War, Molina’s mother would move mattresses to protect her family from bullets.
IN “Compound Effigy (For Ma’khia Bryant),” Cleveland artist M. Carmen Lane pays homage by looking back thousands of years to recreate an Adena burial mound, projecting images on the walls of a small gallery room.
The Cincinnati-based Xia Zhang also considers mortality in her striking installation “Death, Growth, Repeat.” Eight large tombstones made of chia plants serve as a “meditation on growth in un uncontrollable and unsustainable environments.”
Many of the works reflect what was foremost on the artists’ minds during the pandemic. In her thoughtful photographic portraits, taken during the first week of the stay-at-home order, Akron artist Autumn Bland captured health care workers, essential workers and individuals and families in neighborhoods.
Amber J. Anderson of Cleveland Heights spent alone-time putting together Victorian homes from vintage kits, presented in nine archival pigment prints.
Normally a performance artist, Alison Crocetta, of Columbus, returned to her work as a Reiki practitioner with the interactive installation “Open Channel.” In addition to viewing her piece, viewers are invited to use a QR code and an informational video to sign up for a session of the energy-channeling Japanese healing technique.
In curating her first exhibit for the Riffe Gallery, Seda-reeder conceived of the theme before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. She looked, she said, for artists who were working in the conceptual areas of global and local responsibility and whose works could be catalysts for change.
“It’s up to the audience seeing this exhibit to ask the difficult questions,” Seda-reeder said.
“Whose ongoing care is being considered and how do we tend to the world and the people in it who need attending?”
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