The Lens

Contested Ground is a photo series of landscapes and portraits by Art Academy of Cincinnati alumni photographers Taylor Dorrell and Cody Perkins, which takes on the spatial impact of the Amazon facilities in Greater Cincinnati. Economic investments are often relegated to abstract numbers and historical parallels, both relying on an obscure notion of time. As workers at these facilities are engaged in a struggle to unionize, abstract issues are brought into the material world. These massive facilities are built in spaces that people interact with everyday, transforming highways, roads, and individual lives.

Through... Continue reading Contested Ground

On Devil’s Promenade, a road located in southwest Missouri near Oklahoma and Arkansas, there is a stretch where people are likely to encounter the Spook Light, a scientifically inexplicable floating orb that moves, disappears, reappears, and sometimes splits in two or three. Community members know it well. Some search for it, while others keep their distance.

In Devil’s Promenade, photographers and Ozark natives Lara Shipley and Antone Dolezal blend the folklore and local history of their home region with present-day photographs of Ozark people, land, and interpretive images engaging the living mythology of... Continue reading Devil’s Promenade

On Location & Care is a photographically-fixated, two-person exhibition featuring the works of Emmaline Carter and Stephanie Cuyubamba Kong, whose works navigate space, identity, and how they functionally intertwine. A catalyst to the development of their work, formative functions allow for critical experiences to occur, and a connection to place and space. They ask, how does “belonging to” and “being from” create notions of oneself?

The act of looking ties both the individual and collective narrative to a person and a place. With navigating cultural, familial, and individual understandings comes a formulation to dually... Continue reading On Location & Care

Don’t Just Talk About It, Be About It is a multimedia retrospective based on the life of James "Omar” Childress in collaboration with Cincinnati-based artist Mike James. A Cincinnati native, Omar is deeply tied to decades of local history and the African American experience. Omar’s father, James Palmer Childress, became the first Black detective in the Cincinnati Police Department in the 1950s, cultivating his son’s strong foundation and deep tie to the city. Omar became a successful entrepreneur at a young age, operating many small businesses including the Washington Limousine Service, Diplomat Night Club, and several remodeling and deck construction companies.... Continue reading Don’t Just Talk About It, Be About It

CONCEPT and CODA presents photography by emerging artist Lydia Masset and established artist Ron Hoffman. Masset's conceptualized content is viewer-dependent, needing viewers to find and create meaning, while Hoffman's photography responds to itself through a coda of responsive poetry, where viewers are pulled into a reflexive discourse.

In "CONCEPT," Masset isolates serendipitous, contrived content in images that beg the viewer to ask “what's happening?” Her work is an exploration of the art form, a restatement of observations, and a call to viewers to see the unseen. The backstories transpire in the time and space before and after the image... Continue reading CONCEPT and CODA: Lydia Masset and Ron Hoffman