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Thu, Aug 11, 2022
Works by Carlos Motta as well as Carol Newhouse and members of the WomanShare community to be featured next in the Wex galleries
The Wexner Center for the Arts, the multidisciplinary laboratory at The Ohio State University, is thrilled to share its exhibitions schedule for the upcoming fall and spring seasons.
For fall, the Wex presents two groundbreaking exhibitions by Carlos Motta and Carol Newhouse, each of which engages histories—and futures—of queer and feminist resistance.
Carlos Motta, Corpo Fechado (The Devil's Work), 2018. HD video with color and sound, 24:47 mins. Installation view in Carlos Motta: Corpo Fechado, Galeria Avenida Da Índia (EGEAC), Lisbon, Portugal, 2018–19. Image courtesy of EGEAC/Galerias Municipais, photo: Bruno Lopes.
This thematic solo exhibition—the largest presentation of Motta’s work in the US to date—celebrates the Colombian-born, New York–based artist’s commitment to radical difference and the debut of his Wex-commissioned project, The Columbus Assembly.
Acclaimed for work that addresses critical LGBTQIA+ issues of both past and present, Motta (he/him) describes himself as “an historian of untold narratives and archivist of repressed histories.” Your Monsters, Our Idols, curated by Wex Associate Curator of Exhibitions Lucy I. Zimmerman, brings together a selection of Motta’s photographs, films, sculptures, drawings, and installations from the late 1990s through today, which reflect two major areas of exploration in his practice: postcolonial subjectivity and democratic participation.
These works reveal the struggles of queer people under the constraints of oppressive social and political regimes, but also use participation as a device, employing self-representation and self-determination as strategies to produce counternarratives. The range of this liberated expression is expanded through collaborations with other artists, including Julio Salgado, Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Tiamat Legion Medusa, and SPIT! (Sodomites, Perverts, Inverts Together!), a collective including Motta, John Arthur Peetz, and Carlos Maria Romero.
The Columbus Assembly, Motta’s first multichannel sound installation, was supported by a Wex Artist Residency Award. The project is based on conversations with artists, activists, and scholars who considered the stakes of changing the name of Columbus, Ohio—the largest city in the world named after Christopher Columbus. The work asks how reimagining such symbolic acts of recognition might contribute to larger efforts to decolonize institutions, attain equity, and achieve restorative justice.
Two free volumes designed by Composite Co. will be published in conjunction with Your Monsters, Our Idols: A booklet accompanying the residency work that features the edited roundtable conversations along with a poem by Indigo Gonzales Miller, and an exhibition gallery guide that will feature new essays by Zimmerman and scholar and filmmaker Susan Stryker.
Billie Miracle, Bird's-eye view of WomanShare, 1983. Ink on paper. Image courtesy of the artist.
In her first museum exhibition, photographer Carol Newhouse (she/her) chronicles the joys and hardships of the Women’s Lands, a movement launched in the 1970s to reclaim rural America as a safe space for queer women.
Cocurated by Ohio-based artist Carmen Winant, Sharing Circles surveys the world-changing impact of 1970s feminism through Newhouse’s photographic work, which documents the creation of WomanShare—a queer feminist, land-based community in rural Oregon founded in 1974 by Newhouse, her then lover Billie Miracle, and her best friend Dian Wagner. Part of a cluster of lesbian collectives located along the Interstate 5 corridor, WomanShare offered refuge and release from patriarchal society while requiring mutual vulnerability and trust from its members.
Sharing Circles explores the complexities of communal life and the creative practices that sustained WomanShare over the decades—in particular, the sharing circle, a method of group mediation that encourages empathy, active listening, and nonhierarchical participation. The presentation includes over 150 of Newhouse’s photographs alongside her ephemera and artworks by other members of the collective, including Billie Miracle and current residents Bianca Fox Del Mar Ballara and Lycan El Lobo Coss, who are working with Newhouse and Miracle to transfer WomanShare into the stewardship of queer BIPOC women and Two-Spirit people, renaming it NativeWomanshare.
Sharing Circles is jointly curated by Winant, Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Ohio State, and Wex Associate Curator of Exhibitions Daniel Marcus, along with Curatorial Research Assistant Raechel Root and Graduate Curatorial Intern Arielle Irizarry.
An accompanying free gallery publication designed by The Work We Do will include interviews with Newhouse and Miracle and a conversation between Ballara, Coss, and Ohio-based artists and activists Nico Fuentes and Jonas Wooten.
A Fall Exhibitions Preview will take place Thursday, September 15 from 4 to 7 PM. The event will include a 5 PM Spotlight Tour of Sharing Circles featuring Carol Newhouse in conversation with artist and historian Leah DeVun and a 6 PM Spotlight Tour of Your Monsters, Our Idols featuring Carlos Motta in conversation with Lucy I. Zimmerman.
Thursday, October 20, as part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial Columbus Neighborhood Spotlight Day, curator-led public tours will take place at the Wex at 1 PM for Your Monsters, Our Idols, and at 3 PM for Sharing Circles.
Wednesday, October 26 at 6 PM, a virtual conversation between Carlos Motta and Ana María Reyes will be moderated by Lucy I. Zimmerman. It will be available to stream for free at wexarts.org.
Saturday, November 5, the center will host Reassembly, a public, community-led event activating both exhibitions. More details will be announced closer to the exhibition’s opening.
Hope Ginsburg, Meditation Ocean, M.O. 1 [working title], Production Still, 2021; image courtesy of the artist
Anna Tsouhlarakis Opens January 2023
Anna Tsouhlarakis (she/her), an artist of Navajo, Creek, and Greek descent, uses Indigenous knowledge and pedagogies to reframe the discourse around Native American identity within our contemporary landscape. Contextualized by the forced migration of Indigenous people from their homelands, including the Columbus area, Tsouhlarakis’s text-based commission will engage the Wex’s interior and exterior spaces, as well as sites around the city.
A.K. Burns: Negative Space Opens February 2023
Spanning more than a decade of Burns’s (she/her) practice, the artist’s largest solo exhibition to date will be anchored by the multiyear epic, Negative Space. Conceived around natural concepts—power (the sun), the body, space (void/land) and premiering a commission on water—Burns’ work operates at the intersection of politics and fantasy. Probing our accelerating ecological crisis, Negative Space considers the agency of marginalized bodies and their relationship to nature, technology, site, and resources.
Meditation Ocean Constellation, Meditation Ocean Opens February 2023
Featuring the premiere of an immersive, multi-channel video installation created with extensive support from the Wex Film/Video Studio, Meditation Ocean is the culmination of artist Hope Ginsburg’s (she/her) 2020-2022 Wex Artist Residency Award. This iterative, collaborative project, which was created by a constellation of artists, writers, educators, meditators, musicians, curators, divers, and scientists, works for climate justice through oceanic meditations and responsive terrestrial actions. A series of programs, workshops and events activate this porous platform.
Sa’dia Rehman: The River Runs Slow and Deep and All the Bones of My Ancestors Have Risen to the Surface to Knock and Click Like the Sounds of Trees in the Air Opens February 2023
Recipient of a Wex Artist Residency Award in Learning & Public Practice, Rehman (she/her/they/them) will realize a new body of work inspired by her family’s forced displacement in 1974 from their village in Pakistan due to the building of the Tarbela Dam on the Indus River. The project will evolve during the exhibition run to evoke archiving in real time, preserving the rapidly shifting politic of existing, suspended between homeland and migration.
The Wexner Center for the Arts is located at 1871 N. High St. (at 15th Avenue) on the campus of The Ohio State University in Columbus.
Gallery hours are 11 AM–5 PM Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday; and 11 AM–8 PM Thursday–Saturday. Galleries are closed Mondays. Gallery admission is free. Info on campus COVID-19 safety guidelines, bus routes, parking, and more, as well as advance tickets, are available at wexarts.org/plan-your-visit or at (614) 292-3535.
Free gallery admission is generously supported by American Electric Power Foundation, CoverMyMeds, PNC Foundation, Adam Flatto, Bob and Mary Kidder, and Bill and Sheila Lambert.
Carlos Motta: Your Monsters, Our Idols is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support for this presentation is provided by FotoFocus.
Support for Sharing Circles: Carol Newhouse and the WomanShare Collective is provided by Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and Ohio Humanities.
