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Mon, Nov 18, 2019
The Wexner Center for the Arts, the multidisciplinary contemporary art space at The Ohio State University, will present solo exhibitions by Sadie Benning, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Stanya Kahn for its winter 2020 season. The artists will be in attendance for a reception on Friday, January 31.
January 22–April 26 2020 Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs
This winter, interdisciplinary artist Stanya Kahn will present the world premiere of No Go Backs (2020). It was shot on Super 16mm and was supported by a Wexner Center Film/Video Studio residency.
Kahn is known for videos that play with fiction, reality, humor, pathos, and the uncanny. The center presented Kahn’s celebrated film Stand in the Stream (2011-17) in The Box and hosted a visit from the artist in April 2018.
In her follow-up No Go Backs, two teens leave the city on their bikes, half-prepared but ready for a quick departure. The precarity of an endangered world haunts the quiet of this wordless film as the kids make their way deeper into the wilderness, and the earth itself emerges as a towering protagonist. When more kids leave the city, their compressed, visceral journey becomes an allegorical epic for an entire generation that must make a new way forward.
Kahn will also exhibit animations in the lower lobby made with marks, characters, and motifs from her paintings and drawings.
Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs is curated by Lucy I. Zimmerman, Associate Curator of Exhibitions.
Artist bio
Image: Stanya Kahn, No Go Backs, 2020 (film still). Super 16mm film transferred to 2k video. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Supported by the Film Video Studio Program at the Wexner Center for the Arts. ©2020 Stanya Kahn.
February 1–April 26, 2020 Sadie Benning: Pain Thing
The work of Sadie Benning has been shown at the Wex since the early 1990s. A recipient of a 2003 Wexner Center Artist Residency Award, they presented their first-ever solo exhibition, Suspended Animation, in the center’s galleries in 2007. For 2020, they return with a new work of striking scale and ambition.
For most of the current decade, Benning has concentrated on gallery-based projects, often using found photo images as the base material for a series of works that ultimately combines sculptural and painting elements into a unique hybrid.
Pain Thing is a single installation consisting of 63 small wood panels, grouped into 19 discrete sequences, each with its own title, and extending throughout two galleries. Acrylic paint and photo transparencies are applied to each panel, all subject to layers of meticulously applied resin. The overall result complicates the relationship between flatness and dimension, just as it raises questions of narrative and memory.
Sadie Benning: Pain Thing is curated by Bill Horrigan, Curator at Large.
Artist bio Image: Sadie Benning, IUD seq 4a, 2019. Wood, photographic transparencies, aqua resin and resin, 9 3/4 x 7 1/4". Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter, Los Angeles.
February 1–April 26, 2020 LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze
The latest body of work by artist LaToya Ruby Frazier introduces a major new chapter in her investigations of labor, family, community, and the working class across a variety of geographic settings. It centers on the workers at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. After more than 50 years of automobile production and a commitment to manufacture the Chevrolet Cruze until 2021, the facility was “unallocated” by GM in November 2018. Employees in Lordstown have been faced with the difficult decision to transfer to plants in other parts of the country.
Through images and interviews, Frazier conveys the workers’ experiences of the quickly developing events, the intense disruption to their lives and community, and the strong efforts of the local union, UAW Local 1112, on behalf of the GM employees. Presented for the first time in Ohio, The Last Cruze features over 60 photographs and other elements within an installation that visually echoes the assembly line in the GM Lordstown Complex.
The exhibition is curated by Karsten Lund, Associate Curator, and Solveig Øvstebø, Executive Director and Chief Curator, the Renaissance Society, Chicago, where The Last Cruze is on view through December 1. The presentation at the Wexner Center for the Arts, the second venue for the exhibition, is coordinated by Senior Curator Michael Goodson and Chief Operating Officer Megan Cavanaugh.
Image: LaToya Ruby Frazier, United Auto Workers and their families holding up Drive It Home campaign signs outside UAW Local 1112 Reuther Scandy Alli union hall, Lordstown, OH, from The Last Cruze, 2019. Gelatin silver print, 70 x 105". Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York / Rome
Related events
A Winter Exhibitions Preview on January 31, 5–8:30 PM, will feature free galleries and snacks, a cash bar, and a set from DJ Trueskillz in the lower lobby.
In tandem with the exhibition Sadie Benning: Pain Thing, the Wex will present three free concerts in the galleries: didi on Thursday, February 6; La Neve on Thursday, March 12; and Empath on Thursday, April 23. All performances start at 6 PM.
Walk-In Tours are scheduled throughout the run of shows beginning Saturday, February 8.
On Pause, a lunchtime meditation program in the galleries offered in partnership with Replenish: The Spa Co-op, will take place at noon on Wednesdays, February 12 through April 1.
LaToya Ruby Frazier and filmmaker Julia Reichert (American Factory) will have a public conversation for this year’s Lambert Family Lecture on Tuesday, February 18, at 7 PM.
More events and details will be available soon.
Visitor Information
Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs is on view January 22–April 26, 2020, and Sadie Benning: Pain Thing and LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze are on view February 1–April 26, 2020, at the Wexner Center for the Arts, 1871 N. High St. (at 15th Avenue) on the campus of The Ohio State University in Columbus.
Gallery hours are 11 AM–6 PM Tuesday-Wednesday, 11 AM–8 PM Thursday–Saturday, and 11 AM–6 PM Sunday. Galleries are closed Mondays. Admission is $9; $7 for seniors and Ohio State faculty and staff; free for Wexner Center members, college students, and visitors 18 and under; and free for all Thursdays 4–8 PM and the first Sunday of the month.
More info on bus routes, parking, and other visitor information is available here or at (614) 292-3535.
Exhibition Support
Support for winter 2020 exhibitions is provided by Cardinal Health.
The Wexner Center receives general operating support from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the Ohio Arts Council, the American Electric Power Foundation, The Columbus Foundation, and Nationwide Foundation.
Support for arts access at the Wexner Center is provided by Cardinal Health Foundation and Huntington Bank.
