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The Weight of Time

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How many artists: 
6

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$500 to
$4000

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Date: 
Saturday, 14 August 2021 to Sunday, 10 October 2021
Opening: 
Saturday, 14 August 2021 - 6:30pm

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.

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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.

Telephone: 
2162823826
Venue ( Address ): 

2418 Professor Ave., Cleveland, OH 44113

Kaiser Gallery , Cleveland

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