Disturbing Reality

The Cincinnati Arts Association’s Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts presents Disturbing Reality, a group exhibition of nine artists who explore quirky and disquieting images, psychological dramas and off-kilter environments. Participating artists include Allison Grant (Chicago, Ill.); Allyson Klutenkamper (Portsmouth, Ohio); Nate Larson (Baltimore, Md.); Nicholas Sistler (Chicago, Ill.); Mark Slankard (Cleveland, Ohio) and Cincinnati artists Christopher Hoeting, Guennadi Maslov, Emily Hanako Momohara and David Rosenthal. The exhibition is staged on both levels of the Weston Art Gallery and features photography, painting and video projection.

Allison Grant’s Image as Place series creates fictional situations with staged and strangely lit settings that echo feelings of apprehension and hope. Grant’s exterior settings, which are often under construction or in some form of deterioration, serve as the backdrop for a solo figure that is sometimes in an anxious period of transition, much like the site they inhabit.
Allison's Statement Panel

Christopher Hoeting’s large-scale mixed media paintings are mixtures of social commentary and personal narrative. Photographic images taken at a family graveside service are entombed beneath multiple layers of cracking acrylic resin, suggesting a visual dialogue between death and the ritual of a funeral.
Christopher's Statement Panel

Allyson Klutenkamper ’s Domicile and Circumstances series use domestic interiors to explore the photograph as a visual metaphor for the psyche. Her large-scale photographs of interiors with an anonymous female figure suggest film stills and create an ambiguous narrative and subverted reality.
Allyson's Statement Panel

Nate Larson’s humorous investigation of Kirlian photography employs everyday food items such as salami, Spam, or a Twinkie, and shoots high voltage electricity through them in a hand-built imaging device which records multi-colored emanations on light-sensitive paper, thus elevating these mundane subjects to an ethereal state.
Nate's Statement Panel

Guennadi Maslov straddles two worlds with his photographic subjects—his current home in Cincinnati and his former in the Soviet Ukraine where he was born and raised. His haunting portraits of individuals from both spheres of his life attempt to catch the fluid material of the subconscious, reconcile the eastern and western halves of his brain, and illustrate the fragile dualities of human nature.
Guennadi's Statement Panel

Emily Hanako Momohara’s Koden series (“koden” is the Japanese tradition of gift giving to bereaving families) contemplates bereavement and legacy. Through the use of tableaus and funeral home settings, she creates self-portraits that represent haunting aspects of family members who have passed on.
Emily's Statement Panel

David Rosenthal’s most recent photographs are inspired by his investigations into 19 th-century Spiritualists who projected images onto smoke to create the illusion of a visit of a loved one from beyond the grave in a phenomena that came to be known as phantasmagoria. Through the manipulation of light, time, and film, Rosenthal captures his own “spirits” in a beautifully ghost-like series of photographs taken at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.
David's Statement Panel

Nicholas Sistler’s immaculately constructed diminutive paintings distort scale and perspective, placing the viewer in the position of voyeur bearing witness to an unfolding dark drama that creates a physical and psychological tension.
Nicholas's Statement Panel

Mark Slankard’s darkly humorous series Minor Invasions, featuring light boxes depicting overtly-fabricated dollhouse interiors, suggests disturbing psychological themes that evoke the sublimated fears and desires that disrupt domestic tranquility.
Mark's Statement Panel

Gallery Talk Series:

Sat., March 20, 2 p.m.

Families Create!

Education Workshop: Sat., April 17 with Chris Hoeting, 10 a.m.; Sat., May 22 with Emily Momohara, 10 a.m.

Exhibition Sponsor(s):

Tom Schiff