Art is presented in many forms and in many spaces—from brilliant graffiti on concrete canvasses outdoors to large-scale multimedia installations. Oberlin art faculty are presenting their artwork in a new way—a virtual exhibition.
Johnny Coleman
Professor of Studio Art and Africana Studies
Coleman is a sculptor/installation artist and associate professor of studio art and Africana studies.
Blackbird (For A Brown Baby Boy)
immersive media installation.
Curated Storefront Project, Akron, OH, July 2019.
Blackbird
Blackbird (For A Brown Baby Boy) is composed as a sketch within a series of gestures invoking the memory of an enslaved child, Lee Howard Dobbins. In 1853, this child, accompanied by his adopted mother and siblings, fled Kentucky, crossed the Ohio River, and traveled north intent on reaching Lake Erie and Canada. However, the boy was too sick to continue the journey. It was necessary to leave him in the care of a family in Oberlin, Ohio, with the intent of rejoining his people in Canada upon recovery. Lee Howard Dobbins died at four years of age among strangers in Oberlin two weeks later and is interred there. Materials include found rabbit traps set upon hand-constructed tables pinned with dried chamomile flowers; rear-lit images of the lake and adjacent estuary at a hidden cove set within bronze framed alcoves; woven four-channel sonic narrative. Blackbird was installed in the lobby of the historic Law Building in downtown Akron as a part of the Curated Storefront Project.
The Lake
The Liminal
Julia Christensen
Associate Professor of Integrated Media
Christensen is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores systems of technology, consumerism, landscape, and obsolescence. Her ongoing investigation into how “upgrade culture” impacts our experience has manifested as a series of artworks, and her new book, Upgrade Available. Two series of photographs, Hard Copy and Archiving Obsolescence, include images of obsolete documentation in personal archives and in the institutional archives of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, respectively. Her project, The Tree of Life, emerged from an ongoing dialog with scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab about how to design technology that can operate over the course of centuries.
What Remains (Estate Sale 1), 2014, from the series Hard Copy (2014). Digital photograph, dimensions variable.
Institutional Archive, Box 3 (LACMA), 2020, from the series Archiving Obsolescence (2019–ongoing). Digital photograph, dimensions variable.
Antenna Tree Model (Mt. Wilson), 2020, from the series Tree of Life (2019 –ongoing). Digital photograph, dimensions variable.
Kristina Paabus
Associate Professor of Studio Art, Reproducible Media
In my work I examine the systems that we use to control our surroundings-or in turn the structures that try to control us. These strategies include architecture, language, religion, the internet, and government. Through abstraction and metaphor, I create actual and depicted spaces of somewhat recognizable, yet precarious situations. Using a multidisciplinary approach, I create hybrid spatial conversations that observe, interpret, and respond to experiences of attempted control and containment. I explore the operations, fractures, and perceptions of these systems to uncover underlying common codes within our shared experiences.
T.V. Eye Laser relief and screenprint on paper. 2018 16”x20”
The Plot Does Not Care for Itself Etching, screenprint, and linocut on paper. 2018 16”x20”
The Beginning of the End Aquatint, screenprint, and lithography on paper. 2018 16”x20”
Mimi Kato
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Multidisciplinary artist Mimi Kato creates artwork with a diverse range of subject matter, seamlessly moving between photography, digital media, and sculpture. In one series of triptychs, a digitally rendered fictional Japanese suburb is filled with people going about their daily lives, while playing upon gender stereotypes.
Wild Corporation: First Orientation 48” x 43, archival pigment print, 2018
From the series of Wild Corporation
Wild Corporation examines how the patriarchal social structure affects the relationship among women. This work, featuring prints and objects, tells a story of a battle of two companies in the woods and their female workers who are dressed in the typical Japanese company uniform. These uniforms, chosen mostly by male CEOs, are not very practical with tight skirts and vests. They are usually given to female workers who assist with daily operation without career prospects. This uniform becomes a symbol of oppression in the work. This work depicts strong powerful women who undertake tasks traditionally assigned to men such as hunting and warfare by using and transforming office supplies as their survival tools and weapons. They are trapped and threatened by the mentality and the expectations of patriarchal society just as their bodies are trapped in the uniforms. Each team from a different company has an obsession for items that they think contain power. The team in blue uniform desires hair and the yellow team craves heels, both of which are typical signifiers of the feminine beauty ideal. These items are harvested from hostages from the other team.
Wild Corporation: One Step Ahead
40” x 56”, archival pigment print, 2018
Wild Corporation: Risk Management
41” x 57”, archival pigment print, 2018
Omid Shekari
Visiting Assistant Professor of Drawing
Shekari’s work captures stories that speak universally about how force and violence still determine the rhythms and laws of power within the human experience.
Nonstop Medium: Ink and pen on paper Size: 17 x 15 inches, 2019
These drawings are part of a series of images that consider the ongoing dynamic between repressed and repressor. These pieces reflect this experience; the frailty of the human condition and its fluctuating relationship with power, further bolstered with the presence of structure, framing while at the same time enclosing the scene.
My right leg is 4 inches shorter than the left one! Medium: Acrylic & ink on fabric Size: 60 x 46 inches, 2019 The text is a transcription of John Turner’s confession from his service time in Iraq.
Pointing Out Medium: Ink on paper Size: 6 x 9 inches, 2020
Sarah Schuster
Associate Professor of Studio Art, Painting
The subject matter of her work varies from project to project. The the underlying theme throughout her painting is the intimate relationship between creation and destruction both in the natural world and in the painting process itself.
The Loveliness of What I Left Behind
Flashe and Oil Paint on Canvas
6’ X 7.5’
As a painter, I struggle to create sensible form out of a multitude of perceptions and somatic sensations. Paint is the promise of something tangible and fixed, but with each stroke, the painter is faced with the dissolution of the particular. A single stroke of paint catalyzes an endless sequence of relationships that spin out in all directions. Stability lies somewhere beneath the shifting conditions of our perception and therefore beyond our grasp. Art intervenes, hoping to find, as Mondrian puts it, “…the dynamic in equilibrium.” This can be a ferocious process as creation destroys itself in order to create again. While I am painting, I have to tolerate the chaos to sense and perceive the world before the structures of language impose their order. If a painting works, it pauses the chaos. Energy patterns … sound, light, electricity, like the painter, rock an infinitude of atoms into rhythmic collaboration.
Little Brown One
Flashe and Oil on Canvas
12” X 12”
American Spring
Flashe and Oil on Canvas
4’ X 5’
Pipo Nguyen-Duy
Professor of Studio Art and Photography
Pipo’s reliance on the natural world as a theatrical apparatus uncovers collisions between nature and culture, past and present, in carefully crystallized visions that inscribe themselves onto classical western visions of the (un)natural world.
From Hotel Room
Hotel Window/Opera Actress
20”x30,” Inkjet print mounted on aluminum
2016
Hotel Window/Blue Models
20”x30,” Inkjet print mounted on aluminum
2016
Hotel Window/MonaLisa
20”x30,” Inkjet print mounted on aluminum
2016
Hotel Window/Kimono
20”x30,” Inkjet print mounted on aluminum
2017
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