Reimagining New Worlds--Ohio Women to Watch, ‘23-’24
One of the curious ways in which my mother dealt with her unresolved anger and grief was to categorize, endlessly. Often, she undid huge piles of folded laundry, the neat contents of closets and almirahs, the details of long-forgotten drawers. To this she would give her full attention—in increments of one to two hours daily. She arranged, rearranged, organized, archived, categorized, and saw new possibilities in how she was going to think about her world, a new world that had yawned into being in a split second before her very eyes. I was all of seven years old, and my mother was in her young 30s. She had a huge household to run—a smorgasbord of aunts and uncles, cousins real or assumed, my siblings who ranged in age from 7-13. The world spun around its own axis while we mourned the sudden death of my father at the age of 37.
As my mother arranged and rearranged her piles of clothes—blouses, petticoats, night clothes, daily wear saris, saris for special occasions, shawls which were separated by make and count and fineness of craftsmanship—something must have registered in my consciousness. This daily undoing and re-making, this Do-It Yourself foraging of a new pathway stuck with me. My mother’s daily unraveling of her world and making it anew spoke of a larger need within her as well as in the viewer of this performative act. She was searching for a new way forward, a way that was going to accommodate her new reality without her beloved husband, my father who was barely known to me. A new world awaited.
As I grew up, I couldn’t help but integrate this practice into my own visual vocabulary for making sense of my world. I too took to cataloging, archiving, listing, and organizing as a system for ordering my reality.
And that’s why, the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ exhibition, New Worlds: Women to Watch, 2023-2024 spoke to me with full-on intensity.
Staged in Ohio by the Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery and the Ohio Advisory Group, A New World: Ohio Women to Watch 2023-24 is a recurring exhibition featuring emerging and underrepresented women artists. As context, the exhibition has been held in Ohio for the 4th time in this last decade and for the 7th time at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (as New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024). Each time, artists are given a thematic focus which they address. Curators representing the museum’s outreach committees— volunteer affiliate groups which are instrumental in bringing the mission of the museum to their regions—pick a group of women artists who address the topic most eloquently. In 2023-24, 11 Ohio artists were chosen for the Ohio Women to Watch exhibition. Of this group, one artist was chosen to represent Ohio in NMWA’s Washington, DC space.
The 2023-24 exhibition title, A New World, was prompted by the reordering of our world as a direct result of the pandemic. The public health crisis was not the only catastrophe that was called into question, but also the breakdown of social structures such as the family unit. In cloistered spaces, domestic violence soared. Brutal social injustices and hate-fueled crimes, which were largely race and class based, followed soon after. The national elections of 2020 also forced a re-consideration of current societal conditions that seemed to have unraveled before our very eyes. The world seemed on the brink of an impending catastrophe. How to unperch ourselves from this precipitous ledge became the brief that all 11 Ohio artists worked with as they re-imagined possibilities that bridged the gap between the global and the personal.
Co-curators for the Ohio component of A New World, Sso-Rha Kang, Director of the Northern Kentucky University Art Galleries, and Matt Distell, Executive Director of The Carnegie in Northern Kentucky, offered a framework of questions as a starting point: How do artists document and archive their environment? How do artists re-order the world around them? How do artists use this information to imagine alternative ways of seeing the world? What do the new worlds that artists create offer in place of our existing reality?
What emerged was sometimes optimistic, sometimes startling. The 11 artists operated in between the physical and virtual world, between the logical and absurd, the abstract and the real. They approached these spaces with a range of materials, strategies, and techniques that challenged the way in which we see the world. As a result, several thematic, stylistic, and conceptual intersections emerged that allowed for points of comparison and departure.
How is history revisited through slippages in records that reveal what is official versus what is off-script? This question is explored by Migiwa Orimo and Calista Lyon’s field research that results in installations and performances focusing on “ecological grief.” Orimo references “slippage” in her works, which she defines as the distance between language and image. Thus, a walk in the woods during the pandemic introduces her to plants which are classified as “invasive” or threatening. She notices a similar language usage pattern to describe immigrants, and resultantly, Orimo consciously uses the metaphorical value of her field research to make her point rather than its official scientific bearing. Similarly, Lyon uses water as a referent to show collective care. While dams can burst and amniotic sacs can explode, Lyon’s circular installation takes a cathartic turn. How do we create a more compassionate ethic of care as it applies to water conservation becomes a sub-text of her work. A first-generation Estonian American, Kristina Paabus is influenced by her familial history. Her work probes systems of control through architecture and the power of language to articulate both the structural and the abstract. Paabus’ work suggests that we are inevitably influenced by our own history, both shared and personal.
How do we navigate space in a new reality? Sharon Koelblinger explores this question through sculptural frames that intentionally fragment the viewing process, making the audience distort their body to view the work at awkward angles. Kat Burdine figuratively explores this question through a humorous exploration of astronaut Anne McClain—who allegedly checked her estranged lover's bank account from the Space Station—using print, cast silicone, break-up lyrics, and found objects. Virtual spaces are explored by Kara Güt, who employs ethnographic techniques to inhabit and research them while utilizing tools of appropriation.
What techniques do we use to archive and interpret the world around us? Cathrine Whited catalogs objects around her through reduced minimalist shapes until they become iconographic symbols of the objects they represent. Xia Zhang’s set of self-portraits paired with neon words allow the personal to materialize as a public examination of living in fear and avoidance. Mychaelyn Michalec manipulates traditional motifs of women in art history through craft and traditional rug-making techniques.
Lastly, how does our imagination match up with our reality? Erykah Townsend’s work embodies humorous and absurd realities as she spins images of popular children’s TV programming into fever-dream versions of characters that comfort us. The work of Thu Tran transforms objects, food, animals, and body parts into ever-evolving landscapes of GIFs, videos, drawings, and sculptures that result in multi-sensory experiences rooted in fantasy.
The 11 artists of A New World: Ohio Women to Watch 2023-2024 offer portals into ideas and potential realities, which allows the familiar to seem new and exciting, and the unfamiliar to seem compelling and possible. They explore alternative ways of thinking, making, and seeing the world to reimagine our existing world. These works possess an uncanny familiarity that challenge us to look closer and examine what we know about ourselves and our world.
A New World: Ohio Women to Watch, 2023-24 is on view at the Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, April 5-June 9, 2024.
The Southern Ohio Museum and Cultural Center, Portsmouth, July 11-September 7, 2024.
A New World: Ohio Women to Watch 2023-24
Community Resources