COLUMBUS, Ohio—Three new exhibitions will soon open in Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design featuring gestural paintings, video installations, painted sculptures, and photography. While each exhibition is unique—one pulls inspiration from Bellefontaine’s Mad River, one explores queerness, and one highlights the work of CCAD Fine Arts alumni who represent different times in the school’s history—all are anchored around landscape.Opening Thursday, Oct. 7, with a reception from 4 to 7 p.m. is Triple Blood Knot, on view in Beeler Gallery’s Project Room through Nov. 6, 2021. The exhibition features the work of James McDevitt-Stredney (Fine Arts, 2012), knotter, artist, and curator of No Place Gallery, a long-running contemporary art space in Columbus, Ohio. In this solo exhibition, McDevitt-Stredney draws a parallel between his roles as a curator—catching artists in the vast sea of culture—and as a fly-fisher of Mad River, in Bellefontaine, Ohio. The forms in his sculptural paintings are derived from the contours of forest canopies, streams, trail maps, and the routes of off-trail treks he has blazed to Mad River.Following Triple Blood Knot in the Project Room Thursday, Nov. 18, 2021–Saturday, Jan. 22, 2022 is i know it's the end & i am full of beauty, an exhibition exploring queerness through landscape and temporality. Artists Brezaja Hutcheson and Maria Joranko utilize video, sculpture, and photography to narrate their identities into a physical landscape. The exhibition, curated by Reg Zehner (History of Art & Visual Culture, 2020) , stages the gallery as an offering space, as a means to building anew.
The group show investigates such notions of consent and refusal as it relates to the shared power of beingness that exists amongst marginalized communities and the way we survive together,” says Zehner. “This exhibition is the practice of an ‘alternate modality of survival’; a conceptual framework of what it means to be, love, and fight in a world that only continues violence against Black/Indingenous/POC and queer communities.”
The final exhibition of the fall semester celebrates the work of CCAD alumni Kurt Lightner (Fine Arts, 1993), Bing Lee (Fine Arts, 1977), Erin McKenna (Fine Arts, 2012), Kate Rhoades (Fine Arts, 2010), and Ed Valentine (Fine Arts, 1991). Land, on view Thursday, Nov. 18, 2021–Saturday, Feb. 26, 2022, is an exhibition that approaches the word broadly, from the farm to the backyard to the forest.
This exhibition brings together gestural painting, video installation, and painted sculptures that co-opt found structures such as a trampoline, a tree carved with the words of a grandfather plus a large-scale mural consuming the walls of the gallery,” says Curator Tim Rietenbach, Faculty Director of Galleries at CCAD.
An opening reception for Land and i know it's the end & i am full of beauty will be held Thursday, Nov. 18, from 5 to 7 p.m. All exhibitions are free and open to the public and are made possible thanks to the generous support of the Greater Columbus Arts Council and the Ohio Arts Council. To learn more, visit beelergallery.org.
