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Season 21 Launch
Celebrating Manifest's 500th Exhibition!
September 27 - October 25, 2024

main gallery

CORPUS
Exploring the Photograph as Object

A FotoFocus Biennial Participating Venue Exhibit and Manifest's 500th Exhibition Produced Since January 2005!

Not so many years ago, we stopped touching photographs. While print media and brick-and-mortar galleries exist, our common, everyday experience with the photograph has drastically shifted from the handling of 4” x 6” prints from the drugstore to scrolling through brilliant digital images shining out from our screens.

These photographs are easily created, manipulated, and shared, but at a cultural level it cost us the sense of intimacy, of preciousness, that comes with holding an image that has dimension and weight. We lost the expectation that images do not “go out” when we turn our phones off.

Has this also affected how we as a culture relate to each other?

This exhibit aims to examine that photograph that does not turn off. It reminds us that a photograph exists in the world, accumulating the history that sticks to all things that take up space. It showcases the photograph that is touched, that has more than one side, that expands and bends into three dimensions, that is flipped through, that is printed onto something that had a history before it became a surface.

You can touch a photograph with your fingers. You cannot touch an electronic digital image at all—you only touch the plastic container that pretends to be a photo.

CORPUS called to artists for photographic-based works that re-engage the body, acknowledge their place in the physical world, and explore the impacts of choice of surface, volume, texture, material, and presentation methods on the experience of the image itself—the spirit in the body of the art. This exhibit aims to reveal the literal backstory, or other sides of what has become a sideless visual phenomenon, giving the photo back its body.

CORPUS is part of the 2024 FotoFocus Biennial. Now in its seventh iteration, the Biennial activates over 100 museums, galleries, universities, and public spaces throughout Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, Dayton and Columbus, Ohio in October 2024. As part of the Biennial, Participating Venues respond to the theme: Backstories

Support for this FotoFocus Biennial 2024 exhibition was provided by FotoFocus.

For this exhibit 72 artists submitted 233 works from 27 states, Washington D.C. and Germany. Sixteen works by the following 12 artists from 9 states were selected by a blind jury process for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication.

Presenting works by:

Dylan Bannister
Rock Hill, South Carolina

Sally Chapman
Lowell, Massachusetts

Natalie Christensen and Jim Eyre
Louisville, Kentucky

Catherine Day
McLean, Virginia

Myles Dunigan
Oberlin, Ohio

Liz Barick Fall
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Karen Hillier
Bryan, Texas

Julie Mixon
Florence, South Carolina

Amanda Musick
Seneca, South Carolina

Rachel Nemecek
Charlotte, North Carolina

Carolyn Norton
Elsah, Illinois

Kaylee Peters
Kettering, Ohio

Julie Mixon

Carolyn Norton

Kaylee Peters

Liz Barick Fall

drawing room

All I’ve Sung and Have Yet To Sing
Photographs by Michael Tittel

Michael Tittel earned a BFA in Photography from Ohio University in 1992. His work has appeared in Leica Magazine, Saveur, Conde Naste Traveler, Ain’t Bad and aCurator and he was a 2023 Best in Show Winner in the Communication’s Arts Photography Annual. His fine art photographs are held in private collections and Ohio University’s permanent collection. He currently teaches full-time at the School of the Arts at Northern Kentucky University.

Of his work the artist states:

"For forty years I’ve photographed habitually in the pursuit of honoring the people, and places of my life. I explore the existential precariousness of the landscape, and the sublime dimensions reached through portraiture. I often treat portraiture as still life and personify landscapes. To me they are equals in storytelling power.

This work is part of an extended visual poem representing the more visceral moments between people and places in the Midwest. Like music, these photographs celebrate the mystery and wonder of shared experiences. Without the visual grandeur of a place like the American desert or the northern latitudes of Iceland, the camera must evoke drama in other ways. These forced image combinations reveal evocative new contexts and non-obvious qualities: a mysteriousness prescribed by Ohio Valley light, a new sense of weight and form, and a startling respect for the subjects, human or otherwise. Themes of love, solitude, and the memories or people we fear losing are presented here like short love songs. A formal photographic treatment draws attention to what might have been too obvious to notice. These realistic images take on new fictional life in their designed sequencing, which often places one or more images against each other, giving rise to new visual phrases. In this work, one is reminded of the subtle magic that photography delivers and the moments it so effectively honors.”

This exhibition was selected from among 164 proposals submitted in consideration for Manifest’s 21st season.

parallel space

Gain-of-Function
Works by Mark Armbruster

Mark Armbruster lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a Lens based multi-media artist who creates art in reaction to climate change and human effects on the landscape. Mark received his BFA in photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1992, and an MS in Instructional Design and Technology from the University of Maryland in 2019.

Mark has exhibited his photography in numerous group shows including in such venues as Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Giertz Gallery, Champaign, IL; The Crows Nest, Baltimore, MD; Artscape - B24, Baltimore MD; TouchStone Gallery, Washington D.C.; Silvermine Gallery, New Canaan, CT; Perspective Photo Gallery, Evanston, IL; The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; Torpedo Factory, Alexandria, VA; Tamar Hendel Gallery, Silver Spring, MD; The Contemporary, Baltimore, MD, among others. His work has also been featured in F-Stop Magazine Issues #86 & #6 and Jpeg Magazine, Issue #4.

Of his work the artist states:

"These images are from an ongoing project titled Gain-of-Function. The series uses non-traditional landscape imagery that acts as a backdrop for painted graphs and charts representing data from studies on climate change and its effects on the environment. The landscapes are recognizable, taken from a vantage point that shows larger structures of globalized commerce, energy and natural resources, and industrialization at play in our own backyards. Visual data depicted by dots, lines, and complex patterns illustrates climate studies relevant to those environments and speaks to phenomena like temperature extremes, drought, wild fires, and much more. The artwork titles are derived from quotes of climate change denials by politicians and leaders from the past decade. They refer to the specific studies or climate issue represented in the images, while also selected for their satirical tone and sometimes tragic and idiotic brutality."

This exhibition was selected from among 164 proposals submitted in consideration for Manifest’s 21st season.

central gallery

The Aesthetics of Collapse
Works by Brooks Dierdorff

Brooks Dierdorff is an artist exploring the ways media like photography and video shape our cultural imagination of environmental collapse. His work includes a range of methodologies such as photo-based sculptures, installation, video, appropriating images from commercial and archival sources, and experimental documentary filmmaking. His work serves as an interface between political, ecological, and artistic spheres.

He has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally at galleries that include Amos Eno in Brooklyn, New York; The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art; The Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle; High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, California; The Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at The Orlando Museum of Art; the Ulrike Hamm Gallery in Bissendorf, Germany; the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea; and The New Gallery in Calgary, Canada.

His work has been written about in The New Yorker Magazine, The Daily Mail, Lenscratch, Feature Shoot, Aint-Bad, and the Orlando Sentinel among others. His work has been collected by the Nevada Museum of Art, the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Ely Center for Contemporary Art.

Brooks received his BA from the University of California, San Diego in 2007 and his MFA from the University of Oregon in 2012. Currently he is an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida.

Of his work the artist states:

"My work explores how photography shapes our ideas about nature, climate disasters, and environmental collapse. The Aesthetics of Collapse is based on photographs of recent natural and man-made disasters produced for the United States Geological Survey. In the series, select photographs from the USGS digital archive are recombined and cut into an assortment of non-rectilinear shapes, a process that involves both accumulation and destruction.

During the 1870s and 80s, the USGS contracted with photographers to produce documentation of survey expeditions of the Western U.S.. These photographs played a significant role in shaping the mythology of the American landscape as an untainted, unoccupied space of boundless resources and economic opportunity. The pieces in this series can be thought of as interjections in this 150 year-long history, produced at a moment in which ecological crisis shatters the triumphant stories of human ingenuity and nature’s endless bounty. Dams collapse, volcanos erupt, hurricanes and wildfires consume whole cities. The photographic archive, when looked at again, reveals the seeds of its undoing.”

This exhibition was selected from among 164 proposals submitted in consideration for Manifest’s 21st season.

north gallery

LOST AND FOUND
Exploring Creative Reuse

Objects do not die. Destroyed, broken, discarded, or otherwise at their end-of-use, they still have form and, therefore, potential.

Through an alchemy-like process, artists can see discarded things for the essence they represent, as raw material, and re-shape it into new life. Such creative resourcefulness is often driven by necessity. For example, within the fiber arts, scraps are turned into quilts, and entire mending traditions developed around extending and beautifying the lives of garments. Sculptors and craftsmen will harvest wood from anywhere, and reshape it into new works of art, design, or utility. Others, by impulse or conscience, pursue assemblage, collage, and re-contextualization not only to be thrifty or ethical, but to push culture forward.

We worry about the second life of our stuff. The level of guilt, however subliminal, has dramatically intensified the experience of modern life. The aesthetics of dystopic science fiction, where survivalists live in cities of refuse and pilot frankensteinian, rusting vehicles, reveal anxieties about the future use of the things people have made and cast-off. This expanding social lament over the possible future we are complicit in bringing about causes us to ask how can we use the already once used in order to avoid depleting the now understood limited resources at our disposal? How can we be productively creative without contributing to a larger systemic disaster?

With artists, being a particularly sensitive and perceptive subset of society, and with art often serving in the role of a sentinel specie, this subject becomes not only one for serious or playful poetry, but also one of thoughtful hope and ingenuity.

For this exhibit 159 artists submitted 493 works from 35 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and 7 countries, Canada, China, Denmark, England, Germany, Netherlands, and the United States. Nineteen works by the following 12 artists from 8 states, England, and Germany were selected by a blind jury process for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication.

Presenting works by:

Justin Behm
Beaver Dam, Wisconsin

Franklyn Campbell
Chicago, Illinois

Victoria Fuller
Chicago, Illinois

Veronika Krämer
Berlin, Germany

Susan Lenz
Central, South Carolina

Carolin Mueller
Zeitz, Germany

Eric Penington
West Lafayette, Indiana

Jori Phillips
Grass Valley, California

Bonnie Ralston
Brooklyn, New York

Sabrina Rodrigues
London, England

April Wright
Frostburg, Maryland

Larry Zdeb
Troy, Michigan

Victoria Fuller

Eric Penington

Bonnie Ralston

Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit
Thursday, Nov. 7, 7-9pm
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Public Opening: Friday, Nov. 8, 6-9pm

Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit:
Thursday, Dec. 12, 7-9pm
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Public Opening: Friday, Dec. 13, 6-9pm

Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit:
Thursday, Jan. 23, 7-9pm
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Public Opening: Friday, Jan. 24, 6-9pm

Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit:
Thursday, March 6, 7-9pm
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Public Opening: Friday, March 7, 6-9pm

Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit:
Thursday, April 17, 7-9pm
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Public Opening: Friday, April 18, 6-9pm

Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit:
Thursday, May 29, 7-9pm
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Public Opening: Friday, May 30, 6-9pm

Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit:
Thursday, July 10, 7-9pm
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Public Opening: Friday, July 11, 6-9pm

Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit:
Thursday, Aug. 14, 7-9pm
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Public Opening: Friday, Aug. 15, 6-9pm

Manifest is supported by sustainability funding from the Ohio Arts Council, and through the generous direct contributions of hundreds of individual supporters and private foundations who care deeply about Manifest's mission for the visual arts.

gallery map
2727 woodburn avenue
cincinnati, ohio 45206

drawing center map (m1)
3464 Central Parkway
cincinnati, ohio 45223