Earthy Delights

Curated for the Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery, Columbus, Ohio

4 Aug - 9 Oct 2016

Featuring work by 15 contemporary photographic artists working in Ohio.

Images by (in order L to R first row): Virginia Kistler, Emily Hanako Momohara, Darren Baker, Paula Willmot Kraus, Jordan Tate, Joseph Minek, Kent Krugh, (in order L to R second row): Javier Gutierrez, Ricky Rhoades, Deborah Orloff, Jeannette Palsa, Mark Slankard, Jessica Wascak, Emily Joy Zeller

Curatorial Statement

The more common phrase “earth-ly delights” almost always implies pursuing temptations, vanities, or pleasures of physical existence to the exclusion of spiritual devotions. In contrast, “earthy” suggests “of” the earth, bound to the earth, resembling soil, as well as hearty and even uninhibited.

The exhibition features 15 contemporary Ohio photographers whose images present earthy substances, resemblances, textures, places, and experiences. While not landscapes per se, the emphasis is on dirt, sand, and mud, or earth’s materials such as salt, rock, and silver. Some photographs are concerned with the biological realm, concentrating on fungi, forests, and flowers, or complex creatures such as animals and family members. Throughout, there are multiple references to human presence and needs from footprints to shelter, and a responsibility to truly comprehend the notion that we are part of the earth, an earth that gives us life and delight.

All the artists in the exhibition incorporate earthy references, in ways that range from subtle to mythological. There is an extraordinary range of approaches, technically as well as conceptually. They conjure meaning through pictorial qualities that are intellectual, mysterious, associative, factual, or profound in quality for feeling. At times the earthiness evokes emptiness/loneliness or personal ruminations. Other times the ground in question references property or precious natural resources, economies, boundaries, or societal debates. And finally, because the human body and mind breathtakingly manifest and merge nature and culture—in ways that are compulsive and consumptive, romanticizing and rationalizing, healthy and devastating—sometimes the earthy component symbolizes either the social body or the physical body.

Photography, as an advanced representational system, operates in the metaphysical dimensions of time and space. It is well known for its ability to capture the moment, and to insinuate evidence of the spaces in front of the camera. However, even when photographs seem to be obeying their own definition, photography does not reproduce the world, it produces the world as a series of photos. The photographers in this exhibition know how to wield photography’s powers and weaknesses to their artistic advantage.

Lured by the earth and its materials and meanings, Earthy Delights explores our roots as one such organism among the many, concerned with the significance of our collective existence on this planet.