Exhibitions Archive

Location: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH

Julie Blackmon: The Everyday Fantastic features work from this major American photographer's most recent, and ongoing, series, titled Homegrown. Blackmon was raised in Springfield, Missouri, and has decided to remain there and make that world the setting for her work. She approaches Middle America with a poetic combination of wonder and worry as she explores the perpetual mysteries of daily life in a particular place.

In Homegrown, her third series, Blackmon evokes a domestic world gone just slightly awry. There is nothing disastrous in her mise-en-scenes--yet. But each image suggests potential intrigues that percolate just below the level of the obvious. The artist's brilliance lies in allowing viewers the sense that they are making their own discoveries rather than entering into a world that has been carefully constructed by the artist.

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Location: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH

Art encompasses all things, so it is not surprising that artists have embraced big data as both a tool and a subject of their work. Ingo Günther, who studied ethnology and cultural anthropology at Frankfurt University and sculpture and media at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, has been mapping data onto a sea of illuminated globes in his World Processor series for twenty-five years. The series is now internationally renowned and numbers over one thousand objects, a selection of which will be available to Hood Downtown visitors for the first time. The artist’s envisioning of complex data on physically identical but content-specific illuminated globes foregrounds scientific, economic, and historical information to create multilayered accounts of the relationship between humans and the planet.

This exhibition is paired with Mining Big Data: Amy Balkin and Luis Delgado-Qualtrough on view in the Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center, from March 24 through April 30. Both exhibitions reveal how artists use information to create new forms and ways of understanding global issues.

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Location: Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center

Art encompasses all things, so it is not surprising that artists have embraced big data as both a tool and subject of their work. In very different ways, Amy Balkin and Luis Delgado-Qualtrough use data-driven research to grapple visually with such topics as climate change, the demands on global natural resources, carbon emissions, solar energy, and the effects of various human activities on a global scale. Amy Balkin’s poster titled The Atmosphere: A Guide explores the influence of history and politics on the Earth’s atmosphere. Luis Delgado-Qualtrough tackles the problem of carbon accumulation with 10 Carbon Conundrums, a word-and-image essay that recombines historical events, dates, and GPS coordinates.  This exhibition is paired with Ingo Günther: World Processor on view at Hood Downtown from March 24 through May 28. Both exhibitions reveal how artists use information to create new forms and ways of understanding global issues.

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Location: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH

This exhibition presents a suite of paintings, installations, and video from Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based Bahar Behbahani’s acclaimed Persian Gardens, an ongoing series that she began four years ago. An engineering tour de force, Persian or Iranian gardens have captured human imagination since their emergence in the sixth century BCE. These walled gardens comprise multilateral structures, connecting aqueducts, networks of water channels, and surrounding trees and vegetation that remain lush all year in the middle of the desert. Behbahani explores the intersection of politics and poetics that defines the gardens as contested spaces—objects of beauty that have attracted people from different walks of life throughout the ages, from the Persian rulers who created them to evoke their transcendence and political power to the diplomats, common folk, scholars, and soldiers who have sought out their orientalist enchantment.

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Location: Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center

Our language and accent are fundamental elements of how we express and identify who we are, where we come from, and how we relate to one another. Yet, how often do we think about trying to alter our tone, our voice, or our words? Can you think of a time when you might have benefitted from adjusting your accent? 

As an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Nina Katchadourian would come across signs advertising “accent elimination” as she walked the city streets. Inspired by the seemingly paradoxical notion of improving one’s accent as a means of assimilation while still attempting to sustain one’s cultural identity, Katchadourian created the multimedia work, aptly titled Accent Elimination.

In it, Katchadourian explores language and identity and questions what an accent is at its core. As she explains:

My foreign-born parents who have lived in the United States for over forty years both have distinctive but hard-to-place accents that I have never been able to imitate correctly (and have not inherited). Inspired by posters advertising courses in “accent elimination,” I worked with my parents and professional speech improvement coach Sam Chwat intensively for several weeks in order to “neutralize” my parents’ accents and then teach each of them to me.

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Location: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH

The inaugural exhibition at the Hood Downtown Exhibition Space will feature the work of contemporary French photographer Laetitia Soulier. She bases her images and sculptures on the idea of fractal geometry, where each area has a direct scale relationship to the other—understanding a fraction of the world she creates implies comprehension of the whole. Of course, she enjoys simultaneously breaking these rules in her images with the addition of people, whose presence defies the otherwise logical scale relations. In this way, her work mixes logic and magic seamlessly, in a manner consistent with a certain stage in childhood development.

To achieve her effects, she builds carefully handcrafted models that are stages for the single lens of a camera. For each photograph she creates an entire universe. For each series of photographs—“The Matryoshka Dolls” and “The Square Roots”— the visual themes are constant, and many of the furniture pieces are reused, but the set is remade for each individual image. Despite laboring over the models for months, she still applies post-production to her work as well, to merge the various elements we see, and especially to get the lighting the way she wants it. Soulier moves effortlessly, and without prejudice, between the tools of the hand and those offered by the computer—between pliers and Photoshop.

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