November

November is part of a collaboration with FotoFocus, a Cincinnati-based nonprofit arts organization that champions photography and lens-based art through exhibitions and public programming, and is made possible thanks to the generous support of FotoFocus, The Skestos Endowment Fund for Visiting Artists and Lectures, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. 

Artists

Dru Batte, Natasha Cantwell, Cameron A. Granger (Cinematic Arts, 2016), Kalaktive collaborative duo (Bahareh Khoshooee and Sareh Imani), Dawn Kim, Susu Laroche, Bobby T Luck, Calista Lyon, Adee Roberson, Lexie Smith, and Benjamin Willis.

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Health & safety protocols 

Beeler Gallery is excited to reopen to the public with November. Numerous new health and safety protocols in place in response to COVID-19. Please review the following information before visiting: 

• Visitors are required to reserve free timed admission tickets in advance of their visit. 
• Visitors should stay home if they don’t feel well, tested positive for COVID-19, or were exposed to someone with COVID-19 in the last 14 days.
• Visitors must wear a face mask while in Beeler Gallery and on CCAD’s campus.
• A maximum of 30 people are allowed in Beeler Gallery at a time, and there should be no more than 10 people in each area or “room” within the gallery space at a time.
• Visitors should maintain a minimum of 6 to 8 feet between other visitors and gallery attendants. Parties of up to four will be admitted, and permitted to be within 6 feet of each other.
• Please adhere to the wayfinding signs. 
• Hand sanitizer will be available at the entrance to the gallery.
• For more information about CCAD’s response to COVID-19, visit ccad.edu/publichealth.

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Getting here 

Beeler Gallery is located on the first floor of the Canzani Center at 60 Cleveland Ave. in Columbus, Ohio. Parking is free in any CCAD parking lot and campus is easily accessible via COTA bus lines.

Questions? Call Beeler Gallery at 614.222.3270 or email beelergallery@ccad.edu. Follow Beeler Gallery on Facebook or Instagram.

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Meet the curator 

Dean Taylor (Cinematic Arts, 2015) is an interdisciplinary artist and curator who works primarily in photography, filmmaking, and sound. Inspired by natural patterns and phenomena, she explores palpable and corporeal materials through the phantasm with experimental sound and lens-based media. A self-taught drummer, beat and rhythm influences the flow of her multimodal work. She often works collaboratively with institutions, artists, and musicians to produce multimedia events. Taylor is the former Founder and Editor of Hiss Magazine, which ran three issues and provided a space for femme, non-binary, and LGBTQIA artists to share their work and engage in contemporary art and culture. She is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Media Arts Fellowship (2015) and a Cart Pushers Studio Residency (2019). Her films have screened in the United States and India. Taylor is currently a local news videographer and editor in Columbus, Ohio.  
 

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Meet the artists 

 

Dru Batte is a multidisciplinary artist who employs a variety of analog and digital photographic processes and materials in her work. Her work highlights interaction, while exploring relationships formed through the lens. It aims to ask a question, or at least let a thought linger. Previous exhibitions include ​finding light in new places (​ 2017) and ​Through the Curtain (2019). Batte currently works and resides in Columbus, Ohio. 

 

 

 

Natasha Cantwell’s work, which spans music videos, editorial photography, and art projects, openly embraces awkwardness while drawing from the absurdity of human behavior. Her hand-printed analogue photographs and 16mm experimental films have been exhibited worldwide, including at the U.S. festival Experiments in Cinema, and the European Media Art Festival and Stuttgart Filmwinter Festival for Expanded Media in Germany. Cantwell holds a Bachelor of Graphic Design and a Postgraduate Diploma in Art and Design from AUT. She has guest lectured at Unitec and MIT in New Zealand and presented at Semi Permanent Design Conference in Australia as the senior photographer for Frankie Magazine.

Specializing in fashion, portraiture, still life and environments, her editorial photography has captured the beautifully strange details of everyday life for a wide range of publications, including Elle UK, Ladygunn, No, Pavement, Dumbo Feather, Lunch Lady, and Smith Journal, as well as fashion labels Miss Crabb, Penny Sage and Madame Hawke. As a film programmer, Cantwell founded the Auckland Underground Film Festival and has produced events for Channels: The Australian Video Art Festival. Since 2018 she has curated archival and contemporary street photography for the Victorian Archives Centre Gallery. Working between New Zealand and Australia, she is currently based in Melbourne.
 

Cameron A. Granger (Cinematic Arts, 2016) came up in Cleveland, Ohio alongside his mother, Sandra, inheriting both her love of soul music, and a habit of apologizing too much. A 2017 student of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, he uses his work to reconcile his place in and role as a product of American history and its media. His recent projects include “Ten Toes Down” at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, “Pearl,” a body of collaborative works with his mother at Ctrl+Shft in Oakland, and “A library, for you” a traveling community library most recently housed at ikattha project space in Bombay, India. 

 

 

 

 

 

Kalaktive Collaborative Duo was initiated by two Iranian-born New York-based artists Sareh Imani and Bahareh Khoshooee in the summer of 2018 at Skowhegan Residency where the artists met. The duo has since collaborated on many projects and through multiple formats (IRL and URL) including video, sculpture, site-specific installation, and performance.

Bahareh Khoshooee is a multidisciplinary artist born in Tehran, Iran in 1991, the year the Internet was made available for unrestricted commercial use. In her work she explores the underlying tension between reality and fiction, confabulation and manipulation, false memories and alternative facts. She attended Skowhegan School of Art and Painting in 2018, received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida in 2017, and her BA in Industrial Design from the University of Tehran in 2014.

Khoshooee will be mounting her solo exhibition at Baxter St in November 2020. She has presented her work at the Orlando Museum of Art (Orlando), NADA MIAMI 2018, Elsewhere (New York), Housing (New York), and Rawson Projects (New York). She has been included in various group exhibitions including at C24 Gallery (New York), Museum of Photography (Stockholm), 2018 Taiwan Annual (Taipei), Fajr International Film Festival 2018 (Tehran), and the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Artnet News, Vice, The Metro, and The Creators Project.
 

Sareh Imani is an Iranian-born, multidisciplinary artist based in New York. Imani received an MFA in Painting from the University of Tehran and an MFA from the Parsons School of Design in New York. Imani has been exhibiting her work in group shows in the U.S. (New York, Austin), Europe (Venice, Gothenburg), and the Middle East (Tehran, Dubai). She is the recipient of the one-year A.I.R. Gallery fellowship (2019-2020) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture scholarship (2018). In addition, she participated in the MASS MoCA residency (2018), AIM program at the Bronx Museum (2018), BRIC Workspace Residency (2019), BRIC Media fellowship (2020), and NARS Foundation residency (2020).

 

 

Dawn Kim is an artist who uses image and text to examine invisible systems of power in the mundane. Raised in a religious household, she understood early the gravity of visual storytelling, which she applied to her advertising career as an art director. Printed Matter Inc. published her first artist book through the Emerging Artists Publication grant titled “The New York Testament.” Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Yale University Art Gallery, the MoMA Library, the New York Public Library, and the Beinecke Library. She has been an artist resident at MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, and ACRE. She currently resides in Austin, Texas as the 2020-21 St. Elmo Arts Fellow with the University of Texas. She received her MFA from Yale in 2020.

 

 

Susu Laroche is an anagram of Chaos Rule Us and a multidisciplinary artist of Egyptian/French descent. Her analogue short film work has been screened internationally including London Short Film Festival (UK), Samawah Cinema (Iraq) and Nihilist Film Festival (USA). In October 2016 she released a custom Tarot card deck via purge.xxx and in 2020 she released her first EP 'A Blunt Instrument' via Xquisite Releases. 

 

 

Bobby T Luck is a visual artist and education activist based in Columbus, Ohio who works in film, multimedia collage, and installation. After relocating to Columbus from Philadelphia he jump-started the Free Skool for Humans initiative, co-founded MINT Collective, and teaches collage and film theory workshops across the country. He recently served on the board of admissions for ACRE residency, completed the Film/Video Studio Residency at Wexner Center for the Arts, has work displayed in the Columbus Museum of Art, and is currently shooting a video collage series on psychological association, memory loss, decay, and creation.

Luck's work focuses on decolonizing modern imagery and media, and re-imagining globalization and the self by breaking down diplomatic and emotional borders through collage. Pop imagery such as film, magazines, advertisements, and music teach context about the world not physically encountered, however, it is also inherently flawed by the limited experiences of its creators. Through Luck’s work, he attempts to decontextualize the flawed context by separating imagery of humans from their surrounding landscape, foliage, and organisms, and then recontextualize them in ways that challenge flaws in our society's approach to social globalization through mass media. 

 

Calista Lyon is an Australian artist and educator based in Columbus, Ohio. She works to subvert dominant narratives of human exceptionalism, competition, and individualism by investigating relationships of interdependence. Through an interdisciplinary research practice she uses images in expanded forms—performance, installation, and social practice—to address ecological collapse. Drawing from diverse epistemologies her research is influenced by vernacular, Indigenous and local forms of knowing and by scientific thinking, including theorists, historians and ethnographers of science. 

In previous works, Lyon has invited a farming community to join together in the act of walking to build a social fabric. She has amplified the voices of Ohio’s threatened species, sharing the sound portrait of the Silver-Haired Bat and the Massasauga Rattlesnake among others. She has documented and shared the individual wave of the people of Green River, Utah. In collaboration with choreographer and artist Ann Carlson, she photographed the gestures of one-hundred employees at UCLA—from facilities management staff to gymnasts, a vice chancellor to an astronomer. She photographed the residents of her farming community and used their portraits as invitations to share a conversation. Currently, she is working with local amateur botanists, farmers, and scientists to develop The Unknown and the Unnamed a performance that explores the white colonial legacy of the Crimson Spider Orchid.

Calista was the 2016/17 University Fellow at The Ohio State University. She was the 2019 Frontier Fellow at Epicenter in Green River, Utah. In 2020 she will be an Artist in Residence at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and in 2021 she will be a Fellow at the Center for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu, Japan. Born in Nagambie, Australia, Calista received a Diploma of Art in Applied Photography from Melbourne Polytechnic. Relocating to the United States, she received a BFA in Studio Art from California State University, Los Angeles and an MFA in Photography from The Ohio State University.

 

Adee Roberson was born in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1981. Her work weaves sonic and familial archives, with landscape, technicolor, rhythm, form, and spirit. She has exhibited and performed at numerous venues including, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Antenna Gallery, Project Row Houses, Palm Springs Art Museum, Human Resources, Charlie James Gallery, Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, MOCA Los Angeles, and Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario. She is based in Los Angeles, California.

 

 

 

 

Lexie Smith is an independent researcher and bread baker from New York. Her practice explores the manifestations of power in food systems and food histories, with bread as a focus of inquiry. She runs Bread on Earth, an ongoing archive of eponymous study focusing on the political, ecological, social and aesthetic currents of global foodways. Lexie lives and works in Queens and the Hudson Valley, New York. 

 

 

 

 

Benjamin Willis, is a native of Columbus, Ohio and an artist within the Community. Specifically through the lens of photographic and anthropological work. As a self taught photographer, he aims to show the richness and complexity of the inner fabric of Columbus folk. As an African American I believe it’s imperative for us to tell our stories and show our perspective, imagination, and creativity of our people. Benjamin, received a BA in painting & drawing, as well as a BA in Philosophy at Otterbein University in 2014. Served as the resident artist at Otterbein University the following year (2015). 

 

 

 

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About Beeler Gallery

Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD) welcomes visitors to its 6,000-square-foot exhibition space and 99-seat screening room to experience exhibitions organized by emerging curators as well as the annual CCAD MFA and BFA thesis exhibitions. Led by Faculty Director of Galleries Tim Rietenbach, Beeler Gallery provides cultural and artistic opportunities to the CCAD community and central Ohio and brings a span of contemporary and experimental art and design exhibitions to CCAD’s campus whose charge is to challenge the assumptions about who—and what—belongs in a gallery. The gallery is free and open to the public 10 a.m.–3 p.m. Monday–Saturday. 

Photos, from top:

Still images from The Work by Lexie Smith 

Violent Unmaking by Calista Lyon