1,000 Miles Per Hour – the speed of earth's rotation at the equator – showcases the effects of perspective through photography and other contemporary practices. Tim Rietenbach and I curated the exhibition as part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, a month-long celebration of lens-based art that unites artists, curators, and educators from around the world. It is on display in the Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD) from September 15 – October 28, 2022.
The FotoFocus Biennial, now in its sixth iteration, activates over 100 projects at museums, galleries, universities, and public spaces throughout Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, Dayton, and Columbus, Ohio in October 2022. Each Biennial is structured around a unifying theme; this year the theme, World Record, considers photography’s extensive record of life on earth while exploring humankind’s impact on the natural world.
The theme of the biennial is left intentionally vague: is “Record” a noun or a verb? The question that raises for me is, if the world is being recorded, then by whom? Through what lens? And to what end? While all of the artists in this exhibition have very different kinds of practices – some of which are only tenuously lens-based – we selected works that highlight the idea of a lens.
NASA’s Voyager Golden Record and the Eames’ film Powers of Ten serve as conceptual touchpoints for 1,000 Miles Per Hour. The record launched with the Voyager spacecraft contained photographs, illustrations, mathematical equations, music, natural and industrial sounds, and spoken greetings in a variety of languages to show the diversity of cultures and lifeforms on Earth. It was a kind of time capsule, a celebration of the ascendancy of “homo technicus” as we launched pieces of ourselves into the solar system and eventually beyond the heliopause.
Powers of Ten offered a fantastical visual depiction of exponential changes, taking us from a picnic blanket on the shore of Lake Michigan (10 to the 0 meters), beyond our galaxy and out to the edge of the known universe at that time (10 to the 24th meters), then zooming back in to view a proton in the nucleus of a carbon atom inside a human body (10 to the -16th meters).
The film was released in 1977, the same year the two voyager spacecraft were launched. That was also the year I started kindergarten. The scientific advances enabled and celebrated by these utopian cultural artifacts reverberated through my early education; and probably not coincidentally, Charles and Ray Eames made their film for IBM which had its corporate and manufacturing headquarters in my hometown, Endicott, NY. I spent my childhood eagerly anticipating the next batch of high resolution photos to be beamed back to earth from the rings of Saturn, or getting close-ups of the immense storm that is Jupiter’s red spot. The images evoked awe and wonder.
I first learned to process film and make photographs in the darkroom of Kopernik Observatory & Science Center while tracking sunspots during a high school astronomy course underwritten, in part, by IBM. In using the NASA images and Eames’ film as a starting point – a sort of baseline against which our curatorial choices could reverberate – we intended to make apparent not just what was considered scientifically and culturally significant at the time, but perhaps even more importantly what was not considered.
At the most basic level, every person with a camera (or a cellphone) makes value decisions every time they take a picture, deciding what will be included within the rectangle of the pictorial plane and what will be left out. The notion of omission, redaction, and blank spaces comes up repeatedly in conversations with the artists whose works are seen in this show.
Historically, photography and film have created indices of national resources, documents of our social conditions, records of war and industry and human achievement, but they have also been used by empires to maintain hegemony and subjugation, and deployed as record-keeping devices for imperial, genocidal regimes. Photography has been a tool of governance and art and science, especially when used in concert with taxonomic regimes like Linnaean designations, which at their very outset, classified and hierarchized human beings and placed white Europeans at the top (Eshun). At the heart of the problem are control and how we negotiate inequities.
Images, like words, are among our primary signifiers, but what happens when our received truths go unquestioned to the point where we literally can’t envision any alternatives – when we can only see things in one particular way? It leads me to ask how we might rethink identity and image culture. The questions we propose, and the ones we don’t, belie our values. Zooming out – perhaps by a factor of ten – we see that the things we think to name, record, and depict reveal our assumptions and biases. Without a word or symbolic image assigned to describe it, a concept is not just difficult to articulate, but barely visible and nearly impossible to cognize.
On the other hand, modern philosophy has shown that language itself can be violent and divisive because it reduces the multifaceted complexity of reality into idealized abstractions: archetypes, stereotypes, others. By naming a thing we seek to contain it, cementing it into an ideal if imagined form (Slavoj, p. 52). Do we assume that culture, and the biosphere itself, has evolved to a logical endpoint, the pinnacle, and that every historical thing humankind has enacted has therefore been inevitable? We are not suggesting there are easy answers. Instead, 1000 Miles Per Hour invites gallery visitors to sit inside of these difficult questions while considering a variety of works that reframe identity, memory, and cultural values through telling alternative visual narratives.
In their earnestly titled, 700 page history of humankind, The Dawn of Everything, David Wengrow and David Graeber conclude:
“Perhaps if our species does endure, and we one day look backwards from this as yet unknowable future, aspects of the remote past that now seem like anomalies – say, bureaucracies that work on a community scale; cities governed by neighborhood councils; systems of government where women hold a preponderance of formal positions; or forms of land management based on care-taking rather than ownership and extraction – will seem like the really significant breakthroughs… not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternative possibilities: roads not taken. After all, those things really did exist, even if our habitual ways of looking at the past seem designed to put them at the margins rather than at the centre of things… It means that we could have been living under radically different conceptions of what human society is actually about. It means that mass enslavement, genocide, prison camps, even patriarchy or regimes of wage labour never had to happen… It also suggests that, even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.”
If we have always been in the presence of myths, then it seems things may have really started going wrong when we insisted that there was only one answer, one way to be, and then exterminated the alternatives. Surely an argument in favor of fewer cultural solutions for how to live shouldn’t be winning the day. Many of the things we believe make us “civilized” have precipitated calamities, but we may still choose to step back from the precipice. Maybe we will see more clearly when we look through different lenses.
In addition to the golden record images by Frank Drake and Jon Lomberg, and the film by Charles and Ray Eames, this exhibition includes works by contemporary artists whose practices demonstrate distinct approaches to the art of recording, and which broaden the indexical and poetic deployments of contemporary creative practices. The featured artists are James Turrell; Stephanie Syjuco; Dawit L. Petros; Lisa Jarrett; David Bowen; Hans Klompen with Orlando Combita- Heredia, Jeremy Naredo, and Sam Bolton for Ohio State University’s Acarology Collection; CCAD Alumnus Chad Hunt; Ben Kinsley with Robin Hewlett; and Roger Beebe. This catalog includes interviews with those artists whose names are hyperlinked above (just click their names to go to each respective blog entry). The conversations have been edited for concision and clarity. All images are courtesy of the artists or Beeler Gallery.
darren lee (dee) miller, Associate Professor and Chair of Photography
WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED
Eshun, Ekow. “The Background Hum.” White Mischief from BBC, 4 October 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00106by
Graeber, David and Wengrow, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Slavoj, Zizek. Violence. London, Verso, 2008.
Darren Lee (Dee) Miller is an artist, educator, curator, and writer whose work employs community-engaged, trans-disciplinary collaboration and anti-racist, anti-heterosexist advocacy to center the experiences and “subjugated knowledges” of individuals from marginalized identities. They were invited to serve as Chair of Photography and Associate Professor at CCAD in 2019. Their teaching, curatorial work, and artwork have been recognized through numerous residencies, exhibitions, acquisitions, and a 2019-20 Fulbright Research Fellowship to Brazil. Dee currently has a solo exhibition at the Rosewood Gallery in Dayton, OH.
Tim Rietenbach serves as the Faculty Director of Galleries and Professor of fine arts at Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD). In addition to teaching, he has been the recipient of individual artist grants from the Greater Columbus Arts Council (including a Public Arts Grant to install Gigantic—a 100-foot-long sculpture of the human skeleton in the Columbus Science Museum—and a Dresden / Saxony Artist Residency in Germany), the Ohio Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions at the The Centre Pompidou (Paris France), Sluice Art Fair (London England), Columbus Museum of Art, and many others.
Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD) welcomes visitors to its 6,000-square-foot exhibition space located on the first floor of the Canzani Center at 60 Cleveland Ave. in Columbus, Ohio from 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM, Monday through Saturday. Admission and parking are always free. To learn more, visit beelergallery.org.