Saturday, April 25 - Sunday, June 14

Opening Reception: Friday, April 24 - 6-8pm

In 2015, there were twenty-six Planned Parenthood clinics in Ohio. Jared Thorne, who had relocated from South Africa to teach at Ohio State University, photographed all of them as a way of introducing himself to the psychological, sociological, and literal landscape of Ohio. Over the course of a year, the artist drove to every community, small and large, that had a clinic. Many photographs were made at first light, the only time that anti-choice protesters, as well as staff and patients, were not present. Alone, he would set up a large-format camera, using 4×5-inch chromogenic film to create his desaturated and depopulated images. Thorne’s formally balanced and exquisitely focused images are designed to read as studies in decontextualization. This type of context camouflage is also part of the portrait of place: Planned Parenthood buildings are not designed to stand out or to make themselves a target.

A project that was started a decade ago in part to quietly recognize the essential work of this bedrock of healthcare has, with the reversal of Roe v. Wade, become something else: an act of memory, a monument to a world slipping away faster than we might have reckoned. Since its start in 2015, Thorne’s project has evolved as he now seeks to photograph every remaining Planned Parenthood facility in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. As the project nears completion, he plans to create a book that will serve not only as a document, but as a catalyst for discussion about gender, race, and class within the American landscape.

Saturday, April 25 - Sunday, June 14

Opening Reception: Friday, April 24 - 6-8pm

Xaiveria will be in Conversation with Cristina Vasallo April 25th at 2PM at the Contemporary Arts Center  

Petrichor: a distinctive, earthy, usually pleasant odor that is associated with rainfall especially when following a warm, dry period and that arises from a combination of volatile plant oils and geosmin released from the soil into the air and by ozone carried by downdrafts

The exhibition Petrichor marks a turn for Xaviera Simmons that is actually part of a rhythm in her workthat has vacillated throughout her career between art historical adherence strident activism and a more felt system of thought. Simmons’ broad and diverse practice—sculpture, language, photography, installation, painting, and researched deep dives into specific histories—has often engaged the world with a sense of urgency.  Collectively these works were at times (to reference the poet Frank O’Hare) “meditations in an emergency”.  Interestingly, her work remains in the realm of meditation, but it has now shifted again toward a different, more reflective tenor.

Petrichor is an installation of two large paintings as language environments and four large-scale photographs. It seemingly turns away from the sociopolitical clamor that usurps our collective moment toward an abiding curiosity for the wonders of the physical universe and our place within it.

The language works—the smaller, Wintering, and the larger, Petrichor—sit one in front of the other, extolling a deeper awareness of the most minute aspects of the reader’s (and, of course, the writer’s) neurological and autonomic systems. They ponder the wonder of our corporeal vessels and of the physical world around us and ultimately acknowledge the most distant phenomenological occurrences of the cosmos towards personal experiences of scale, mark, paint and color. For Simmons, the scale and the luxurious materiality of the larger language paintings propel this work further into the realm of a knowledge that emanates from the body.

Wintering, acting as a liminal device into Petrichor, focuses on the body as a container of electricity and rhythm. Wintering is the incubation period, a time when shedding and introspection occurs.  It parses the idea of breathing as both a noun (the volumes of air that the body takes in and expels) and as a verb (the act of respiration with all its inherent rhythms and, importantly, pauses). In turn, it delves into the effect that the rhythm of breath has on the more intricate neurological bodily systems.  It brings to the fore thoughts how these systems operate together both in our bodies and in our consciousness.

As Wintering transitions into Petrichor, Simmons leaps both in scale and in ideation to the cosmos, always conscious of the relationship between the systems intrinsic in the body and those inherent to the earth and the Universe.

Inserted between these two painting/language works, are four new large photographs that explore the very nature of discovery that drives the thoughts that are foundational to both Wintering and Petrichor. While Simmons acts as  the actor/sitter/maker in all four images, her face is obscured, making them portraits of everyone’s experience of discovery. In each is a tableau that recounts the gathering of ideas that ties them indelibly to the notions held in the literary space of painting / language installations. These photographs are a stream off of a larger body of work called the Sundown Series that has as its impetus contemporary art criticism over the last 50 years.

The exhibition Petrichor is akin to the earlier work in that it is a reaction to our experience of the world.  It still engages the viewer in a space beyond the speculation of coded behavior to create a quasi-literary space that details history, mythology, archival materials, and Simmons’ own personal thoughts and impressions. It still endeavors to enact change and reform through awareness.  It differs from the earlier work in that it attempts to move out from under the exhausting weight of our shared daily tumult. Instead, it is an embrace of our mutual experience of a Universe that is simultaneously deeply ordered and entropic.