2020: Ohio Women to Watch – Paper Routes
A Women to Watch Ohio collaboration with the Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery in Columbus
Women to Watch Ohio – 2020, featured five Ohio women artists. Kristine Donnelly, Sarah Kabot, Sa’dia Rehman, Breanne Tremell, and Alice Pixley Young were selected this year as emerging or underrepresented artists. Sa’dia’s work was chosen by NMWA to be part of its international exhibition in Washington DC this summer.
Watch a conversation between visual artists Kristine Donnelly and Alice Pixley Young. ➔
Moderated by UC Visiting Artist Lecture Series’ Committee Chair, Maria Seda-Reeder.
Meet the artists
Sarah Kabot
Sarah’s work has shown nationally and abroad, at institutions including The Suburban (IL), Smack Mellon (NY), the Akron Museum of Art (OH), the Museum of Contemporary Art (OH), the Drawing Center (NY), the Peabody Essex Museum (MA), Denny Gallery (NY), and Tegnerforbundet in Oslo, Norway. In 2013, Sarah completed two large public art commissions in Ohio. Recent honors include residencies at Dieu Donne Papermill (NY), a Swing Space residency through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (NY), the Headlands Center for Art (CA), and UCross (WY). Sarah’s work is in the public collections of the West Collection, the Cleveland Clinic, and Progressive Insurance. Sarah is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Drawing Department at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio.
Kristine Donnelly
Inspired by historical ornament and pattern, Kristine Donnelly creates large-scale cut paper sculptures. Kristine’s work is the result of a painstaking laborious process. Using a simple blade, Kristine hand cuts intricate designs into patterned paper. The patterns are an unrecognizable image inspired by wallpaper, lace, and geometry. Through screenprinting, Kristine reproduces and repeats the patterns onto long rolls of paper, waiting to be cut. The repetitive motion, the choreographed act of cutting and printing the pattern is both meditative and obsessive. The cutting destroys sections of the printed pattern and reveals fragments of designs and walls hidden below.
Rather than hiding or preserving its fragility, Kristine’s work tests the tolerance of paper. Through cutting, stitching, pinning, and stretching, Kristine pushes the material to its most fragile skeleton and beyond. As Kristine struggles to transform such an ephemeral material, Kristine’s work questions the function and frivolity of decoration.
The works by Sarah Kabot in Forgetting Lessons reflect the inevitable distortions and omissions occurring in the public recollection of distant but meaningful news events. NYT 2015 is a new iteration of her series of photographic collages created specifically for the exhibition at SPACES. Each collage combines photographs printed within a cover section of an edition of the New York Times.
from the introduction to Sarah’s exhibition at Spaces
The intricately cut images are reassembled into compositions reminiscent of ink stains or scribbles. Additionally, her newly created, large-scale sculptural installation recombines background elements of images printed in both the Plain Dealer and New York Times, approximating architectural space.
Sa’dia Rehman
Sa’dia Rehman is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores how contemporary and historical images—in public and private records—communicate, consolidate and contest ideas about race, power, and gender. Through performance, video, installation and large-scale wall drawing, Sa’dia obsessively pulls apart and puts together “images of consumption”— family photographs, mass media, and art historical images. In addition to Sa’dia’s archive, her core materials include hand-cut stencils, Xeroxes, charcoal, graphite, erasers, spray paint and ink.
Sa’dia has shared her work nationally and internationally at venues such as Twelve Gates Gallery (2019), The Kitchen (2018), Aicon (2018), Alwan for the Arts (2018), Center for Book Arts (2015), Local Projects (2015), Los Angeles Sony Theater (2015), Taubman Museum (2013), Queens Museum (2012), Brooklyn Museum (2010) and Pakistan National Council of the Arts, Islamabad (2006), among others. Sa’dia was a nominee of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, a recipient of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Grant (2018), Meredith Morabito and Henrietta Mantooth Fellowship (2018) and Ann Hamilton Travel Grant (2016). Sa’dia has been awarded residencies at the Edward Albee Foundation (2018), Byrdcliffe Woodstock (2018), Vermont Studio Center (2018), Rasquache Residency (2016), ASI/LMCC & Creative Capital (2011) and AIM Bronx Museum (2008). Sa’dia’s work has been featured in the NYTimes, Harper’s, Art Papers and ColorLines. Sa’dia received her MA from City College, CUNY (2006) and MFA from Ohio State University (2017).
Bul Bul ka Bacha (Nightingale’s Child), A Rhyme (detail), 2016,
graphite, black spray paint and ink on paper,
96 x 110 inches
Breanne Tremell
Grounded in a practice of drawing and painting, Breanne Tremell pushes the boundaries of line and mark making towards cut paper, cast shadows, smeared ash and projection. Beanne works with a wide variety of materials from the traditional to the improvisational; ash, tar paper, salt, cast glass, and light are used in experimental and process-based ways. Brianne’s current projects respond to place and impermanence using the urban, domestic and natural environment as a framework. They distort and amplify scale and space through shadow play and video projection to distill a sense of the transient. These juxtapositions raise questions of history, labor, and technology as well as the environment in which they exist.
Alice Pixley Young
Alice Pixley Young’s work has been supported through grants from the Ohio Arts Council, City of Cincinnati, Summerfair, the Surdna Foundation and the NEA. Alice’s work has appeared in Sculpture Magazine and Hyperallergic and recently was exhibited at A.I.R Gallery, NYC Governors Island Art Fair, Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Bullseye Projects, the 21c Museum, and Currents International New Media Festival. Young was awarded Best in Show for her installation at 1708 Gallery’s InLight exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She has been awarded residencies to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Jentel, Ragdale, Hambidge, Vermont Studio Center and the Contemporary Artists Center. Raised in Washington DC, she studied Painting and Printmaking at Ringling College of Art and Design and the New York Studio Residency Program, and received an MA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and an MFA from the University of Maryland. She maintains a studio in Cincinnati, Ohio and is affiliated with A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.
Curator’s Tour
Curator’s Matt Distel and Stephanie Rond virtually lead guests through the exhibition and discuss their curatorial process, providing the backgrounds and inspirations of featured works in the show
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