Resource | Findlay, Ohio
January 31, 2018

The Neon Heater is a contemporary art gallery owned and curated by Ian Breidenbach and Emily Jay. It opened in November of 2012, and has monthly exhibitions with a curatorial focus on conceptual and installation based works, contemporary photography and painting trends, and video and new media. 

<VV> Virtual Vacation
Richard Munaba, Lauren Post & Kim Young

​January 5-13, 2017

Flexible Magic
Kyle Seis & Grant Gill

January 16-27, 2017

Circling the Drain
Tom Hoying & Nick Boso

February 20-24, 2017 

Honeycrisp
April Camlin & Virginia Griswold

March 2-16, 2017

Voices Not Loud
Mille Guldbeck & Caroline Santa

March 20-31, 2017

The Loneliest Places
Julia Oldham & Chad Stayrook

Dates: April 8-23, 2017

Valley of the Sun
Doty Glasco

May 6-18, 2017

Valley of the Sun, uses photography, collage, and sculpture to explore the relationship of photography to constructed notions of time, truth, nature, identity, and history, with a particular focus on the history of American landscape photography. Valley of the Sun utilizes a near complete archive of Arizona Highways magazine to explore the relationship between image-making, the landscape, and American cultural identity.

Doty Glasco’s work attempts to disrupt the mythic quality of the archived image and reclaim landscape photography as a powerful aesthetic tool for critical investigations of larger power structures.

Jauria
Angie Saiz

​May 22 - June 8, 2017

Art is either related to life or has nothing to do with anything. However, any completely intimate genre or registry can be quite sterile. And it is not a matter of telling one's own life but of narrating the facts that shape a life. These facts, by themselves, would be of no great importance, but it is precisely art that provides them with a deeply human dimension. That is, one tells life from the warp of facts, from what the facts leave as a mark.

In Jauría, the latest project of Angie Saiz, there is no doubt that there is clarity about the latter. We might even venture, in favor of a traditional version of the essay, that art history is also the history of misery. The fragile, the broken and the desolate aspects of existence finds in art the force that allows us to glimpse happiness. Because as in the facts, in the artwork nothing is left behind. One is, at the same time, all that one has been.

Saiz is a visual artist with production of works in painting, photography, public intervention, video installation and sound art. Her work develops aesthetic problems based on the biographical imagery and the intersection and crisis between new technologies and the concepts of time, limbo and ruin. 

Glitter and Doom
Rachel Rampleman

June 17 - 29, 2017

Born and raised in the suburbs of the Midwest, NYC-based multimedia artist Rachel Rampleman creates bodies of work that explore subjects like gender, artifice, spectacle, and the excesses of popular culture through the tinge of a very American lens. Part directorial, part curatorial, and part anthropological, she probes into oft–overlooked elements of our culture to reveal an expanded landscape of American life. Her astute observations— awash with empathy and rife with psychological complexity—hint at an underlying dissonance that straddles the absurd.

Rampleman’s work frequently showcases exuberantly bold and irrepressible female/femme personalities who revel in challenging common clichés associated with masculinity and femininity, and who often assume roles stereotypically associated with men. This is a landscape where sexual braggadocio, heavy-metal rock stardom, or hyper-muscularity have become characteristic of feminine prowess. Working primarily with lens-based media, Rampleman has made work ranging from documentary style videos and photos of and about Girls Girls Girls (the world’s first and only all female Mötley Crüe tribute band), to experimental video series (such as Busby Berkeley 2.0 - in which nostalgic 1930s routines choreographed by Berkeley and performed by Hollywood showgirls are transformed into something more hypnotic, industrial and menacing), to photographic studies documenting spectacles such as bull-riding competitions and monster truck shows.

For her solo exhibition Glitter and Doom at The Neon Heater Gallery, Rampleman will premiere two new multi-channel installations. Both showcasing her continued explorations into video portraiture, one of these will feature her ongoing documentation of performers from NYC's alt-burlesque scene, and the other will present appropriated and manipulated footage from a recent international women's pro-bodybuilding competition. Also on display will be a series of large-scale photographs (taken at Mötley Crüe's final concert at Madison Square Garden, a punk performance by Otto's Daughter in Troy, Ohio, etc.), as well as additional single and multi-channel video works, which, taken collectively, will present a broader sense of the artist's overall oeuvre.

How Soon is Now
Kailyn Perry

​July 3 - 14, 2017

Kailyn Perry composes paintings that investigate identity through a spectrum of different experiences. The works are existential studies packed with painterly effects and layered with meaning, albeit elusive. Playful shapes that emphasize color and pattern in planar forms commingle with scenes of ordinary life, usually tinged with humor. Her subject matter reflects this flexibility as well: her works are just as likely to feature friends gathered around a drink-filled table or picturesque landscape as they are to depict an improbable scenario of extended limbs or see-through portraits.

Kailyn Perry was born in Boston Massachusetts in 1990. She attended Massachusetts College of Art and Design and graduated with a BFA in 2013 with a dual major of Painting and Art History. Kailyn currently resides in Chicago and holds a studio practice at Autotelic Studios.

Pending Situations
Bonny Leibowitz

July 17 - 28, 2017

​Pending Situations, a solo exhibition and installation of painted, stuffed vinyl, canvas and polyfoam forms and paintings on paper by Bonny Leibowitz. Pending Situations utilizes the concepts of Centeredness and Imbalance in observation of our political, social and cultural climate in flux. I’m interested in creating a space in which stability and expectations give way and force us to contemplate new realities. The exhibition may be a way to open a dialogue on how, in spite of our conditions or the conditions of the others in the world around us, we find new ways of being.

Value Returning Function
Justin Hodges

August 3 - 17, 2017

​Hodges continues an investigation of the implications of recent technological advancement in Value Returning Function. In his newest body of print, sculpture, and interactive robotic work, Hodges ruminates on the efficacy of, and ever-increasing dependence on, data driven systems. Value Returning Function playfully, if not irreverently, suggests that emerging technologies frame, fabricate, and otherwise alter the world around us, and our role in it.

Banks of the Calcarine Fissure
Caroline Turner & Ian Anderson

October 13 - 27, 2017

I. 391 million years ago, a mollusk opens its shell to greet the warm, rising young sun. It begins the new day by nourishing itself with algae on the salty ocean floor. It feeds and consumes; always in pursuit of new and more plentiful horizons.

II. Eventually, moments of glacial melting, sea level rises, drought, swampy expanses, and eventual land masses define the area that the mollusk once thrived. Their shells dried up, along with the coral plains, the trilobites, and the rest of the once dominant sea life, becoming forever preserved in their new home of stone and sediment.

III. Hundreds of millions of years later, while foraging for fossils along the Ohio River Valley, the mollusk lies in its fossilized state somewhere just below the mud on a creekbed in the distance. The iridescence on the surface of its shell still gleams slightly in the light of the sun. The pursuit of the unknown draws them to the banks of the water where they reach down to grab the rock and brush off the ancient dirt. Admiring the relief for its transcendental beauty, a diminished sense of self washes over them; time itself becomes obscured.

IV. All of the unknowable forces that led them to this place at this time converged at once; they shaped this moment beyond any imaginable comprehension. All that ever was, everything that is, and all that ever will be can be felt in this lingering instant of deep time. Outside of perception and outside of ourselves, it remains.

i. A new world of connections in networks far more complex begins to breed; constantly replicating itself for future survival. Its mission is to make us obsolete, to overcome our agency for a deeper sense of becoming. Our entanglements of self hold us back in this strange landscape, we are unable to adapt.

ii.The sun begins to set and dusk settles in. Our experiences have become clouded by the systems we once endured; we have yet to harness our energy in this precarious moment of change. It lowers still despite our unpreparedness. Everything comes down to this; to one fold in space, one moment in time, one last breath. . .

iii. In the dark of night, let the tide wash over you on the banks of the calcarine fissure.

This World and Others Like
Drew Nikonowicz​

November 3 - 30, 2017

This World and Others Like It investigates the role of the 21st century explorer by combining computer modeling with analogue photographic processes. Drawing upon the language of 19th Century survey images, I question their relationship with current methods of record making.

Thousands of explorable realities exist through rover and probe based imagery, virtual role-playing, and video game software. Within the contemporary wilderness, robots have replaced photographers as mediators producing images completely dislocated from human experience. This suggests that now the sublime landscape is only accessible through the boundaries of technology.

Referent Fold
GM Keaton, Benjamin Heyer & Timothy Earl Niell

December 1 - 22, 2017

​Referent Fold contends with the loosening of the structural power of associations found in the indexicality of photography and archaeology. For GraceMarie Keaton, Benjamin Heyer, & Timothy Earl Neill, the index is no longer a literal trace connected to “truth”; the index is instead a fertile ground that works to reveal the poetic connection between things - how one relates to the other. GMK, BH, and TEN approach the image and the object as neither fixed or transcendent, but as autonomous agents - having the ability to grant and expand a subjective perspective.

All images courtesy The Neon Heater.

400 1/2 S Main St.
Findlay, OH
Room 22, the second floor of the Historic Jones Building

Hours: Every Thursday, during scheduled exhibitions 5-7pm

@theneonheater

RESOURCE
A posting of any length based primarily on submissions but also compiled through research by The Rib. Resource shares press releases, exhibition details, photo essays, interviews, podcasts, and other original content generated by galleries or alternative sources. Resource establishes a critical dialogue or discourse for artists and institutions by simply sharing information in a network connecting networks.