Dancing in a Tight Embrace at the Sculpture Center

Expanded media and sculpture dance in a tight embrace through the kaleidoscope of contemporary art. The Sculpture  Center’s forwarding the affair this fall with its always experimental exhibitions and SculptureX symposium at the CIA.

The Tragedy of the Commons, a collaboration between Ali Momeni of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Swiss  Robin Meier, uses the closely observed food choices and social behaviors of a living colony of Atta (leaf-cutter) ants, in  the Main Gallery, for the symbolic portrayal of the mechanisms of the capitalist market. This market functions via the  creation of demands that largely exceed the vital and primary needs of the population, thereby manifesting itself within  an aesthetic of saturation. The ants are on generous loan from the Cleveland Botanical Garden.

With an installation of West African inspired seats holding various evocative work implements, other symbolically  charged natural materials, and sound, Oberlin College’s Johnny Coleman evokes the African American past of the  “railroad.”

In Procession: Song for the Underground Railroad, he composes a poetic environment that links the individuals who  traveled from station to station along the underground railroad to those who migrated north to this landscape following  the Civil War and during the Great Migration of the late 1920s.