Is it audacious to hope now? Is it possible to figure out the daily, touch the ineffable, and make visible the swirling turmoil of the world (whether that world is rooted in the past or located with GPS coordinates)? Nine contemporary artists answer these questions in Reverberations, on view through September 28, 2024 at Understory Gallery. Reverberations also features an Artist Talk on September 15 at 3 p.m., accessible in person and via Zoom.

“This exhibition explores the echoes produced by a sound or an event,” says Susan Snipes, Understory’s owner and one of the featured artists. “Sounds or images may embody the reverberations of memory. Personal experiences reverberate within broader societal narratives. Political movements reverberate across generations. Reverberations linger in spaces impacted by historical events. Reverberations of the future may be heard or seen in the present moment.”

Shannon Cleere, Naomi Even-Aberle, Sarah E Johnson-Brown, Alyssa Karis, Jessie Keating, Susan Snipes, Maha Taitano, Adria Zal, and Jamie Zimchek make visible what resonates (or gets under the skin): family trauma, genocide, gender roles, and the ongoing work of everyday living. These artists also resonate and impact one another: Eight are recent graduates of the Vermont College of Fine Arts’ low residency MFA program, and Snipes is in that program now.

And what resonates? The sparkling grey dust of Cleere’s “Invisible Hand” renders elegant silhouettes of domestic caregiving from yes, vacuum cleaner debris and glue. Cleere states, “I am interested in the friction created by elevating this otherwise disposable matter into something visually appealing and making invisible labor visible.”

For Taitano, the impact of experiencing the bombing of Lebanon as a child echoes across time and space and generations, looping through her immigration to the U.S. and bouncing back to the ongoing bombing in Palestine. “Sound Healing From Israeli Bombing” assembles personal-yet-official documents, photographs, and a detailed equation aching to render the past sound trauma with future sound healing: just how many crystal sound bowls reverberating at 678 hertz are needed for six seconds of healing sound? And then the artist asks, “How many times of six second healing would a Palestinian woman my age raised in Gaza need to heal today?”

The incongruous image of a woman in full traditional martial arts armor pumping gas, crossing the street, contemplating choices in a deli, and waiting for a barista to finish her order glitches and stuns, as Even-Aberle presents strength and femininity in “Everyday Warrior.” Nine photographs candidly catch an anonymous woman warrior (You? Your sister/mother/auntie/boss/BFF?) diligently bringing her extraordinary abilities to the ordinary tasks of the day.

Because it’s the ordinary—in all of its heavy boredom and its pressing horror—which reverberates throughout this show. Johnson-Brown’s large photo installation “These Things of Which We Do Not Speak” chronicles lives made up of curving, unpopulated roads, crumpled letters, voting stickers, the strong clutch of hands (one very old, one very young); Zal’s “Enough! Darling Enough! – Mohammed Bahar” honors the 40,000 lives lost in the current Palestinian genocide in a mixed-media installation of watermelon seeds, so chosen because the watermelon is a symbol of Palestinian resilience against the Israeli occupation. “Like people, when put under pressure, a watermelon will burst, forcing the seeds to propagate,” Zal states. “Despite the tragic loss of innocent lives, I hope that individuals will take some seeds home, plant them, and watch them grow and propagate simultaneously with the Palestinian people.”

Questions of family echo through Zimchek’s “Whose Legacy Is It?” which presents the artist as a selection of her illustrious and debatable ancestors in manipulated polaroids splayed out as a family tree and accompanied by suspended textiles. Family narratives expand into fairy tale archetypes in Keating’s collaged triptych of “Jack Be Nimble, Jack Be Quick, The Cow Jumped Over the Moon, and 3,4 Shut the Door,” in which delicate inky structures hover over washes of color, as orbs encircle figures on a journey, leading us on with their backs to us. And family roots Karis’s “October,” an ongoing work exploring connections between caregiving, healthcare systems, grief, and depression that stem from the artist’s experience of caring for her father at the end of his life.

Understory is located on the lower level of 78^th Street Studios, 1300 W. 78th Street, Cleveland, Ohio, 44102. Walk down the ramp, turn right, and walk all the way through the event space to the gallery. Open Fridays from 12-5 p.m., on Third Fridays of the month from 12- 9 p.m., and by appointment.

Visit https://understory.art/Exhibition-Reverberations for more information and a link for the Artist Talk on September 15, 2024, at 3 p.m.

Reverberations

Artist Talk at 3 pm September 15

Open for Third Friday, September 20

On view through September 28, 2024.

Understory Gallery

78th Street Studios