All Who Wander Are Not Lost, And Even If They Are, Wonders May Never Cease

Being lost is an unfinished business, feeling unmoored despite being somewhere specific. Lost is destruction and grief, escape and adventure, terrifying freedom. Lost inspires awe in equal parts breathless amazement and fear in the gut, yet it provides respite from daily life and ordinary identity. Explore all aspects of lost in The YARDS Project’s current show, Let’s Get Lost: an exhibition about Wandering and Aloofness, on view now through June 28, 2025.

Let’s Get Lost arose as an inquiry into art as a form of resistance and healing, according to YARDS Project director Liz Maugans. “This show came out of a feeling of wandering, not knowing which way was up in the current environment,” says Maugans. “Artists wander all the time; there’s not always a known endgame or result. Being lost can mean loss and discovery, grief and healing.” Maugans gathered ten artists through studio visits and Zoom conversations, pulling legacy artists and relative newcomers working in a variety of media and found “kismet moments that flickered” between and among their interpretation of what it means to get lost.

First, get lost in the rapture of games and patterns from the get-go at the entrance to the exhibit. Corwin Levi’s three aluminum dibond prints—”Tiddlywinks,” “Bright Lights Boulevard,” and “Vision Test No. 1”—mix and remix and lay out pieces from vintage game boards to recreate paths with new, oracular directions: “Stumble Go Back 3,” “Pat Dog Go Ahead 4,” “Mud Hole Start Over” (and find his intricate paths intersecting with photos and overflowing squares in the small gallery—they are mind-blowing). Ryan Harris’ intensely colored collages bracket Levi’s work, bringing the joy of an eternal summer afternoon lost in play with “Super Soakers” and the abundant nostalgia of what once was one’s neighborhood in “The Block.”

Jennifer Adams’ delicate, nearly invisible pencil drawings of walls are, in the words of the artist, “conceived from visual language present throughout our neighborhoods, cities, and regions;” her quilt installation, “Trees and Clouds” drapes patterns of comfort over stalwart chairs, inviting visitors to touch, stroke, and flip the textiles to see both sides: rigid geometries backed by soft florals.

Then there are the lost lives. Deborah Silver’s magnificent group, “Unfinished Business in Dreamland,” has its roots in Lakeview Cemetery, bringing together 21 women whose tombstones do not have a death date, despite their birth dates of more than 100 years ago. With a nod to the strictures and structures of Victorian-era propriety in her use of embroidery floss to build Dreamland, Silver brings to the forefront these undocumented lives without end dates, as possible stories rise and swirl from this wall-sized testimony.

The poignancy of worn children’s clothing, rendered in ghostly pastel and charcoal and hanging empty, is brutally underscored by Jerry Smith’s titles: “Perilous Journey,” “Thoughts and Prayers,” and “Shrug.” Aesthetic delicacy slams into trauma, here, beautifully. What has been lost, indeed? Michael Weill’s “Rend” series physically manifests the grief for the loss of a child. Weill’s photographs of places visited with his son, Joshua (who died at 18), contain phrases from the Kaddish, Jewish prayers recited for the memory of the dead. Each panel is split, rent with a tear—echoing the ancient practice of tearing one’s garments as an outward sign of mourning.

The natural world encourages getting lost. David Mahler’s enormous “Waterfall Triptych, Chagrin River,” is solace on repeat, inviting one to be lost and soothed and lost again, over and over. The strong and noble “Spring Dance,” Rick Rollenhagen’s alabaster sculpture, rests on a wooden plinth beneath the triptych. Its stony strength is rendered dainty in its position beneath the massive painting—one of the many conversations happening between and among the individual pieces in the exhibit. Liz Maugans, assisted by artist Cheryl Craver and students from Cleveland State University, populated the gallery with these inter-artwork dialogues: in addition to the Mahler-Rollenhagen convo, Meryl Engler’s flowing woodcut of a woman lost in sleep and wrapped in a patterned quilt hovers above Adams’ actual quilts, primly folded on chairs.

The natural world also encroaches upon us, taking over what stands for civilization and ushing in its loss. In Elisa Albrecht’s “Spark,” heavy trees march to enclose a boy and his dog and his Molotov cocktail as ticky-tacky houses burn at their feet. Her “Laundromat” perches on the edge of a landscape that is eating cars, buildings, and a graffiti-embellished plane fuselage.

Get lost—not as an f-you, but as an experience that engulfs and restores. Healing comes in all shapes and sizes, and right now, that’s a quiet revolution worth joining.

Let’s Get Lost: an exhibition about Wandering and Aloofness
Through June 28, 2025
YARDS Project
725 Johnson Court
Cleveland, Ohio, 44113
Noon – 3 pm Monday – Friday
yardsproject.com