Stephanie Rond: Spacewalkers Exhibition

Artist: Stephanie Rond https://www.stephanierond.com/ Exhibit Title: Spacewalkers

Dates: Oct. 6-31

Reception: Wednesday, October 22, 7:00-8:30pm L

ocation: Lea Gallery Stephanie Rond (Columbus, Ohio) is an internationally recognized painter whose work subverts and reimagines traditional expectations of space, place, gender, and power. Her practice activates female narratives in uncommon spaces and builds communities through creative collaboration. Rond develops street art and canvas paintings through a deeply tactile, materials-driven, hands-on process of designing, cutting, and painting impressions on layers of paper and photographs. Inspired by the ‘spacewalkers’ that repair the Hubble telescope, Spacewalkers is a series of street art installations and indoor work that explore figures who exist in liminal spaces, spaces both human and otherworldly, spaces of creative possibility and personal peril. These figures tell a different story about the purpose of public art as well as the women and marginalized people who are too often excluded from participation as well as representation. The series re-imagines what–and who–deserves to be made visible in public space. Traditionally, monuments exist to reaffirm and reinforce power. I believe it is important to consider not only who is represented and glorified by monumental art, but also who is not represented, who is perpetually absent, who is denied recognition. I see the Spacewalkers series as anti-monumental, a series of street art installations that resist–and, more importantly–rebuke the assumption that public space exists to exalt the already powerful.