Transcendence.
May 17 - June 28, 2025
Performance by Sylva Dean and Me: starting at the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, 11:30 AM CT, Saturday, May 17
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 17 from 3 - 5 p.m. CT
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Transcendence.
To transcend is to rebel against the finite, to press beyond the confines of time, space, and materiality in search of something enduring, unseen and true. In Transcendence. Rachel Leah Cohn, Jenny Del Fuego, Sylva Dean and Me, Anna Schink, Constance Edwards Scopelitis, and Studio Lauren Zoll engage with these thresholds, conjuring works that hold tension between material and immaterial states. What remains is a state of becoming, an encounter with transformation itself, exceeding the perceived boundaries of our physical and temporal reality.
Across diverse mediums, from painting to drawing, installation to performance, wearable sculptures to cameraless photography, the artists in Transcendence. pursue distinct yet intersecting methodologies. Some turn inward, mining the body as a site of transformation; others interact with materiality itself, dismantling and reassembling form to reveal its inherent mutability.
Participating Artists:
Rachel Leah Cohn is an interdisciplinary artist with a practice grounded in experimentation. Her recent work explores Jewish rituals, protective magic, and ancestral symbols as pathways to connect across time, space, and community. Her current investigations are particularly drawn to water rituals, notably the mikveh, an ancient Jewish bathing practice.
Jenny Del Fuego engages a cross disciplinary approach to examine themes of memento mori and resilience. Through acts of labor and collaboration, her work reflects upon the cyclical nature of decay and renewal, and the embodied experience of agency.
Anna Schink's cameraless photographic practice combines reclaimed materials with elements of the natural world, bearing witness to fleeting moments of time and place. Informed by tarot, dreamwork and hypnosis, her process becomes a collaboration with site specific flora, fauna and atmosphere which creates images that quietly resist the rise of machine made imagery.
Constance Edwards Scopelitis draws directly onto Quaker handkerchiefs passed down through her family, linens once likely carried to church, overlapping their refined surfaces with meticulous depictions of vice, folly and low lying creatures. Rendered with classical precision, her interventions transform heirlooms more than a century old into pointed reflections on the tension between inherited ideals and present day realities.
Sylva Dean and Me is an interdisciplinary performance art project initiated in 2010, in which silent, masked performers inhabit intricately bound wearable sculptures made from thousands of repurposed milk vessels. Performed durationaly in public and institutional settings worldwide, the work transforms sustained physical labor into a meditation on recovery, identity, gender and the mutable boundaries of the Self.
Studio Lauren Zoll creates meaningful art by embracing simplicity as a tool to engage new ideas. Bending Light, drawn from a larger public installation of the same name, uses refraction, color, and sun tracking forms to reveal the invisible forces of light. Merging scientific inquiry with artistic wonder, Bending Light invites a slower, more elemental way of seeing and reconnecting with the magic that shapes our world.
Set against the historical backdrop of New Harmony, a site marked by utopian experiments, Indigenous erasure, and complex layered histories, the exhibition proposes that transcendence, while not solely a collective fantasy, can be realized through the singular dedication of the artist. Curated by Ventiko, a conceptual artist working across lens-based media, performance, and social practice, Transcendence. explores the potential of art to exceed temporal, spatial, and material constraints, opening pathways to both spiritual elevation and critical inquiry.
- Curatorial Statement, Ventiko
2025 | Celebrating our 50th year, and 40th year as part of the University of Southern Indiana.
New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art at University of Southern Indiana promotes discourse about and access to contemporary art in the southern Indiana region. New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art is a proud outreach partner of the University of Southern Indiana.
This exhibition is made possible in part Arts Council of Southwestern Indiana, and the Indiana Arts Commission, which receives support from the State of Indiana and the National Endowment for the Arts.