Solar Noon is pleased to present CYCLES, a three-person exhibition featuring work from Ethan Fessler, John Knight, and Mark Harris – all of whom are entangled through the context of the School of Art at the University of Cincinnati, where Fessler is currently enrolled, Knight is an alum, and Harris is a professor. The exhibition presents the interconnected gestures within each artists’ practice through photography, painting, and sculpture. The intermingling of knowledge and shared experience emerges throughout the exhibition – Fessler’s sculpture, Fixed (2024) explores ideas of impermanence through raw and manufactured wood assembled in an effort to defy gravity. Through the futility of the endeavor, Fessler emphasizes the intensification of brokenness within a system – one small glitch builds to define the entire piece. He relates this phenomenon to his generation’s post-pandemic outlook and the confluence of historical cycles embedded in our present reality. Knight’s series of five photographs titled, Hard bark from the family tree (2023) features black and white scans of his grandmother’s floral arrangements amidst snipped segments of political material, building layers of underlying poetics that omit as much as they reveal. While Knight leaves ambiguous the source of revolutionary text within his work, Harris’ series of watercolor paintings titled, Citizens depicts various posters, membership cards and tokens, and declarations of candidacy that were distributed or wheatpasted on walls during the uprising that led to the 1848 Paris Revolution, wherein the historical monarchy was replaced by the French Republic. A subtle, durational layering that ultimately produces a decisive shift is evoked in each artists’ work in CYCLES, wherein the underlying force of small gestures has the potential to lead to monumental change. 

Ethan Fessler is a non-binary contemporary sculptor and current BFA student at the University of Cincinnati College of DAAP. His practice engages the androgyny of form through non-figural assemblage sculptures using reclaimed materials like steel, wood, and other found objects. Recent exhibitions include Consequential [Im]material at the Tabula Rasa Gallery in 2024.

John Knight is based in London and Montana. Recent exhibitions include Final Hot Desert, London; Monaco, St. Louis; Apparatus Projects, Chicago; BSMNT Gallery, Leipzig; Julius Caesar, Chicago; The American Institute of Thoughts and Feelings, Tucson; and Muscle Beach, Portland. Selected group exhibitions include Final Hot Desert; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Utah; and As It Stands, Los Angeles. Knight co-directed the curatorial projects: Williamson Knight Gallery, Portland; Cherry and Lucic, Portland; H. Klum Fine Art, Portland; and THE PINK HOUSE [Jan. 19, 1995] at Bad Reputation, Los Angeles. He received an MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland and a BFA from the University of Cincinnati. Knight is represented by Final Hot Desert.

Mark Harris works in Cincinnati and London researching Caribbean plant histories and poetics, and avant-garde sound and literature. Exhibitions include Wave Pool, Cincinnati, 2023; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, 2023; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, 2022; Ruschwoman, Chicago, 2022. Publications include Sonic Wilderness: Mad Vinyl Records, AADR, 2022; ‘Caribbean paradigms of noise and silence’, Small Axe, 2021; ‘A great chaos of sound: alternative practices of working through madness, alienation, and the aesthetics of catastrophe in 60s Britain’, Counterculture Studies, 2020; ‘Rebellious Type: Kamau Brathwaite’s typographic derangements,’ Manifold: Experimental Criticism, 2020; ‘Turntable Materialities,’ Seismograf, Denmark, 2017; ‘The Materiality of Water,’ Aesthetic Investigations, 2015.

Solar Noon is pleased to present 

FIELD | SHADE, an informal exhibition by Supermrin featuring a series of sculptures that explore the potential of working with and through the relationship between landscape and architecture in the age of extinction. The array of forms resists categorization in either direction, occupying the grid of the built environment while forming their own emergent clusters that fractalize like leaves as if peering through a lush forest at dusk. Each individual work represents one node in Supermrin’s expansive sculptural practice titled FIELD, which utilizes a grass-based bioplastic material invented by the artist in 2020. The material is simultaneously the tool, medium, and message upon which our bewildering present can be processed and considered, offering the decolonial raw matter to form new connections like the undergrowth of roots thriving in the dirt. 

Throughout the exhibition, the individual works take many forms: from a large-scale sculpture in response to the legacy of Modernism as evoked in Auguste Rodin’s figurative bronzes titled FIELD [family secrets], to a series of two delicate half-dome woven works fastened to the wall by steel rods titled FIELD [untitled], and a pointed arched window, FIELD [birch] that simultaneously evokes both Islamic and gothic architecture; a biologic portal with light leaking through from interconnected histories and temporalities. The smallest piece in the exhibition, FIELD [mother] is perhaps the most enigmatic, blurring the line between sculpture and artifact – a fertility totem or insignia for the metaphysical force within FIELD. 

In each piece, Supermrin showcases the multifarious potential of her material - stretched over branches and adorned with indigo and turmeric. However meticulously the sculptures have been crafted, with each meeting of branch and blade mapped, the material has its own agenda that unfolds within the exhibition. FIELD | SHADE represents a relinquishing of the desire to control, a submission to the haunting totality of nature. The works are both deity and dust; at once resonant, and yet inert. They are the speculative rewilded future, the fleeting moment of pause under the blistering summer sun.