Invisible Synonyms
CURATED BY ELLA WEBER
MARCH 8TH - APRIL 26TH, 2019
"But these are connections, right? You start off with directions and then somehow they connect, and it just happens that your life connects with it all too. What causes the connections? Are the connections made before you see them or are they made through you seeing them?"
-Paul McCarthy
Invisible Synonyms invites us to scan the surface of the everyday. The work draws our attention to the nuances of empty space, transient moments, and weird coincidences. It opens an awareness to the relation of similarities.
Exhibiting artists David Knox, Josh Johnson, and Ella Weber bring to light the connective tissue between material and experience. Through moving image, text, and three-dimensional structure, Invisible Synonyms gives form to the intangible links that bind us together.
Language overlaps
the balance of light and shadow
pass through a stencil
frames the absence of text
when words become shape
wooden planes meet
a corner exposed
This exhibition was presented with the support of the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
Installation Images
Photos: Debra S. Kaplan
About the Artists
Ella Weber (b. 1987) intentionally maintains minimum wage jobs as a means to fuel her art, financially and conceptually. Experimenting with video, text, print and social media, Weber suspends the tension between consumer and viewer, performer an employee, artist and gallery. She earned a BFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and an MFA with distinction in printmaking from the University of Kansas. She has attended numerous residencies at Oxbow School of Art, The Wassaic Project, Anderson Ranch, PrattMWP and PLAYA to name a few. The artist has shown extensively across the United States. Her most recent solo show, Sounds Good, opened at The Union for Contemporary Art in summer 2018. Currently she resides in the basement of suburbia and slices ham in a delicatessen.
David Jonathan Knox (b. 1988) is an artist who is also a model, dancer, and actor. He is currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree from The Ohio State University where he received a Graduate Teaching Associateship and taught Beginning Drawing and Life Drawing. He exhibited work at the Inverse Performance Art Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts in the 18th Annual Ohio Shorts Film Festival, and The Ohio State University Urban Arts Space, where he received the Gilmore Art Scholarship for his thesis show. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. During this time, he exhibited numerous works of art at the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery. He also traveled to Florence, Italy for a printmaking residency at the Santa Reparata International School of Art and exhibited at their contemporary art gallery. Recently, His work was published by the academic journal of contemporary art criticism, Peripheral Vision.
Josh Johnson earned a BFA at the University of North Dakota, and an MFA at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has exhibited nationally, including shows at the Joslyn Art Museum, the Soo Visual Art Center in Minneapolis, Colorado State University, and Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati. Josh received a 2016 Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, and was twice selected as a finalist for the William and Dorothy Yeck Young Sculptor’s Competition at Miami University in Oxford, OH. Josh has taught sculpture at Nebraska Wesleyan University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the College of Visual Arts. He is currently the Residency Arts Technician at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE and teaches 3-D foundations at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.