FEATURED ARTIST
Michael Thompson
Cincinnati, OH
Michael Thompson is an artist, speaker, and entrepreneur. His work focuses on human ecology and nuance utilizing interdisciplinary mediums to create immersive stories.
SLOWTHINGS is an exhibition about objects and processes whose very qualities are shaped by time. It celebrates craft, agriculture, attention, and the kinds of making that ask us to linger and ruminate. In a time where we are often asked and expected to be constantly productive, efficient, and optimized, I’d like to invite you to take the long way home with us.
I am reminded of a quote from the late, great Annie Dillard who passed away 9 days ago: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”
This show is meant to offer a quiet resistance to a culture increasingly organized around immediacy and relentless productivity, almost always at the expense of quality, health, and humanity.
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Michael Thompson is presenting The Cure, a nine-foot mobile constructed from locally sourced hanging tobacco. The work is an ode to my familial ties to Kentucky and to the history of sharecropping that shaped generations of my family. Suspended and slowly moving through space, the tobacco becomes both material and memory of something grown, harvested, cured, carried, and inherited. This work was created in conjunction with Kings Farmula in Augusta, KY who practice agriculture as a deep spiritual relationship with the land.
Participating artists include:
Julia O. Bianco
Baylee Schmitt
whose works deliberate walking, time, homeplace and craftsmanship.
In addition to these new and collected works, SLOWTHINGS is partnering with Cincinnati Poet Laureate, Richard Hague, and The Mercantile Library to offer a small curated collection of “Slow Books” which you can read and peruse in the gallery.