On View September 19, 2024 – November 14, 2024
Spacewalkers is a series of densely layered visual works that invite the spectator to create or reimagine narratives of belonging and transformation. Inspired by the ‘spacewalkers’ that repair the Hubble telescope while in orbit, the pieces explore figures who exist in liminal spaces, spaces both human and otherworldly, spaces of possibility and peril.
The Spacewalkers series is interested in both using and critiquing frames as devices for containment and control. While frames can certainly focus our attention, they can also erect borders and boundaries that are designed to exclude other subjects and objects. So, for me, the question ‘What do we frame?’ is a political and ethical one. Who is permitted visibility in art as well as public space? Who is given self-determination and the right to shape the spaces and places in which we live? Who is authorized to create the frames through which we make sense of ourselves as well as others? In this series, I want to expose and complicate the process through which frames are constructed and, in turn, mechanisms of power.
Each work in Spacewalkers repeats and, more importantly, resists frames that keep women in place and far from freedom. It is my hope that these works will open space for new stories of both resistance and promise.
About the Artist
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.
Rond’s street art brings a bright, otherworldly aesthetic to the outside’s most gritty spaces, offering an initial moment of visual reprieve followed by a revelation of each piece’s haunting subtext: Why does it surprise you that this is here? Her work in both indoor and outdoor spaces, elevate a compassionate positivity that offers a safe space to ask hard questions—of the viewer, of the wider visual culture, of the environment in which a piece is hung, and of the artist herself.
Most recently, Rond has been honored as a Young Guns Art Award finalist (London), an exhibiting artist at Bienal de la Habana (Matanzas, Cuba), a TedX speaker, and as the only representative of the U.S.’ Midwest portion of the global Google Art Institute: Street Art Project. She is the curator of Carnegie Gallery at the Columbus Metropolitan Library, and her work has been honored and exhibited extensively in Columbus, including at the Columbus Museum of Art. She’s created street art and murals in numerous national and international locales, including Vienna’s Wien Museum (“City Dwellers,” 2019) and in Kathmandu, Nepal (“Seeds of Kindness,” 2019). As a prolific community arts leader, activist, and collaborator, Rond has worked with multidisciplinary artists, elementary school students, plant nurseries, arts councils and collectives (she’s active in discussions of climate crisis with the international collective Micro Galleries), and an online community of female street artists from around the world, among others.
Rond is the founder of Women Street Artists (womenstreetartists.com) and S.Dot Gallery, a dollhouse that exhibits miniature art pieces and challenges notions of traditional domesticity as well as art accessibility. A short documentary about Rond’s artwork, “Tiny Out Loud,” won Best Ohio Short Film (Columbus Film Council) and Best Short Documentary (WV FILMmakers Festival), and was an official selection in 20 international and national film festivals, including Boston, Cleveland, Las Vegas, New York, Portland, St. Louis, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC.