Mark Harris uses documentary video to ingeniously comment on youth culture, music, art history, philosophy, and avant-garde ideals with wry wit, humor, and a generous but direct vision. Without being didactic or overly romantic, Harris celebrates "microcosmic utopian communities" by looking at them with an enchanting sense of wonder. Utopian Bands depicts a Beijing concert Harris coordinated, where one can feel the passion, reverie, and momentary transcendence of the viewers listening to the music. In Marijuana in the UK, Baudelaire and Benjamin are read to cannabis plants to enhance their THC content. Harris graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland and the Royal College of Art in England. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Goldsmiths College in London. His work has been shown in venues such as the Tate Modern, as well as Ohio State's own Hopkins Hall Gallery. Harris is currently the director of the School of Art at the University of Cincinnati. He also writes for Art in America and Art Monthly.

Tracy Featherstone examines the need for security within an overbearing consumerist culture through the creation of sculptural forts—flimsy yet inventive in appearance. At times, the large-scale, playful sculptures look like, in the artist's words, "childhood living room forts." Yet a distinct sense of fragility lies under the child's play. Featherstone's recent voyage to Ghana, West Africa, instigated her ruminations on domestic displacement and the vulnerability of our everyday relationships. She comments, "The intangible nature of human relationships is ever shifting and our desperate attempts to establish structure and permanence are often futile." Featherstone earned a B.F.A. at the University of Cincinnati and a M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. Her work has been shown at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and in Columbus at the Roy G Biv Gallery in the Short North. In 2006, Featherstone received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Creative Excellence award. She is currently an assistant professor and foundations coordinator at Miami University.

Rain Harris examines the ironies associated with excess and wealth through color, pattern, and decoration in works ranging from dainty, diminutive pedestal objects to large sprawling installations. Harris creates captivating grotesqueries that are a kind of pseudo-utilitarian domestic kitsch. She makes her own versions of elaborate, baroque-like decorative porcelains, and combines motifs, sometimes ones she intensely dislikes, to transform them into new patterned environments. Of pattern, she says: "I am aware that it can be larger than life, even when it is small, because it has the ability to be infinite." Harris's work explores the comfort we find in purchasing, arranging, and living in decorated homes and questions our understanding of what is real and what is fake. A graduate student at The Ohio State University's Department of Art, Harris received her B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been shown in Korea, Puerto Rico, and Denmark, as well as in The International Expositions of Sculpture & Functional Art in New York and Chicago, and at the Ohio Craft Museum.

Organized by the Wexner Center with guest curator Sean Foley.

image credits
1. State Fair Logo

2. Opium Dreams, 2005
Porcelain
Image courtesy Rain Harris

3. Fallout, 2006
Mixed media
60 x 144 x 84 in.
Image courtesy Tracy Featherstone

4. Still from Marijuana in the UK, 1999
Video
9 mins., 36 secs.
Image courtesy Mark Harris