Curated by Didi Dunphy
This exhibition gathers artists around the picnic blanket—artists who see space and recognize our place within the universe—not with grand declarations, but with a human closeness. Inspired by the film, Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, and its conceptual ancestor Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps by Kees Boeke, we begin at a picnic: a quiet, human-scale gathering, familiar and finite. From this simple scene, the film expands outward to the furthest reaches of the observable universe, and inward to the structure of the atom—reminding us that our perception of significance is always relative, always in flux.
Like the Eames’ journey through magnitudes, these works move between the infinitesimal and the infinite. They explore space—its presence and absence through the lenses of both minutiae and the sublime. Void becomes cinematic, the in-between intentional. There is comfort here in ambiguity, in the pause between frames.
Displaying the meaningfulness of our scale in the immense uncertainty of our current paradigm, romantic nihilism emerges as a logical response. Seemingly our current struggle looks at the fine line between meaning-ful and meaning-less as is challenged at every new cycle. If we are, as Caspar David Friedrich painted us, specks within overwhelming landscapes, then the question is not “Why do we matter?” but “What do we do with the knowledge that we don’t?” A picnic, perhaps—may be a gesture of defiant joy and connection. A gathering of minds under a vast sky.
Ridley Howard’s paintings embrace empty space, what feels like a moment unseen between edits in a film. Kenophobia is the fear of empty space, a condition that Howard does not shy from and instead allows that space to become poignant.
Clay Jordan’s photographs punctuate stillness with symbols of innocent play and kawaii—a single red balloon, an echo of presence. We might even imagine ourselves looking up at the single red balloon floating aimlessly above our picnic, into the blue abyss.
Yuichiro Komatsu’s ceramics meditate on the shadows of objects, capturing their quiet authority. His restrained monochrome silhouettes define romantic space and universal void.
The works in Picnic do not resolve the tension between optimism and pessimism. They sit with it. They recognize the absurdity of existence and find beauty there—on checkered cloth, beneath expansive skies, with galaxies above and cells within. They ask not for meaning, but for attention. And perhaps that is enough.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Clay Maxwell Jordan is a photographer who has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. He is a 2019 MacDowell fellow and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. His first monograph, Nothing’s Coming Soon, was published in 2019 by Fall Line Press and his second book, Perpetual Care, was released in April 2024.
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Ridley Howard (b. 1973) received his BFA in Painting and BA in Art History from the University in Georgia in 1996, before completing his MFA at Tufts University in 1999. He has completed residencies with Skowhegan School of Painting (2000), the 2010 Visiting Artists Residency through the CCA in Mallorca, and the 2012 Visiting Artist Residency of the Villa Lena Foundation. Howard is the recipient of several awards, including the 2020 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the 2011 Traveling Scholars Fellowship from SMFA, the 2006 Joan Joan Mitchell Foundation Career Opportunity Grant, and the 2001 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. His works have been shown globally by galleries and museums such as the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Hall Art Foundation, Vermont; Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill; New Bedford Art Museum; and Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor. Howard’s work can be found in the collections of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts. Howard works between Athens, Georgia, and Brooklyn, New York.
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Yuichiro Komatsu, originally from Tokyo, Japan, is a contemporary ceramic artist and educator. He studied at Parsons School of Design and obtained his BFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz. After graduating, he apprenticed with the internationally renowned ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu. He then earned his MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Komatsu was awarded the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Postgraduate Research Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Art, Architecture, and Public Sphere at Kunsthochschule Berlin- Weißensee in Germany.
Komatsu’s work has been exhibited at numerous venues, both nationally and internationally. These include the Haw Contemporary in Kansas City, Missouri; the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia; the Paço das Artes in São Paulo, Brazil; the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; the Jingdezhen Ceramic University Art Museum in Jiangxi, China; and the Berliner Kunst Project in Berlin, Germany, among others. He has participated in artist residency programs at the Banff Centre in Canada, the European Ceramic Work Centre in the Netherlands, Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP) in Brazil, the Institute for Research in Applied Arts (IRAA) at the Hochschule Düsseldorf-University of Applied Sciences in Germany, and the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Japan.
Komatsu serves as a Professor of Art at Columbus State University. He has previously held teaching positions at the Alberta University of the Arts, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and Queens College, City University of New York. He is currently based in Columbus, GA.