Studio San Giuseppe Exhibition Announcement

(Cincinnati, OH) – The Studio San Giuseppe Art Gallery at Mount St. Joseph University presents Nate Larson: Escape Routes from September 22 - October 26, 2014.   Nate Larson is a contemporary artist working with photographic media, artist books and digital video. Larson is based in Baltimore, Maryland, and is a faculty member in the photography department at Maryland Institute College of Art.  His artwork and projects have been shown throughout the United States and internationally, as well as featured in numerous publications and media outlets.  The SSG exhibition features Larson’s photography series Escape Routes, as well as the Waffle House Index.  

The photographs in Escape Routes retrace the escape route of John Wilkes Booth as he fled from Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC after shooting and killing President Lincoln.  During Booth’s 12-day and approximately 75-mile flight, he struggled to understand why he was not greeted as a liberator and war hero. His flight led to trials and public hanging of his conspirators and the federal government’s first execution of a woman.  Booth himself was shot and killed following a confrontation with Union soldiers near Port Royal, Virginia; a hero in his own mind, and a villain to history.  Tracing his path almost 150 years later, the route is now a mixture of urban living, declining suburbs, new housing developments, rural pockets of country living, and highway commuter culture. The landscape is a palimpsest, etched with stories upon stories, encoding the mythologies that we create for ourselves about contemporary life in the United States. 

The Waffle House Index is an informal metric used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine the impact of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery. The measure is based on the reputation of the Waffle House restaurant chain for staying open during extreme weather and for reopening quickly, albeit sometimes with a limited menu, after very severe weather events such as tornados or hurricanes. FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate coined the term in May 2011, following the Joplin tornado; the two Waffle House restaurants in Joplin remained open after the EF5 multiple-vortex tornado struck the city on May 22. According to Fugate, "If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work."

The Closing Reception will be held on Sunday, October 19, 2:00 – 4:00 PM, with an artist's talk at 3:00 PM.  This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the FotoFocus Biennial, held in Cincinnati this October.  FotoFocus is a non-profit arts organization whose mission is to present the finest in contemporary photography and lens-based art, and to produce events that are artistically, intellectually, and academically rigorous yet accessible and enriching to a large and diverse public.

Studio San Giuseppe is a nonprofit art gallery located in the Dorothy Meyer Ziv Art Building on the campus of Mount St. Joseph University, Delhi and Neeb roads in Delhi Township, 15 minutes west of downtown Cincinnati. 

Gallery hours are Monday through Friday 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM, Saturdays and Sundays 1:00 – 5:00 PM.  The Gallery is closed on major holidays, as well as the University's mid-semester break, October 10-12th.  Admission is free.  For more information, call Studio San Giuseppe at 513-244-4314. 

Mount St. Joseph University is a Catholic, non-profit college of 2,400 students located in Cincinnati, Ohio; Mount  St. Joseph University offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in interdisciplinary liberal arts and professional curricula.