The Wellin welcomes Rhona Bitner: Resound
By Katie Rao ’24, Staff Writer
From awe-inspiring acrobatic feats to uninhabited performance venues, The Wellin Museum of Art’s Rhona Bitner: Resound, explores the collection elements that make up the performing arts. Marking Bitner’s first museum survey, the Wellin’s exhibition brings together the artist’s works from the last three decades — with themes of music, theater and performance permeating throughout the show.
Rhona Bitner: Resound demonstrates the artist’s interest in joining the visual and performing arts. She envisions the camera lens and the performer’s stage as two apertures through which one can interpret the world around them. Featuring a number of Bitner’s photographic series, the exhibition showcases the various ways the artist examines performance.
Photographs from her series Stage consider solemn still stages. Images from this collection capture the stage either before the curtains rose or after they fell, gesturing toward a feeling of anticipation and expectation. Meanwhile, a smaller, diligently arranged set of images brings forth the performers. Bitner’s Circus series portrays American and European circus acts of the late twentieth century. In the midst of action, illuminated circus entertainers seize the spotlight, standing out against a black backdrop. Images from her series Pointe take a different approach, while still starkly contrasting her subject against the background. This ongoing series depicts the worn pointe-shoes of professional ballet dancers, rather than the dancers themselves, to fashion “portraits” of ballerinas. Turning her attention toward the patrons of performance, Bitner’s most recent series, Tour, seeks to bridge the realms of live performance and fandom. She captures throngs of energetic spectators enjoying performances, conferring the importance of the audience in the history of performance, not just the performers.
Occupying the whole of the back wall, selected works from Bitner’s Listen series feature photographs of 395 vacant music venues from across the United States. Over 13 years, Bitner traveled to 89 cities to create her indexical collection of American rock ’n’ roll history and landscape. Rather than look at contemporary performance, rendering physical bodies participating in the art, Bitner investigates the history of performance. While initially it might seem that Bitner’s Listen series functions as a historical index of American musical and cultural history alone, the body of work goes beyond sole documentation. Her works contain a two-pronged sense of absence — the absence of figures and the absence of sound — yet one can imagine that these spaces were once filled with both. The absence empowers the imagination to occupy this space; viewers’ individual memories mingle with the collective memory of American musical history captured on film by Bitner.
Together with these longstanding projects are two personal series, Headshot and Ghost Light. The former presents the head of one of Bitner’s oldest childhood toys: a stuffed clown. Printed on traditionally sized 8x10 paper, the same size as an actor’s headshot, Bitner photographs a subject characteristic of her body of work. Ghost Light echoes the work of artists who sought to capture their transforming cities, like Eugene Atget and Berenice Abbott. The advent of the 2020 lockdown inspired Bitner to photograph New York City’s vacant streets.
Toward the end of the exhibition, visitors can enter the immersive and interactive WellinWorks space. The area integrates the themes of Bitner’s work with an invitation for guests to engage in a hands-on experience. Visitors are welcome to compose storyboards and design their own postcards. Across the room, visitors can take a seat in the listening room to tune into select songs curated by Bitner. Finally, the museum features its very own stage where guests are encouraged to partake in the world of performance.
Spanning from her 1990s Cibachrome prints to her more recent chromogenic and digital prints, the Wellin’s exhibition of Bitner’s visually complex images have much to offer. Bitner’s work provides fertile ground for nuanced discussion surrounding the performing arts, photography, music and more.
Rhona Bitner: Resound will be on display at the Wellin Museum of Art from Sept. 9 to Dec. 9.
