The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
2024 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Elaine Andrews
Bio
Elaine Arvan Andrews lives and makes art in Youngstown, Ohio. She is an artist, educator, and writer who has been making postcard-sized collages since 2013, when she became fascinated by mail art. She earned her Ph.D. in Nineteenth-Century British Literature at Ohio University and is now works as the Assistant Director of Academic Affairs and Associate Teaching Professor in English at Penn State University, Shenango Campus, just across the Ohio border in Sharon, Pennsylvania. Inspired by vintage ephemera and Rust Belt landscapes, she has published an essay in The Youngstown Anthology: Car Bombs and Cookie Tables (Rust Belt Publishing, 2016). She has exhibited her photography and collages in Akron, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh.
Artist Statement
My art explores the fantasy spaces among strangers as they interact in the digital world. These imaginary encounters are expressed in the imagination-based encounters between the viewer and historical relics, such as paper ephemera or obsolete buildings and public spaces. The ephemera collages represent “unmailed postcards” because of the self-contained nature of the fantasy communications and perceptions they express. Mostly postcard size, these collages allude to the practice of “mail art,” yet remain “unsent” and private. Unsent, they seal off the privacy of inner fantasy lives and how we live by a construction of the world based on “filling in the blanks” with ourselves.
Similarly, my photographs of historical buildings in the “Rust Belt” make visible the limitations of interpreting the past and how, like the unmailed postcards, we fill in the blanks of historical record with our imaginations.