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
Bio
Robert Robbins is an internationally exhibited visual artist who explores issues of social, political and environmental conflict through landscape as subject. His art, which takes the form of large-scale paintings, on the surface appears straight-forward, but on closer inspection leaves the viewer to contemplate their position in the world.
Robbins received his MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University and his BFA in Fine Arts from the Columbus College of Art and Design. His work has been awarded fellowships from the Macdowell Colony, the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Robbins’s work has been exhibited at the Butler Institute, The Chateau Museum (Rochefort-En-Terre), Springfield Museum of Art (OH), Sears / Peyton Gallery (NY), Bonfoey Gallery in Cleveland, Lydon Fine Arts in Chicago, the Carnegie Center for the Visual Arts (KY), Morehead University, Florida State University, Cleveland State University and the Maryland Institute of Art, among others. His work is included in the collections of the Nord Family Foundation, the Columbus Metropolitan Library and the Ohio State University.
Robbins is a Professor of Art at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Artist Statement
The most recent artworks included will come from two groups of paintings I’ve been working on for several years. Both groups of paintings reflect on the temporal and memory aspects of passing through time, and travelling to and away from home, or to and away from the people you know.
These paintings are about traveling at speed, the ephemerality of sensory memory. They are about being in multiple states and places all at once. They are about the feeling of doing one thing while thinking about something else. They are about being distracted and about noticing something small and unexpected. They are as much about what we forget as what we remember, and how technology is changing how we remember.
My paintings express the feeling simultaneously being in nature and separate from it. We can repeatedly slide through space in vehicles surrounded by the natural world while completely isolated from any sensory experience of it.
It is a strange world that has us spending most of our time with panes of glass between ourselves and the natural world around us. In the car, at home, at work we are looking at screens and through windows. Either we speed down the road with trees and sky flying past us completely insulated from the wind and cold, or we are looking at a computer screen, a smartphone, out a window, and having a conversation with a friend all at once. This work explores the confluence and conflation of time, space, the natural world and the artificial world in our complicated lives.
