Movement, Chance, Light

The Cincinnati Arts Association’s Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts will debut three new exhibitions on December 17 featuring regional artists: Vision: Things That Fly/Site-Specific Installation by Elissa Morley, a magical landscape world of translucent drawings and suspended ethereal forms by Elissa Morley; Utopia: Paintings and Works on Paper by Todd Reynolds, the dreamlike and somewhat disturbing large-scale paintings and watercolors of Todd Reynolds; and Movement, Chance, Light: Abstract Photographs by Diana Duncan Holmes, a new series of evocative abstract photographs by Diana Duncan Holmes. 

Inspired by a month-long residency in Reykjavik, Iceland and its austere and remote landscape, Diana Duncan Holmes ( Cincinnati, Ohio) digitally breaks down representational images thus redefining them as a more universal concept or recurring archetype. Focusing on extreme close-ups of natural and architectural forms, Holmes’s photographic details transform the mundane and ordinary into extraordinary images. Movement, Chance, Light will feature a new series of photographic images presented on multiple panels of aluminum and ceramic as well as several sculptural found objects that served as subjects for selected photographs. 

Diana Duncan Holmes earned a bachelor of science in English education and journalism from Florida State University in 1967 and a master of education in English from the University of Cincinnati in 1970. She pursued her interest in photography at Northern Kentucky University from 1973 through 1975. 

She has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions at local, regional, national and international venues including: The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati Art Museum, Clay Street Press, the former Toni Birckhead Gallery, the former C.A.G.E. Gallery, the Weston Art Gallery (all Cincinnati, Ohio), Carnegie Arts Center (Covington, Ky.), Dayton Art Institute (Dayton, Ohio), Springfield Museum of Art (Springfield, Ohio), Miami University Art Museum (Oxford, Ohio), Riffe Gallery (Columbus, Ohio), Southern Ohio Museum (Portsmouth, Ohio), Spaces (Cleveland, Ohio), College of Wooster Art Museum (Wooster, Ohio), Evanston Art Center (Chicago, Ill.), A.I.R. Gallery (New York, N.Y.), National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.), Kharkiv Municipal Gallery (Kharkiv, Ukraine), and Amerika Haus (Munich, Germany). 

Her work is represented in numerous corporate and museum collections including Cincinnati Bell, Atlantic Richfield, Chase Manhattan Bank, Cincinnati Art Museum, Springfield Museum of Art, Miami University Art Museum, Fidelity Investments, and Chicago Art Institute among others. She has been the recipient of several Ohio Arts Council grants including an Individual Artist Fellowship in 1997 and OAC Artist Residencies in Prague, Czech Republic in 2003 and Reykjavik, Iceland in 2006. In 2009, she was awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the City of Cincinnati. She served as an adjunct professor in English from 1975-92 at the University of Cincinnati and as an adjunct professor at Northern Kentucky University where she taught advanced photography from 1980-2005. 

download Diana's Statement Panel 

Gallery Talk Series: Thursday, January 6 at 7 p.m.