The Contemporary Dayton

Appearances is the premiere exhibition of an ongoing photographic series by artist Ella Kraimer, based in New Bremen, OH. Working primarily through photographic self-portraiture, Kraimer transforms secondhand garments sourced from thrift stores into carefully staged fictional identities. Through irony, humor, and cultural critique, the work investigates how identity is constructed, performed, and circulated within contemporary visual culture.

Featuring large-scale digital prints, Appearances functions as a visual diary that exposes a culture shaped by social media, fast fashion, and digital spectacle. Drawing on the legacy of artists such as Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura, Kraimer extends their investigations of performance, gender, and cultural codes into the context of today’s image-saturated environment. Inspired in part by childhood memories of paper dolls, Kraimer employs collage, assemblage, and costume to deconstruct and reconstruct her own image. Each photograph stages a carefully constructed persona, revealing identity as fluid, fragmented, and negotiated between self and society, interiority and exteriority, authenticity and performance.

Kraimer’s practice is informed by cultural theory addressing spectacle, media, and simulation, raising questions about how contemporary technologies reshape perceptions of selfhood. At the same time, her use of thrifted clothing foregrounds issues of reuse and sustainability, questioning the material and symbolic economies in which clothing circulates. Through these layered images, Appearances invites viewers to reflect on how their own identities are mediated by images, shaped by systems of consumption, and entangled within the aesthetics of visibility in the digital age.

Artists: Ella Kraimer

With Heather Jones (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

Source: fotofocus.org (opens in a new tab)

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Stacy Kranitz premieres her newest body of work, Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down. Featuring more than 75 photographs drawn from historical archives and Kranitz’s own images, the exhibition demonstrates how Appalachia has been seen and misseen across generations. The result is a complex portrait of a region shaped by myth, exploitation, resilience, and the uneasy tension between representation and reality.

More than 60 years after President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty, Appalachia remains a place where poverty is both deeply entrenched and persistently misrepresented. The initiative was partly shaped by Harry M. Caudill’s 1963 book Night Comes to the Cumberlands, which exposed the exploitation of Appalachian land and labor by coal companies. While Caudill initially framed the “mountaineer” as a victim of industrial greed, he later adopted troubling eugenic ideas, claiming poverty was hereditary and advocating sterilization programs. This shift reveals how the mythology of the mountaineer has evolved, from self-reliant frontiersman to victim blamed for systemic hardship.

Photography has played a key role in shaping these narratives, from early portraits of homesteaders to propaganda, government documentation, and media coverage during the War on Poverty. Over the past decade, Kranitz has built close relationships within Appalachian communities. Her images challenge viewers to confront how photographs can both reveal and distort lived experience, urging a reconsideration of Appalachia and of photography’s power and limits in shaping cultural understanding.

Artists: Stacy Kranitz

With Heather Jones (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

Source: fotofocus.org (opens in a new tab)