Ohio Reclaimed: What Once Was | Group Exhibition
Forum Gallery
October 4 – December 14, 2024
This exhibition explores real Northeast Ohio landmarks in the midst of being reclaimed by nature. From the ferris wheel at Chippewa Lake to the locks in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, each location is examined through multiple mediums; poetry by Theresa Göttl Brightman, photography by Mary Defer, and paintings by Dee Fairweather. The work prompts questions about who the land belongs to—humankind or Mother Nature.
Mary Defer primarily works with analog photography, inspired by the unreliable nature of memory, the natural world, and the unearthing of family history. A near-lifelong NE Ohioan, she grew up on a family farm and discovered her love for photography at Kenyon College, where she earned a B.A. in Studio Art. Defer’s work has been exhibited regionally at Cleveland Print Room, Valley Art Center, and Pinwheel Gallery, and nationally through at Auburn Art Gallery (Los Angeles), Soho Photo Gallery (NYC), and Filter Photo (Chicago). In 2012, her book as when was included in DIY: Photographers & Books, the first-ever museum exhibition of print-on-demand photobooks at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Dee Fairweather is an oil painter living in Medina, OH. Her interest in history began in grade school when her family moved to Roscoe Village, an historic canal village in Coshocton, OH. Using primarily neutral tones and influenced by American Tonalist artists, Fairweather’s emotionally fueled landscapes typically feature vast scenery with awe-inspiring skies. Her goal is to create timeless, atmospheric landscapes highlighting breadth, distance, and luminosity to fuel mental health, stress relief, and escapism.
Theresa Göttl Brightman is a poet and writer who uses her work to examine how the mundane and the mystic interact. Her poems have appeared in many online and print publications, two chapbooks and one full-length collection, and she has performed her poetry across the U.S. Brightman has received awards from The University of Akron, the City of Ventura, Cleveland Museum of Art, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Rhysling Award, and Best of the Net awards. With an interest in environmental activism, her most recent poems often explore themes within eco-poetry.
Did you know?
Most of the artwork on display at Summit Artspace is for sale.
Click on the artwork images for pricing and more information about each piece.
If you would like to purchase any art, please visit a staff member or volunteer at the front desk, or email natalie@summitartspace.org.
Special thanks to Bradley Hart, Summit Artspace resident artist, for photography of virtual exhibitions!
1- Theresa Göttl Brightman | On Lock 28 | NFS
Poetry and audio recording
On Lock 28
She was here first.
Before she birthed our ancestors’ ancestors,
before any language-bearing creature
tried to control her by calling her
the first of thousands of names:
Ocean, River, Rain, Current.
When the Earth was a spinning hot slurry of iron,
she was here, in a rock of ice.
She formed sky and clouds,
built atmosphere, originated
the cycle of rain and cloud, rain and cloud.
She was here to catch carbon bits and flakes,
snap them together, and give them a place to float around
until lightning struck, creating something new, again.
She brought purpose with the animation of a single cell,
and she made another and another and another.
We made the mistake of trying to bend her to our will.
We called her Cistern, Aqueduct, Canal.
We forced her, an affront to her essential character,
until she rebelled, until we called her
Storm, Flood, Hurricane, Tsunami.
Now we must ask if there is Water in our bellies.
Not an all consuming fire, but Water.
Water that gives life and takes it away.
Water that runs and stands
and flows and falls. Water that adapts,
diverts, and carves with persistence.
We must find Water in our souls,
Water in our hands, Water under our feet.
It is our job to unmake our sins, to free her, restore her,
return her to her purpose
of creating a world where we can live.
2- Dee Fairweather | Ohio Canal | $1,200
Painting on panel
36” x 30”
3- Mary Defer | Ohio & Erie Canal Lock 28 | $400
Archival print from handmade negative
17.25” x 17.25”
4- Theresa Göttl Brightman | Nature Tells of Deep Lock Quarry | NFS
Poetry and audio recording
Nature Tells of Deep Lock Quarry
This is where they cut me,
as all children cut their mothers.
Ask any mother. Ask
your own mother.
She will tell you.
Whether it is a deliberate,
stone-sharpened disobedience,
or an accidental, bounding, glittering ignorance,
sin always begins with a cut.
Prideful men of gold and grain,
tiny men with tiny minds, an acorn cap
so stuffed with their own broken creations
they cannot recall or comprehend
that a world could build Herself.
When they stopped seeking me,
they only betrayed themselves.
Shunning what gives and sustains life
builds fortresses that do not live.
So they cut me to build cities of men and mills of men,
cut from me just as they cut from their own mothers,
took from me as they took from their own wives,
and from what they took and cut
built cities for their sons
where their daughters could serve.
I do not serve men.
Sisters, take heart. Look to me.
Where my tree roots were ripped from soil,
I am now a grove of buckeye trees.
Where my soil was dried and pounded for roads and mule trails,
now rosepink blooms afresh where frogs and toads peep lullabies.
Where my air was filled with the sounds of metal against rock
metal against rock metal against rock,
now warblers sing their arias.
I delight in the warblers.
They sing of the trees.
They sing of the sky and the rain and
the sun and the cloud and the snow.
They sing of their fledglings,
and they sing of their mates.
They sing that they live their lives.
And when they sing,
they sing to praise their Mother.
5- Dee Fairweather | Quarried Stone | $1,200
Painting on panel
36” x 30”
6- Mary Defer | Deep Lock Quarry | $400
Archival print from handmade negative
17.25” x 17.25”
7- Theresa Göttl Brightman | Nature Tells of the Jaite Paper Mill | NFS
Poetry and audio recording
Nature Tells of the Jaite Paper Mill
I will take you back,
like the iron you took from me
to build your levers and springs
and pistons, like the iron in your own blood
that also came from me.
It was mine and I take it back,
as you are mine, and I will also
take you back.
These pits in the metal
from rain and wind and sun,
the sprouts of furry mullein poking
through cracks in the factory floor—
you call this decay, as if I’m the one
who caused the damage. But I promise,
I am only setting the scale back to balance,
swinging the world side to side,
making the sky dizzy.
Cloudy mourning doves nest in a valve. A walnut sapling
interrupts the line. Blackberry brambles tangle the mechanisms,
and grape vines embrace the gears, freezing the rollers.
This is progress.
You built this palace of cold iron
and wonder why you can’t have miracles,
why magic has forsaken you. Each rusted bolt falling,
each washer broken by air and water,
is my way of helping.
I will take all of it,
small bite after small bite,
to bring you back into wonder.
You can take minerals from me, your little tantrums,
for forty years or four hundred years.
Your counting doesn’t matter, and I am never exhausted.
I come back again and again
and again.
8- Dee Fairweather | The Hidden Jaite | $1,200
Painting on panel
36” x 30”
9- Mary Defer | Jaite Paper Mill | $400
Archival print from handmade negative
17.25” x 17.25”
10- Theresa Göttl Brightman | Nature Tells of the Molly Stark Sanatorium | NFS
Poetry and audio recording
Nature Tells of the Molly Stark Sanatorium
Let me hold you.
Let me wrap ivy arms around marble columns,
across mosaic ceramic tiles, veining plaster buttresses.
Let me courtyard crawl, spreading
leaf and vine blankets.
Assigning you a beautiful place to die
was still assigning you to die.
And this place was beautiful,
crafted balconies and scrolling porticos,
with sunlight and trees and gardens.
The apple tree that shaded your afternoons
now stoops, abandoned in the side yard,
orchard remnant untended, fenced from all contact,
a split trunk, dropping fruit to rot,
where not even the deer can feed from it.
Blackberry brambles
dangle crystal rain pendants,
summoning rainbows,
summoning clarity and vision
summoning you.
Ghostly snow slipping silver
over shed leaves, a treasure hunt fortune,
bright coins for your ferry toll.
I send the rain as apology,
because you, too, are my creatures.
You deserved breath and celebration.
You deserved more than statistics and percentages
housed behind splintered windows.
So much pain walks this world.
You cannot carry it all in your tiny bodies.
Let me hold you.
Let my living be your monument.
11- Dee Fairweather | Stairway to Heaven | $1,20011
Painting on panel
36” x 30”
12- Mary Defer | Molly Stark Sanatorium | $400
Archival print from handmade negative
17.25” x 17.25”
13- Theresa Göttl Brightman | On the Cherry Valley Beehive Coke Ovens | NFS
Poetry and audio recording
On the Cherry Valley Beehive Coke Ovens
The road to technology,
paved here in correspondence coal mines,
rail spikes, shovels and shovels and shovels
and stone. Soot smear smiles into
mortar brick scrape stack, round and round
into turtle shell, into cone flower, into
dunes with heavy-lidded eyes.
This pickax to pig-iron
end-to-end supply chain,
feeds railroad western expansion
frontier forge. Reconstruction steel boom
to iron horse buffalo extinction equals
marble mansion tycoon barons.
Listen to the Cherry Valley coal cough
company town. Light pollution red hills,
smog, mineral rights, curtaining stars, peeking through
circular smoke vents with acid rain trickle down.
Twenty-four seven operation,
two hundred and fifty tons fired
every day every day every day.
Franco-Prussian War depresses
black lungs in the bank vault, paying for empires.
Blast furnace bust town sitting
just south of Youngstown, Ohio.
Coal miners gone, coal cars gone, coal babies gone,
the red glow of Cherry Valley gone,
one thousand people in less than one hundred years, gone.
Blackberry thorns now thread through the crumble.
Ferns hide in damp corners, thin green mold
climbs the dome walls, and furry mullein
tuckpoints in brick dust. Straw bale scatter
shelters more than mice and cotton tails.
But at least we can see the stars now, peek through
the century-cold oven vent. Smoke out stars in,
smoke out stars in—
a galaxy stretched across our arms.
14- Dee Fairweather | Coke Ovens | $1,200
Painting on panel
36” x 30”
15- Mary Defer | Cherry Valley Beehive Coke Ovens | $400
Archival print from handmade negative
17.25” x 17.25”
16- Theresa Göttl Brightman | Nature Tells of the American Legion Camp | NFS
Poetry and audio recording
Nature Tells of the American Legion Camp
Before their mothers birthed them,
before they stepped into
evaluations and scarcity,
into men and women,
into bullies and toys and
percentiles and status symbols,
into pay scales and report cards
and ideological categories and ridicule,
they were mine.
Before distraction was distraction,
before boredom became boredom,
the only point of existence was existence,
and they were mine.
For treasured summer-short days,
like toy soldiers and shiny trinkets
hidden in a cigar box, they came back to me,
to poison ivy mud-stomp mosquito-bite scraped knees.
They came back to star-full nights, named and wished,
to coyote howls interrupting exhausted dreams.
I know how many boys sat around this fireplace,
how many eating camp fare and telling
ghost stories, how many ghosts.
I know. I count them.
And they are mine again.
17- Dee Fairweather | Warmth in the Wilderness | $1,200
Painting on panel
36” x 30”
18- Mary Defer | American Legion Camp | $400
Archival print from handmade negative
17.25” x 17.25”
19- Theresa Göttl Brightman | Nature Tells of the Hillandale Bridge | NFS
Poetry and audio recording
Nature Tells of the Hillandale Bridge
When once the sun stretched wide and red, and the moon sang blue
and soft and big as a pie, and the ocean rolled thick and cold and dark,
a man—small and saucer-eyed hungry—believed in a Rumplestiltskin-
Midas hero and built a great bridge that curved and turned like the neck
of a golden goose. Man dreamed of chiseled mansions of marble and
stone and carved cornices and gilded ballrooms and wrought iron
fences on the other side. Man built his great troll treasure bridge, and I
did what I do, and I waited. I am no young lightning god shifting swans to
maidens, I cannot birth wolf monsters to end the world. I do one thing—I
wait and take back what is mine. I waited and the dandelion mansions
never sprouted from seed puffs. I waited and the bridge sat rain-stained-
lonely in the woods, squatting bear-stretched across the ravine—no
roads, no cars, no path to fortunes. I waited and toppled the concrete
guard rails, unraveled rebar, unrolled grasses and understory across
brick pavement, dripped ivy through to valley floor. Then I called my
brother who took my hand and turned this golden enclave upside down.
You don’t know him, but you name him a thousand names.
To you he is Hermes, Anansi, Coyote, he is Loki and Tanuki and Kitsune.
My brother colonized the dressed-down un-use colonnade with the
children, setting their ritual fires and drinking their ritual brews and
making love and making song between the dappled trees and painting
rabbit fire and owl eyes on the arches that were, marking their names in
secret-treating, calling on my brother in all his names and he is fed with
their libation. And we laugh. We laugh at the great plans of meager men
flipped like temple tables. We laugh at what new worlds these children
carve in all my greenest refuge. We laugh in delight. We laugh in hope.
We laugh in renewal. And always we laugh.
20- Dee Fairweather | Bridge to Nowhere | $1,500
Painting on panel
36” x 48”
21- Mary Defer | Hillandale Bridge | $400
Archival print from handmade negative
17.25” x 17.25”
22- Theresa Göttl Brightman | On the Warner and Swasey Observatory | NFS
Poetry and audio recording
On the Warner and Swasey Observatory
And on the eighth day God created Wonder—
human brains germinating two seeds,
two breathy syllables, “why” and “how,”
planted inextricably deep.
With those two words, people built this temple,
twin telescopes, technological cathedral
eating spiral galaxies and red dwarfs,
master-tools of exploration, seating human minds
where human hands could not yet touch.
Two jewels crowning sculpted beauty worthy of
discovery—curled stairways, halls of mosaics,
students walking among marble and brass zodiac constellations.
Wonder is a sacrament.
To study Nature and all her creation is prayer.
To ask the question
is holy.
When English ivy swallowed the grand entrances,
and weather peeled the panels to reveal naked domes,
exposing tracks and pulleys rusted in the now vacant turrets—
replacing wonder at the heart of this temple with
sadness and forgetfulness—this, too, is a kind of sin,
an eleventh commandment violation of
a crime against what could have been.
A black cat echoes from within, crying a psalm,
“It will die, or it will live and it will die.”
Maybe once upon a time is not enough
to maintain a star temple on a hill.
Maybe the old gods in relief are not enough
to inspire worship of a visible miracle.
Maybe breaking the seventh seal releases
not horsemen, but regrets.
23- Dee Fairweather | Viewing the Observatory | $1,500
Painting on panel
36” x 48”
24- Mary Defer | Warner & Swasey Observatory | $400
Archival print from handmade negative
17.25” x 17.25”
25- Theresa Göttl Brightman | Nature Tells of the Sidaway Bridge | NFS
Poetry and audio recording
Nature Tells of the Sidaway Bridge
what cannot be seen cannot be remembered what is hidden cannot be healed
26- Dee Fairweather | Crossing | $1,200
Painting on panel
36” x 30”
27- Mary Defer | Sidaway Bridge | $400
Archival print from handmade negative
17.25” x 17.25”
28- Theresa Göttl Brightman | Nature Tells of the Moon Tower | NFS
Poetry and audio recording
Nature Tells of the Moon Tower
I know how tired you are.
You are exactly as tired as this soil,
hard-packed and spent to dead grey dust,
absorbing decades of railroad coal fallout.
You are as tired as the Standing Rock,
as the crooked Cuyahoga, holy landmarks
disrupted for ninety-five years
by incessant iron and whistles and chatter
and iron and signals and gates and locks and iron—
tired and dry of color and quiet.
Here, I have taken something ugly
and made it beautiful. The juvenile woods
turned the land with roots and moss,
healing over century-scars.
Turntable, locomotive stalls,
roundhouse—I swept away those footprints.
Only this tank-less tower stands as reminder,
sun-tears leaking through
green-growth shadows,
tinsel-shimmered in spider silk.
I beckon you, curl in the leaf litter
in the shade of the ivy-clothed platform,
skull squinting through the canopy.
You built places of strain.
I built you for rest.
You built places of work.
I built you for joy.
I want to live
open to the light.
You ask if this is necessary.
The answer is yes.
This is the most necessary thing
you’ve ever done in your life:
to exist.
29- Dee Fairweather | Along the Tracks | $1,200
Painting on panel
36” x 30”
30- Mary Defer | Erie Railyard Water Tower | $400
Archival print from handmade negative
17.25” x 17.25”
31- Theresa Göttl Brightman | Nature Tells of the Seville Barn | NFS
Poetry and audio recording
Nature Tells of the Seville Barn
Listen as I sing in the elderberry clusters,
dark and wine.
Listen as I sing in the pokeweed stalks,
ink and dye and uncooked poison.
Listen as I sing in the burdock blooms, purple in spring
and sticky pranks in fall.
Listen as I sing between the wings of the bees in the blossoms,
gold and bright hot burn.
Listen as I sing through the foxtail grasses,
sprouting from the tops of dampened cross beams.
Listen as I sing over these squared off support beams,
nothing machined, only the old heft
still stands because of craft and muscle and sweat and hand.
Listen as I sing through the aluminum roofing,
peeled and folded and curled in the clover
like an injured animal. Listen as it moves
in the wind, swaying with the late summer
breath and fall. Listen as it holds the time.
Listen as I sing through it like a flute.
Listen to the harmonies that have always been here,
that remember the trees before the beams,
that remember the trees before the cornfield,
the harmonies remembering that this space
has always been mine.
Saw-milled white-washed panels splintered and tore.
Aluminum roof snipped from frame like wind
is can-opener, like weather is blade.
But the frame, I leave. The cross beams, the supports,
shaped and adze-knicked, I leave.
What is closest to me,
I leave.
32- Dee Fairweather | Chance of Rain | $1,200
Painting on panel
36” x 30”
33- Mary Defer | Seville Barn | $400
Archival print from handmade negative
17.25” x 17.25”
34- Theresa Göttl Brightman | Nature Tells of Chippewa Lake | $NFS
Poetry and audio recording
Nature Tells of Chippewa Lake
I delight in repetition and order.
It’s how you know me best.
I flatten planetary orbits into
a clockwork disc. I drift the poles
from winter to summer to winter,
while your moon circles every
twenty-eight days.
Tree leaves silver-sing in the wind,
as the lake keeps time,
ripples into shore and
then back out, ripples
into shore and then back out.
Squint and you can still see
fairway lights. Close your eyes
and you can still hear the whistles
and buzzers, the spinning cars
reeling along a monorail track.
Open your eyes and bald eagles
chirp their soaring song overhead,
a reminder that this was the best
of your America, that there still is
the best of your America to come.
It’s all a matter of perspective.
Supernova lights radiating,
ride the wheel into
the lake-thick summer night,
up into space, over crowds,
over music, over.
Everything changes
when you see from above.
35- Dee Fairweather | Ferris Wheel on the Lake | $1,500
Painting on panel
48” x 36”
36- Mary Defer | Chippewa Lake Tumble Bug | $400
Archival print from handmade negative
17.25” x 17.25”
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