Illustration of a group of clownfish swimming near sea anemone tentacles, depicted with orange and white fish below blue, wavy tendrils.

Nothing exists in isolation. Everything is connected.

Location:	Museum
Ticket Info:	Free
Questions:	Megan Hancock Museum Director & Curator hancockm@denison.edu 740-587-5713

Every living thing, every ecosystem, every work of art, every scientific discovery, and every planet is part of an interconnected web of change. Cycles explores the patterns that shape our world, revealing how growth, transformation, memory, and renewal connect disciplines too often viewed separately.

Bringing together historic and contemporary art, scientific illustration, photography, rare books, film, music, dance, and interactive media, the exhibition reveals unexpected relationships across art, science, history, and the natural world. Artists and scientists share a common pursuit: observing change, recognizing patterns, and asking questions about the world around us.

Time is essential to that pursuit. Whether observed through a microscope, telescope, camera, scientific instrument, or an artist’s hand, patterns emerge over time. A dividing cell, an insect’s metamorphosis, a changing climate, the rhythm of dance, the evolution of music, and the orbit of the Moon reveal transformations unfolding across vastly different scales and spans of time.

Throughout the exhibition, artists and scientists offer different ways of seeing these connections. David S. Goodsell reveals the architecture of living cells, while Jill Pelto and the Woodwell Climate Research Center turn scientific research into visual narratives. Katie Paterson’s Earth-Moon-Earth sends Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata between Earth and the Moon, allowing distance and physics to reshape the music. Joe Conzo Jr.’s photographs capture hip hop’s evolving relationship among music, dance, community, and identity. Mollie Wolf’s WAKE considers water as a life-giving force and repository of memory, while Dan Homan’s eclipse photography and John Soderberg’s documentation of Ohio’s ancient petroglyphs explore celestial and seasonal rhythms.

Not every cycle is natural. Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War and Enrique Chagoya’s Homage to Goya II confront recurring cycles of violence, asking us to recognize patterns in history so they need not repeat endlessly. Other works explore identity, ecology, ritual, and cultural memory, reminding us that cycles are not simply processes to observe; they are systems in which we participate in.

Moving from microscopic life and environmental systems to celestial movement, spiritual traditions, identity, music, and artistic practice, Cycles invites us to discover connections among subjects that may at first seem far apart, and to consider our own place within them. Every ending can become a beginning, every repetition can produce change, and every return can offer a different perspective. We are not separate from these cycles of change; we are part of them.