SHED Projects:
visual culture and
experimental projects
Current Exhibitions
Current Exhibitions
my new build!
akeylah wellington
April 18 – May 30, 2026
Opening: Saturday, April 18, 5–9 PM
SHED Projects presents my new build!, an in-progress, research-based installation by Columbus-based artist akeylah wellington.
Approaching the role of builder, wellington develops an evolving architectural structure using experimental materials and techniques. Drawing from building traditions across Haiti, the Caribbean, and the broader Southern diaspora, the work examines how cultural knowledge continues to shape and adapt forms such as the shotgun house.
Rather than presenting a finished object, my new build! unfolds as one phase of an ongoing project. wellington constructs and reclassifies materials—working with pony beads, sequins, and other craft elements as both structural and symbolic components—creating a living framework that reflects on memory, labor, and inheritance.
Installed within SHED’s domestic architecture, the work enters into direct dialogue with the house itself. In this context, the project operates as a living sculpture—one that mirrors SHED as both a home and a conceptual space, allowing the work to remain open, in-process, and responsive.
Through this investigation, wellington engages questions of home ownership, economics, and the realities facing younger generations today, while also considering how spaces can be built to hold care, safety, and healing.
Upcoming Exhibitions
Upcoming Exhibitions
Jon Gott: Dunes
A One-Night-Only Occupation of the Historic Brooklyn Centre Firehouse
Thursday, May 14, 2026 from 5–9 PM
Location:
Brooklyn Centre Firehouse [next door to SHED Projects]
3723 Pearl Rd, Cleveland, OH 44109
SHED Projects presents Dunes, a one-night-only presentation of new work by Jon Gott, taking place within the historic Brooklyn Centre Firehouse.
Curated by Gabrielle Banzhaf, Dunes acts as both installation and invitation—bringing living systems, architecture, and human presence into temporary relation within a vacant structure currently listed for sale. The project stages what the artist describes as “a poetic hijacking of a real estate showing.”
Within the building, Gott introduces live tropical orchids: organisms that spread, attach, and survive through complex, often unseen relationships. Existing in a state between refuge and displacement, the flowers become both material and metaphor—occupying the firehouse without fully belonging to it.
The installation considers exposure across multiple registers: the opening of the building itself, the presence of living forms within it, and the shifting ways these systems become visible, obscured, or emotionally charged through encounter. Visitors are invited to move through the structure as part of the work, experiencing the firehouse not as backdrop, but as a body holding layered states of vacancy, memory, and possibility.
Flowers operate here as both seduction and signal—drawing people in while complicating relationships between nature, architecture, desire, and occupation.
Extending outward from SHED Projects, Dunes continues an ongoing inquiry into how domestic and cultural spaces expand, seep, and activate adjacent environments.
Concurrent open hours will be held at SHED Projects during the event.
SHORT CUTS 2026
Oct. 1 - Oct. 4, 2026
SHORT CUTS is an international short film festival produced by SHED Projects centering experimental, artist-made moving image works five minutes and under. Founded in 2023 and previously hosted in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the festival will continue and expand in Cleveland in Fall 2026.
The festival prioritizes formally adventurous, non-commercial work that often exists outside traditional film circuits, including experimental narrative, documentary, animation, moving-image art, and interdisciplinary practices. By focusing on brevity, SHORT CUTS creates an accessible entry point for audiences while offering filmmakers thoughtful contextualization and meaningful visibility.
The primary public screening will take place at the Cleveland Cinematheque at the Cleveland Institute of Art, culminating in an approximately two-hour curated screening program followed by filmmaker conversations and community gathering. A secondary public screening will take plaec at the Capitol Theatre.
SHORT CUTS 2026 jurors are Lilan Yang, Janelle VanderKelen, and Gabrielle Banzhaf. Together, their practices span experimental film, installation, education, moving-image art, and artist-led curatorial work.
SHORT CUTS 2026 is supported in part by Neighbor Up.