the hunt needs only slight lighting.

Further questions about Hard Knocks.

2011-08-03T12:59:00.002-04:00

The summer issue of Cincinnati's online arts journal Aeqai contains a review of Thunder-Sky Inc.'s current exhibition "Hard Knocks." It's been exciting to see how the exhibition and Maria's text have spurred debate and discussion.

You can see the original article and a few comments that have gone live on the page here.

Details about the artist talk on Friday can be found here.

I'm disappointed then that more than a week has passed since I wrote a series of questions I posed Maria + the journal. Not only have they gone unanswered, but they have not even been posted.So I'm posting them here in the hopes that those locally, who are interested in the discussion and the topic of "outsiderness" in contemporary art can consider them. In particular, I wanted to bring these thoughts into a public space before the artist talk for the exhibition this Friday at the gallery.

Please see below.

Matt Morris says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.

July 26th, 2011at 2:35 pm(#)

Maria, whether or not I’m a firm supporter of a project has nothing to do with whether or not I feel it is above criticism. On the contrary, if my friendship with Thunder-Sky does not come into my critique of how they execute exhibitions, my friendship with you also does not place your writing outside of my need for clarification or my desire to engage in a critique of the criticism. I’d like to think that my desire/demand for precision in efforts, both curatorial or critical, would extend in the same way into projects that I am not directly associated with (if Malton or Manifest attempted an exhibition in this vein for example).

I don’t think I’ve jumped to conclusions or interpretations in these questions. That it seems possible to read your ideas differently than you intended them is precisely why I think they need clarification. To that end, I must also have been unclear in my questions, because the driving points of what you are trying to say in this text continue to allude me.

Thank you for clarifying that you think the exhibition ignores the ways in which these artists are connected to the art world, whether or not they have degrees.

I don’t think I understand why that matters though.

Wouldn’t it stand to reason that if we are aware of any living artist who is a supposed ‘outsider’ then they are no longer living outside of mainstream contemporary culture or uninvolved with the art world? It’s why I brought up exhibitions like Gee’s Bend and Thorton Dial. In terms of art history, what is more “outsider art” than these people? And yet, they are in nationally touring exhibitions, selling work in Chelsea, and in the case of the quilts, public enough to have USPS postage stamps made of them. An “outsider artist” Cher Shaffer who I’ve collected work from in the past year has a credit card swipe at her art booth in fairs, and has sold to the rich and famous like Whoopi Goldberg. Are her mounted mainstream associations making her less of the ‘outsider’ she was when she got started? At a point when schools, public libraries, pay-by-the-month cellphones and internet cafes are all democratic access points to participating in the Internet (i.e., mainstream culture), who does still fit into the Grove definition you used?

Perhaps the only one I can readily think of is Henry Darger, since we did not know about his art until after he had died, and as a culture, we aren’t very interested in whether or not he would have wanted his work to be experienced in museums, coffee table books and documentaries.

If the artists at Thunder-Sky aren’t outsiders, then bring some to my attention who are (and my conjecture is that if you or I know about them, then they are no more outsider than anyone in the “Hard Knocks” exhibition). Or perhaps better, the term itself—no matter where we source its definition—may have lasted, as Keith said about the constructed narrative around Kevin White, beyond its usefulness.

It seems to me that this wasn’t a case of ignorance, as much as focusing on one lens. My experience of the work—and admittedly, I’ve read very little of the supporting texts related to the exhibition—suggests that there isn’t a claim of there being no involvement in mainstream or arts cultures, but more, it inquires into how these differences in involvement can be mapped outside of degree earning art academia. How does the art historian’s artmaking in private differ or bear similarities to the art hobbyist who runs a hair salon and runs with the elite jet set? What does an artist with no formal training in England have in common with or digress from someone from the American south?

I’m not asking that you “agree with every creative decision a gallery has made just because one might agree full heartedly with that gallery’s mission,” and projecting that kind of extremity onto my questions is unhelpful. My questions are not intended to drive you into agreement with what the gallery did. Truthfully, I have my own challenges with experiencing the exhibition. But if I bring them into this public space, I would hope to be as exacting in my critique as possible.

I am not struggling with your text because it could bruise some alliances I have in the arts or some precious definitions or curatorial inquiries I am invested in. I am following up in hopes that you’ll be as specific as possible about the issues you find in the exhibition, and ultimately what the problems the artists have addressed, the gallery has addressed or you have addressed MEAN. I mentioned a lack of resolution because beyond pointing out inconsistencies and problems in an exhibition, I hope that criticism will actually attempt to articulate those meanings so that we can collectively assess what has been accomplished. I have particular hopes in regards to the subject of “outsiderness” because I am completely skeptical that it exists beyond the language and scholarship that prolongs its supposed relevance.

weekend periphery.

2011-04-03T09:47:00.000-04:00

raja for the win! Saveur's masterpiece Sandwich issue. Aaron Betsky's Queer Space. Jeanne Dunning. Cecil Beaton. French onion soup. Rascals NY Deli + the boy working there who knew what U·turn is. Creme de violette!

Last night I visited one of the senior thesis exhibitions at the Art Academy of Cincinnati (which I attended from 03-07). I enjoyed a decent half of the work on display, but I got particularly involved in the video works of Rian Hunter.

Rian was an intern at U·turn last year. She is very quiet and was shy--at least around me--and her statement accompanying these works mentioned that these and other personal characteristics were involved in this work's conception.

The format--human figure performing action squared to a camera recording the action--continues a kind of displaced performance art that early John Baldessari and more recently Kate Gilmore have explored. Or as one of Hunter's faculty mentioned last night, Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci. Basically it is a simple form of video performance art. And like Acconci, Hunter puts her own body and personal space through the paces of physical actions, sometimes exposing herself to duress, or at least aggravation.

I've no problem saying that her thesis work struck me as much stronger than where I was in my own studio/post-studio practice when I were her age.

The videos varied in length, some only a few minutes long, and other more involved activities taking nearly an hour to cycle through. The [conceptual] flicker of these different time spans sharing a darkened gallery space is of interest to me.

Another aspect of her installation that I noted was her resourcefulness of using very disparate technology to present the five or so videos, and how cohesive the presentation felt. The arrangement of various TVs, projectors and gallery ottomans had a order like a manicured garden. on obstacle for young artists working with video (or really any artists without a lot of funding) is the technology needed to present a set of their works. Often, it is a gumbo of borrowed televisions, monitors, projectors, etc. And in Hunter's case, it was no different. But I believe she struck upon some poetic balance in what she exhibited and how.

the simplicity and strangeness of the tasks Hunter set for herself gave me the uncanny sense that she had extended her inner life just enough beyond her skin to make it onto her body through repeated (sometimes excruciating) gestures.

on so there we are. thanks to everyone who stopped by Brighton last night. Suzanne Silver's installation Broken English is a marvel. And I couldn't be happier with how our project with Matthew Deleget and Ellen Nagel came together. Both shows up through April 30, with gallery hours on Saturdays from 12-4.

love your sunday because at least so far there is sunshine,

best of cincinnati, jimmy baker, drag.

2011-03-30T11:53:00.006-04:00

this week's issue of CityBeat is our annual Best of Cincinnati issue. It is a witty guide to Cincinnati's great food and drinks, shops, galleries, artists, music venues + etc etc etc. i was involved in a lot of different picks about realist painters, vintage shopping, gay brunch, drag queens, video art + etc. Read through all of the staff picks (and the perhaps less reliable readers' picks) here. Or pick up a copy and use it as your locavore bible.

I've also committed a few thoughts on Jimmy Baker's paintings to page.

And a could not be more excited to take a break from preparing for Brighton's art openings this Saturday to take part in the grand opening celebrations for The Cabaret, a drag performance venue opening in OTR tomorrow night. Thursday is for VIPs, but there are three more nights of shows with amazing guest stars and the local creme de la creme. Bring your high spirits and wads of dollars for tipping.

in the meantime, i plan on continuing to feel grumpy that snow keeps falling. i am working towards making a decision about where i will be moving to in the fall. i cannot wait for yoga tonight at You Do Yoga.

keith, carmel, brighton and thunder-sky

2011-03-27T15:09:00.007-04:00

okay, so there was a lapse. in the meantime, U.turn's supporters have generously given us upwards of $1000 to help cover operating costs, and i have been writing, dreaming, spring cleaning and what-have-you.

the largest of these written projects are these: Keith Haring at the CAC. This was a cover story at CityBeat. And a good exhibition.

The other big project I can't show you quite yet. It is the catalogue essay for Carmel Buckley + Joel Fisher's exhibition Nature's Stain, that was at Aisle last fall. The essay, titled "Making Suggestions," considers the two artists as cultural excavators, and how these new works continue and in some ways radically shift both of their practices.

Other small bits of words that have run in CityBeat recently:

Amanda Checco at Park + Vine. This show has ended, but you can still visit the mural she has made in the general store, as well as the much larger outdoor mural at the corner of 12th and Jackson that she supervised last year.

The Weston Art Gallery's new exhibitions. Fibercations by Cynthia Lockhart and Narrative Figuration, a group exhibition curated by Daniel Brown. Among the artists featured in Narrative Figuration is the inimitable Emil Robinson. Along with several paintings, the exhibition contains a few of Emil's pastel works, which I had never seen in person before. They are entirely different experiences than anything else on view.

What comes next for me? well, I am TOO EXCITED that Brighton will be bustling with three great shows this Saturday. At U.turn, we are presenting Pared: Matthew Deleget and Ellen Nagel (click on the title for more info at our blog). At semantics, we are showing a solo project by Suzanne Silver. I have written about Suzanne, curated her into a project previously, and followed her work enthusiastically for several years. Because her work often deals with the abstraction and deconstruction of language, an exhibition at a gallery called semantics is very appropriate. Her exhibition, along with U.turn's and the first of the season's shows at our neighbor Synthetica M Gallery will all open with reception from 7-10 pm, on Saturday April 2nd.

Eric Ruschman and I are collaborating on a project for Thunder-Sky Inc.'s upcoming exhibition 2 + 2 = 5. Exhibition opens on April 29th. More details at their site.

i hope you are enjoying this saturday as much as i am!

U·turn's Literati Glitterati Fundraiser + CS13's Today Show

2011-02-14T14:03:00.004-05:00

hello bright beacons,

Watch for my small piece about CS13's Today Show in this week's CityBeat. Here are a few details about it now: Our friends at the alternative arts space CS13 will be presenting a 24-hour long exhibition called The Today Show that begins at 5 pm on Friday, February 18th and culminates in a reception on the evening of Saturday, February 19th, from 5-7 pm. A number of the artists included in their exhibition have shown or will be showing at U·turn in the coming months. The artists will mount an exhibition in which all of the work is conceived, created, installed, documented, written about and presented to the public in a 24 hour period. CS13 is located at 1420 Main Street in Over-the-Rhine. Make it an evening all about alternative spaces in the city: start at CS13 at 5 pm and then join us for dinner and a poem or two at 7 pm.

What that last part is referring to is U·turn's Fundraiser event on Saturday night. Here are some details for the event:

Literati Glitterati: A U·turn Fundraiser
February 19th, 2011, 7:00 – 10:00 pm
$10 suggested donation at the door

Cincinnati, OH—In little more than a year and a half of consistent monthly programming, U·turn Art Space is proud to have exhibited sixty artists from our region and from around the world. Now we are asking for your help. But don’t worry; we put the ‘fun’ in fundraiser. On the evening of the 19th, there will be books, buffets and beauty. Along with a delicious homemade meal, we will be offering beer for sale, live poetry readings and intermissions filled with a playlist designed especially for the event.

The evening will double as a book release night. Here are a few of the exciting releases planned:

-Brighton Approach Gold Edition- A special edition of Brighton Approach, U·turn’s art and literature periodical, will be available for sale. A number of the writers included in the book will be reading their work throughout the evening, including Keith Banner, Jennifer Glaser, Michael Hennessey, Meg Prichard, Nick Story and Dana Ward. These books have been printed full color, with art and writing contributions from Cincinnati and all across the country. As a Gold Edition, the book has been themed around alchemy, the pursuit of transforming the mundane into something precious. As an alternative arts space, we readily identify with such a goal.

-The U·turn Folios- The gallery has created four sets of full color digital prints, featuring work by the collective, as well as over twenty other artists that have exhibited with the space since October 2009. Three small folios have been curated and each will be available for $15. A larger folio that includes all of the prints from the smaller collections will available for $30. All folios will include a certificate of authenticity from the gallery. These will be printed in a limited run for the event.

-Exhibition Catalogues- Since the beginning of 2010, the gallery has been designing print-to-order catalogues for every exhibition. A full run of these books will be unveiled, with information about how to order them from our online store (if you’d like to preview some of these books, visit the web address: http://stores.lulu.com/UturnArtSpace). This run of catalogues include essays and poems by Christopher Backs, Keith Banner, Shawnee Barton, Craig Damrauer, Micah Freeman, Hollis Hammonds, Isaac Hand, Justine Ludwig, Matt Morris, Patricia Murphy, Zachary Rawe, Eric Ruschman and Dana Ward.

A little about the cost of running the space:

U·turn is comprised of five members, all working artists with day jobs. The gallery takes no commission off of the sale of artwork in the space, wishing instead to pass all profits back to the artists. So far, we have financed the space with our own incomes.

It costs an estimated $585 a month to operate the gallery. This includes rent and energy as well as costs for producing an exhibition, such as wall paint, lights, reception refreshments, postcards and the cost to ship work back to artists. For a professional art gallery, this is amazingly economical. In the winter, our heating bills are much higher. We hope that this fundraiser will help us offset these expenses and make our spring exhibitions easier to produce.This event coincides with our remarkable current exhibition, Marcia Hafif: Glaze Paintings. The renowned Hafif has designed a spacious installation of 8 small monochrome paintings that activate the entire room.

Steve Rosen reviewed this exhibition recently in CityBeat: http://www.citybeat.com/cincinnati/article-22668-marcia-hafif-finds-sanctuary-at-u-turn.html

For more information about the exhibitions U·turn has presented for over a year and a half, please visit our blog: http://www.uturnartspace.blogspot.com/

We hope you'll join us on Saturday to support U·turn and the exhibition programming we bring to the city!

birdwatching, hafif watching, catalogue crushing

2011-02-11T08:52:00.004-05:00

hi dreamers,

this week in CityBeat I plugged the freshly opened For the Birds, an invitational exhibition at NKU's Galleries. I was speaking with an aspiring young curator last Sunday (and I hope that at least some of my subjective experiences were useful to be retooled into strategies), and considered aloud that there may be (at least) two or three loose catagories on how to approach curating an exhibition. A first and most common is to detect a trend, a train of thought running through a number of artists, and bring them together under that heading. A second is to begin with a line of inquiry, and to use the curating experience to either seek answers or modify the questions. A third is working on a solo exhibition. Now these can be especially interesting, because there are still questions driving the exhibitions, but they come from within the work, the artist's practice.

For the Birds is definitely the first type I described. We made it to the opening at the very end (and I might complain that while the press release promised free parking, we were charged b/c some kind of sports event was taking place). When you draw together all kinds of work on the basis of it all containing birds, there is going to be stronger and weaker work. There's a mixture here. There is one sculpture, and while I wasn't interested in the birdcage shaped as a church or the seed mixture shaped into Saint Francis, the actual proximity to small happy/cranky little live birds (finches?) really held all of the other works in place.

I also want to direct readers to Steve Rosen's really spectacular review of Marcia Hafif's exhibition currently on view at U.turn. Marcia's work has been a sublime, stunning, moving experience to work with. We are so pleased that Rosen shared in some of that profundity. Thank you Steve!

I will note that we are not a non-profit, nor do we think we are (the mention of this in the article will only first aggravate critics who have touched on this distinction. We are a not for profit alternative space. U.turn is not a registered 501(c)(3), nor does it plan on becoming one. We are very happy with how things are running.

My big work of this week has been on finalizing all of U.turn's catalogues. Since the beginning of 2010, the gallery has been designing print-to-order catalogues for every exhibition. A full run of these books will be unveiled, with information about how to order them from our online store . We're gearing up for a fundraiser on February 19th at the space starting at 7 pm.

YES + Marcia + more.

2011-02-03T18:34:00.003-05:00

marcia hafif, egypt, blue valentine, viktor + rolf, bompas + parr, pate de campagne, yoga, keith haring, keith banner, virtual walkthroughs of art museums.

this week, i got to jot out a few notes about the new exhibition of work by Mark Warren Jacques at YES in Over-the-Rhine. The show is up through February 18th, but his drawings and installations are just the start of good reasons to stop by. i'm very impressed by their collections of zines and artist's books, and plan on spending more time with them soon.

in TWO DAYS, Marcia Hafif's exhibition of paintings opens at U·turn. join us?

Creative Gallery, Marcia Hafif + other periphery

2011-01-29T15:21:00.008-05:00

sylvain chomet, maple blondie ice cream, mimi imfurst, david rakoff, michael hunter, givenchy couture, dan savage, noomi rapace, sazerac, mrs. donaghy, yes, foie gras, helena bonham carter, violets....

This week I wrote a small piece about Over-the-Rhine's Creative Gallery, which opened its final exhibition last night during the Final Friday art walk. Read a little bit of my ruminations on this art world transition here.

Meghan and Dan Robson, who ran Creative Gallery for the last 3.5 years

Meanwhile, we have just closed our January 2011 exhibition at U.turn Art Space--a solo project with Joey Versoza--and we're getting prepared for Marcia Hafif's solo exhibition in February, which opens a week from today. More info about both shows here.

My review of Country Club's current exhibition + Seda-Reeder's article about me.

2011-01-15T16:32:00.005-05:00

This week, CityBeat ran my review of Another Mis-en-scene, an exhibition at Country Club curated by local collector Michael Lowe.

Also this week, I was honored to have Maria Seda-Reeder write an article about me for Aeqai, an online journal I wrote for steadily in 2009 and the first part of 2010. Read her notes on my different practices as an artist, writer and curator here.

This weekend, I am getting more heavily involved in mapping out an upcoming cookbook that U.turn Art Space is releasing as a fundraiser effort. We are trying to gather all of the recipes we have used for our opening receptions since the start of the gallery-- that includes Eric's fantastic spiked punches!

I am also bundling up our press release for the February exhibition. More on that soon!

My 2010 round up for CityBeat and a mini review about Aisle

2011-01-03T11:06:00.006-05:00

well, 2010 saw itself out over the weekend. i was on a fire escape in the west end with champagne, Eric, and several good friends. Just before we called that year quits, I wrote about some of my favorite experiences in the galleries in Cincinnati in 2010. It accompanied a review Steve Rosen wrote about the museums in the city. Read it here.

It's a weird thing for me to cover this tier of the art world in Cincinnati. I try to be very conscious of the ethics of how to discuss what I've experienced while avoiding direct commentary on projects I've been involved in. I think in an ideal world, there would be more writers in the city committed to writing about these artists, galleries and shows, and also more space in publications like Citybeat and the Enquirer that could support a larger art conversation. I've written this piece in total humility, and from my own very subjective place in the arts. I was pleased to look back and see how much gruond I covered in a year, and found memorable exhibitions in downtown, OTR, the West End, Northside and Northern Kentucky.

also, a new little mini write up of Aaron Cowan and Chris Vorhees at Aisle Gallery.

I am currently working on a review of the current exhibition at Country Club in Oakley and on a handful of different fundraising efforts for U.turn Art Space.

I hope everyone has a healthy, joy filled 2011.

L,
m.

Goya's Los Caprichos at the Taft Museum

2010-12-15T09:36:00.003-05:00

This week's CityBeat includes my review of the Goya etchings on view at the Taft.

Also, I've recently written a couple of mini reviews in the To Do Pick section:

Bill Ross at the Bonbonerie (up through the end of the year) + Phyllis Weston Gallery's exhibition Inspired by the Art of Caring, that ended last week.

I have received word that my review of Yamini Nayar's recent exhibition at Pearlman Gallery will appear in the March 2011 issue of Art Papers. I have also been working away at my catalogue essay for Nature's Stain, a two person exhibition from early this fall at Aisle Gallery featuring Carmel Buckley and Joel Fisher .

L,
m.

back to tell you a little bit of what i've been doing.

2010-11-24T13:29:00.003-05:00

what?!?!? i'm back on my blog?
sortof, but not really.

i am going to lightly experiment with this being a place that i mostly just update anyone following to things i've have going on or have been up to. for example, by the end of a year, my writing has been published all over, and in 2010, i've written for Citybeat with such frequency that it's easy to miss all that i've share with the world. not to mention a bevy of exhibitions i've either shown in or had my hand in organizing/curating. i may also go back and post links or full texts of articles/essays that have run earlier this year.

i'm going to see if this blog can work as a kind of news room. it may be that i need to explore newer options like twitter or tumblr (that a thing, right?) to make simple, clean updates to my goings on.

but for now, here we are, staring into each other eyes as time passes.

in this week's citybeat, i reviewed the current exhibition at Thunder-Sky, Inc. that features work by Lexington, KY artist Bruce Burris and Cincinnatian Aaron Oliver Wood. click anywhere in this graf and you can go straight to it.

also, i gave a little shout out to Lily Mulberry's stalward annual show that promotes local artists and crafters homemade/handmade/local products as viable (and extra desirable) christmas shopping options. read on here. she won't be getting started at 4 a.m. on Friday like Wal-Mart probably is, but I like that come 9 a.m. on 'black friday,' there Lily will be ready to talk you through some gift ideas, and on hand for some of the loveliest gift wrapping i've ever had on things i give to mom, friends, etc.

other upcoming waiting in the wings:

NEXT FRIDAY I am in the exhibition Chocolat curated by Brian Joiner at Prairie. Reception Friday night starting at 6 pm. My installation involves free desserts, so stop by.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, SATURDAY DECEMBER 4th is the opening for U.turn Art Space's The Mechanics of Joy. Love the artists in this show, and can't wait to share this thoughtful endeavor with you all. Reception 7-10 pm. Located at 2159 Central Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45214

it is cold and sleeting today, and i love it. eric and i walked into work together and will do more walking towards lunch and home.... in about..... now actually.

L,
m.

freakin' weekend 1/22/10 -->

2010-01-19T14:29:00.008-05:00

lots to do!

almost all of the content in this post is taken from various press releases. I would write with more insight if I could, but many of the artists are new to me. These are some of the things i'll be doing (if i don't make it to all the openings that night, i'll be getting to see the shows sometime next week, you can be sure):

FRIDAY / JAN 22 / 2010

Prairie
4035 Hamilton Avenue CIncinnati, Ohio 45223
Peiter Griga's solo show ICANNOTREMEMBERALLTHATIHAVEFORGOTTEN which features the results of Peiter's longstanding exploration of human memory in photographs, cast wax objects, video and performance documentary. The objects displayed in the gallery incorporate elements of Peiter's reinterpretation of the ancient mellification ritual described in histories of ancient Babylon. In this ritual, corpses were embalmed with honey, entombed and later used as medicine for the sick. Those who ingested this "medicine" were not only healed but also took on the memories of the deceased. Peiter Griga's exhibit will run through March 6. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday 10-6 and Saturday 10-4. Prairie follows Peiter Griga's exhibit with solo shows by Phil Spangler in March and Katie Parker in May.

Aisle
424 Findlay Street 3rd Floor
Cincinnati OH 45214
Hours: M-F 1-4 and Sat by appointment, 241-3403
Andy Marko: if EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE
opening reception Friday Jan 22, 2010 5-8pm
runs thru February 26; Gallery Talk Saturday Feb 6, 1-3 pm
“If Everything Is Possible (we’re all f***ed): Experiments in Humor”
by Andy Marko presents conceptual artwork at the intersection of the personal, the political and the humorous. Digital prints, web-based media, objects, installations and live performance create a gallery space that is a.) a thematically unified installation, b.) an exhibit addressing issues of age appropriate behavior, aging, personal relationships, consumerism and goofiness or c.) a really weird place.
Marko scatters objects across the space challenging the conventions of gallery presentation. Still images are presented sequentially (filmically) or as performance objects. Gag items, prank objects such as an enormous whoopee cushion, a novelty check, talking banana peels and phony doggie doo fill the gallery. Thought and word balloons add a comic element to the exhibit, creating new meanings between the text and the image. This exhibition dances on the third rail of contemporary art practice – humor. Individual performances by Marko and Kirk Mayhew and live clowns at the opening. Cotton candy, fruit punch and hot dogs will be provided.

Studio of Mary Barr Rhodes
424 Findlay Street 2nd Floor
Cincinnati OH 45214
5:00 - 10:00 pm
Mary Barr Rhodes will exhibit a series of sketches, mixed media drawings and paintings exploring the spirit and physicality of wateras consciousness.
Amanda Schrier, performance artist, accompanied by the visual effects of Marc Seimer will express a physical interpretations of the imagery on display.
Performance at 9pm

Carl Solway Gallery
424 Findlay Street, 1st Floor
5:00 - 8:00 pm
Carl Solway presents A New Work by Jay Bolotin: LEAVES FROM A CAST PAPER NOVEL, an exhibition of 33 drawings from an illustrated manuscript, the manuscript itself and an edition of cast paper pieces. This new work is the initial source imagery for THE JACKLEG TESTAMENT: PART TWO, a trilogy. This exhibition marks an association of 35 years between Jay Bolotin and Carl Solway Gallery.

Carl Solway Gallery also presents a selection of black & white photographs by Jerry Uelsmann.He is best known throughout the world as the modern master of the photomontage. His dreamlike composite images are created by printing elements from multiple negatives onto single sheets of paper. His laborious method of hand printing in the darkroom using anywhere from three to ten enlargers, predates the layered imagery of digital photography by decades. His dramatic, surrealistic, style of image- making challenged conventional notions of reality as depicted in photography and was once considered iconoclastic. His body of work is now a part of the classic tradition of photography practiced as an art form.

Museum Gallery/Gallery Museum
1218 Sycamore, OTR
6:00pm - 11:00pm
"Huxy: Modes of Masculinity"
Our intention is to initiate constructive discourse on the controversial subject of maleness. This show examines the roles, stigmas, and stereotypes of what it means to be a man in the 21st century. We engage artists, scholars, and the common person in a creative re-description and re-interpretation of patriarchy, feminism, and postmodern gender construction.
Artist List: Andy Au, Nicki Davis, Matthew Dayler, Ricki Dennis, Michael Everett, Jeremy Flick, Richard Eyman, Richard Groot, Sara Mulhauser, John Mosher, Nick Paparone, Kyle Penunuri, Josh Pfeifer, Matthew Shelton, Jeff Smith, Brad Schwass, Kevin Thayer, Ryan Young, Matt Wiseman, Charlie Woodman
In addition to their works, the opening will include live performances by Bill Brown, Doug Couper, Jake Eisenhower, Mark Harris, Nicolas Perkins, Jason Philips, Reid Radcliffe, and Matt Shelton, as well as a real poker game featuring a group of men who have been playing together for more than 20 years. The poker chips they will be using were specially designed by Ryan Young.

COUNTRY CLUB / CINCINNATI
JANUARY 22 – APRIL 10, 2010
RECEPTION: FRIDAY, JANUARY 22, 2010 7–9pm
Shapeshifter
Country Club is pleased to announce the opening of the group exhibition, Shapeshifter. Co-organized with Linda Schwartz, this exhibition features seven artists subtly manipulating concrete and abstract resources. These artists elevate mundane materials or employ traditional or simple processes to create objects that speak to a variety of complex issues. Jimmy Baker, Keith Benjamin, Beth Campbell, Stephen Irwin, Tony Luensman, Letitia Quesenberry, Chris Radtke.
ALSO
Paul Coors: Neon Firs = Biggie's Pot
This exhibition features a selection of editioned works dealing with issues such as protest, consumption and agency. The title of the exhibition rearranges the letters of Coors 2009 exhibition ("Before I Start Singing") with Semantics gallery in Brighton where several of these works originally appeared. All works in the show involve the process of screen printing on paper, distilled into formal and conceptual investigations that challenge traditional approaches to printmaking.

------------------------------------------

SATURDAY / JAN 23 / 2010

Encore Tenthaus performance
U.turn Art Space
2159 Central Avenue
Cincinnati, OH 45214
Performance begins at 8 pm.
In conjunction with the current exhibit, COLONY, U.turn is happy to announce an encore evening by the performance collaborative, Tenthaus. Tenthaus is made up of Abby Cornelius and Wyatt Niehaus. Cornelius is currently a student at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, while Niehaus is studying in the University of Cincinnati’s DAAP program. In their projects, they stage ambient, playful performances that blend music and theatrical shadow play by employing a camping tent as a barrier between the activity and the audience. Working with loop pedals and a mixture of traditional instruments and less clearly defined noises, Tenthaus’ performances are delicate and whispering, like a musical round of ghost stories. Tenthaus has performed around Cincinnati and Columbus, including the Art Damage Lodge in Northside and the historic Arnold’s Bar and Grill in downtown Cincinnati.

The photographic work of Adam Longbonz, as well as the videos and wall collages by Maidens of the Cosmic Body Running will also be on display in the gallery space.

CS13
1219 Sycamore Street, OTR
Super Desserts + Busman's Holiday- concert
ALL AGES
$5 helps touring bands do big thangs
8 PM sharp
At their core - or, more appropriately, their warm, gooey center - Super Desserts are a pop band, just like any other. But besides those pleasing combinations of chords and melodies, there's nothing conventional about this band. Instruments? They've traded drums and amplification for banjo, sitar and bass clarinet. Packaging? Their CDs come in 7-inch vinyl sleeves stuffed with elaborate handmade liner notes. Performance? They're known to play at living rooms, libraries and sidewalks across Columbus. Song titles? One of them is "The Sorcerer's Wife Admits That the Magic Is Gone from Their Marriage and Files for Divorce."

MUSIC: www.myspace.com/superdesserts
VIDEOS: http://vimeo.com/8006007
http://www.ohiosessions.com
and Busman's Holiday (Bloomington, IN)
MUSIC: www.myspace.com/busmansholiday
VIDEO: http://vimeo.com/5120614

Outsiderness' Prolonged Beyond Its Usefulness

2010-01-19T12:41:00.004-05:00

"While culture and society have made it a great deal harder for Kevin to be seen as a significant artist, focusing on his outsiderness only prolongs that narrative beyond its usefulness. Even worse it often simplifies our responses to his art as charity or pity. As a working artist, Kevin has earned the freedom to step away from the old "outsider art" narrative and orthodoxy, and move into a realm where his art can do the talking for him. His art seems to be saying, It's not what you think."

that's from Keith Banner, Thunder-Sky, Inc. co-founder, writing about Kevin White's work that can be seen in Out Of Order, the first exhibit at Thunder-Sky, Inc. not by and/or about Raymond Thunder-Sky. I think that Banner brings up some interesting thoughts about integrating the multiple artistic dialogues at work in our community and in the arts generally. Especially the point about pity, which has left me, well, disturbed in the past as I've heard viewers talk about artists at Visionaries and Voices. Keith Banner offers a clear, simple vision: "Outsiderness" may be prolonged beyond its usefulness.

Out of Order: Paintings & Other Creations by David Jarred & Kevin White opens February 26, 2010, with a reception 6 to 10 pm, at Thunder-Sky, Inc. Also that evening, Milan DelVecchio's animated short film based on "Out of Order" works will be screened, and poetry and short stories written in response to the exhibit will be read by creative writing students from Miami University (Oxford, Ohio). Thunder-Sky, Inc. is located at 4573 Hamilton Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio 45223.

Top ten art experiences of 2009

2010-01-04T14:43:00.014-05:00

Happy 2010!

If you haven’t gotten a chance to read my picks for best shows in (mostly) alternative galleries in Cincinnati from 2009, check it out here.

I hesitated to compose my list of favorite shows in 2009 until I had seen everything, and that was down to the wire, as we traveled to Washington D.C. at the very end of the year, and I had a feeling that one or more of those experiences would make it onto my list. The first five or so were easy, the latter half, more competitive (I might mention the Surrealism and Beyond exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum or PS1’s Between Spaces group exhibition as close runner-ups). But here are the shows settled on for the top 10 best art experiences I had in 2009:

1. Roni Horn a.k.a. Roni Horn, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
The Whitney’s two-floor retrospective survey of Roni Horn’s work was a spacious, poetic arrangement of the artist’s multi-disciplinary (and very pluralist) practice that susses out the semiotics and subtexts of identity. Lest her luminous, post-minimalist sculptures be construed as purely formal and mechanical, they are coupled throughout the exhibition with suites of photographs that are at different turns highly personal (such as the room of self portrait couplets surrounding the twin-sheets of hammered gold on the floor) or else emotively charged. No matter what her medium or execution, Horn excels at delving into and revealing unexpected depth in cast glass, brooding portraits, or black-on-black text embossed into rubber floors.

2. Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection, Hirshhorn Museum + Sculpture Garden. Washington, DC
After preparing myself to engage with this exhibition for over a year, I finally got over to see it at the very end of the year (and the very end of the exhibition). Truitt’s nearly life-size (and in some instances, soaring clear above everyone’s heads) wooden forms are vehicles for the psychology and poetry of her deftly-controlled and chosen colors. The objects are nearly monochrome, with discreet bands of second or third colors interjected into their compositions. Based in Washington, this painterly aspect of her work has traditionally situated her between the Minimalist and Color Field camps of the day. But in her preoccupation of surface treatment, Truitt stepped outside of the desubjectivizing impulse in Minimalism, and also began the work of psychologically felling the columns that she built. A key set of works in exploring Truitt’s significance to this discourse is the four Dryad sculptures from around 1975. Renato Danese, her longtime gallerist, said of Truitt’s sculptures, “They became almost translucent,” which is precisely the point. When Truitt’s early champion Greenburg observed “It was hard to tell, in Truitt’s art, where the pictorial and where the sculptural began and ended,” he was starting to recognize that the sensitivity to introspective rumination that propelled Truitt’s decision making also tweaked the objects so that finally the physical thing acted as a container and a portal to the landscape of memory from whence it came.

3. Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World, Drawing Center, New York, NY
This much-deserved look into Ree Morton’s revealed her as broadly applicable to myriad contemporary approaches to abstraction, humor and a penchant for detaching her languages of symbols and marks from their reference points. The openness and the practicality of her drawings and installations surpass her Post-minimalist contemporaries (such as Eva Hesse) in panache, sly wit and specificity. Throughout the exhibition, it becomes clear that Morton often began a body of work by using a recently studied text—philosophy, botany—as a departure point for works that free float into highly personal abstractions that return to the zest, confidence and joy of the Rococo.

4. Trace, Carmel Buckley at the Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, OH
Carmel Buckley evoked the spirit of place with an installation constructed from sculptural objects, drawings, monotypes and video. In creating this exhibition, Buckley set forth a project for herself as an artist-cum-archeologist by using objects and specific qualities she has discovered in the house and surrounding woods that she moved into with her family when they relocated to Ohio. She honed in on the specific idiosyncrasies of the place, and, rather than trying to recreate the environment inside the Weston’s lower level gallery, she offers a series of fragments that allow a blending between the place to which she refers and the place in which the viewer encounters her work. The psychological tone of these layered, partial spaces was palpable.

5. Gedi Sibony: My Arms Are Tied Behind My Other Arms, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO
Gedi Sibony’s exhibition invited an interlude of profound intimacy between viewer and museum by way of a series of provisional installations, using humble gestures as an access point to familiarizing oneself with the specific qualities of the space. Most profound were the moments in which the artist’s nearly imperceptible sleight and subtlety brought me deeper into the rooms themselves.

6. 18th Century French Drawing everywhere. The Frick Collection, New York, NY; the Morgan Library, New York, NY; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
I have felt repeatedly reassured for my ongoing commitment to the Rococo through a series of exhibitions around the country that have started with Antoine Watteau and built exhibitions of his and other drawings from French masters and students from the 18th Century and some before or since. These are frothy and decadent, sometimes startlingly scratchy and inelegant. Liaisons, parties, sex, cooking, gardens, seashells, goddesses: their reservoir of subject matter precede so much of my own art research. I grew this year because of these exhibitions.

7. Luc Tuymans, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH
Tuyman’s photo-based works offer that the romance of painting is not within the materials of the medium itself, but lies in the fact that a painting is not a photograph. While photography has entered and exited the realm of fact and believability, paintings have remained defiantly fictitious, a quandary of objective (detached) and subjective (invented) sensation. The translation of images from world events, popular culture or the artist’s personal life into manipulated paint displaces the topics at hand, inviting a rare opportunity for the associative and the imaginative to work themselves out in a viewer’s search for meaning.

8. Purchase Not By Moonlight, Anri Sala at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH
Anri Sala’s multimedia exhibition is conceived as a spectacle fully integrated into the sweeping, angular galleries of this particular museum. Projected films, photographs, and sculptures perpetuate a dusky state of partial comprehension as delicately reconfigured fragments, eroded narratives, communication breakdowns, and an all too lifelike blending of opposites consume exhibition spaces that have been painted in gradually darker shades of gray as one proceeds through two floors of work. Throughout the exhibition, means of communication are contrasted, often portraying a poignant disruption between parties. For Sala, the beauty is in the collision, in the rare potential for something new to emerge from an unsuspecting discourse.

9. Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works, 2000-2007, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
One of the first gods in my artistic pantheon graced us with a multi-disciplinary display of sculptures, paintings and photographs that were all connected through nature as a thematic element. Over and over, though, the works’ takes on ‘nature’ felt purely imaginative, prismatic, at least reduced from the huge expanse of the natural world. Flowers became huge, six-foot tall affairs in paint; oceans and bays were flattened by the scribbles with which Twombly responded to them; and the menagerie of his sculptures recalled funeral barges, ornamental trees, and a sense of sparkling rarity, like someone catching a Unicorn.

10. Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL
Having heard a great deal about this exhibition the year before, as it caused a storm of reviews and enthusiastic reactions from friends in New York, I was afraid I would be disappointed with this body of work. The opposite was true. These works don’t translate into descriptions and printed images in magazines well. They are a Wonderland of confused perceptions, a Willy Wonka science-experiment that uses light, color, mist, organic materials and interactivity to push and pull at how we think we see and experience space around us. Beauty (1993), the oldest work at the MCA version of the survey, will be remembered as one of the most spectacular visual experiences I have ever had. The exhibition would be higher on my list if I wasn’t bothered by the theatrical constructions that the museum had to be transformed into so that the effects of Eliasson’s works could be experienced. I found it distracting and distrusted the displacement it forced from real, natural light, day-to-day looking.

drifting in and out

2009-12-14T16:18:00.003-05:00

dear readers,

the latter half of 2009 got much busier than I expected. my infrequency in posting anything of substance confirms this. on top of the many different projects i currently have going on, i've decided to increase my efforts in my lifelong work of journalling for myself.

a wise, older friend said recently to me that one of the hardest things for someone like me to do right now is to "know what's happening in your life while it is happening." it got me thinking about how much better i want to look at my own motives, privately, and to record them. in my circle, i'm known to say passing comments like "i believe coming of age during a recession of this magnitude will make us all all stronger as we get older." it has become important to me to actually record some of that experience better, in the hopes that it will profit wisdom and advice for others as i get older and begin to occupy spaces as a role model (and humbly as i do it, too). If I had not read Anne Truitt's memoirs through this year, I would have certainly been at a loss on how to manage so many different opportunities, bills, expectations. Her notes are invaluable and i believe that if i were to take the time, my own could be helpful, at least in a small way.

so i may continue to be present on this blog less. it doesn't mean that i am not lurking about on the Interweb. Also, i hope readers here will continue watching for texts in my other outlets, like City Beat, Sculpture, Aeqai + Art Papers.

i hope everyone's winter seasons are proceeding beautifully!

you cannot recreate this sequence of events.

2009-11-29T12:16:00.005-05:00

i'm hardly any good for a well formulated entry right now. that is, my stable, refined observations are bound for other places: readings for an upcoming exhibition we need to plan, a lecture in TX, articles for everywhere, catalogue essays (didn't you hear? U.turn is going to produce catalogues now and again. and i think they are going to be beautiful!). but there is such a nice array of bits worth considering, that they may as well be plotted here.

maybe a year ago, my brother lent me his copy of All About Eve. Films are weird creatures; i trust my instincts about when to watch them. When i have trudged forward with heeding my quiet compass, the effects can be disastrous. I woke several days ago and decided that it was the right time to commit to the film. No doubt entire courses can be and have been taught about this eloquent, humorous, sensuous film. Bette Davis is a revelation. The script is unceasingly poetic. The issues- agism, trust, obsession- are timeless and relevant. the two couples that are moored in the center of the story remind me, oddly, of the Ricardos and the Mertzes, in Lucille Ball's madcap I Love Lucy, just at a different level of antics. I was struck by their fluctuating loyalties, how it seemed in the end, all they wanted or needed was each other, but how they each proved willing to act against one another when stressed to a certain point.

i think there are few actresses today who would let themselves occupy a role the way Davis did. Puffy eyes, frizzy hair, pushed to a place that could only parallel her and her contemporaries' careers. i thought she was stunning, as i know that many also do.

and maybe it is the black and white, and my rereading of Jed Perl's Antoine's Alphabet, but I've been spending more time with the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley than i ever have. his debt to Watteau is incalculable, but in particular, he is one of several important contributors to the characterization of the Pierrot character, in whom i take great interest.

particularly, this drawing The Death of Pierrot (which could very well be a title for an exhibition or artwork in my future) is a remarkable illustration. if only you could see a crisper version. the drawings at this point in Beardsley's career began to include dotted lines to create lighter marks. the effect is to make parts of Pierrot, even his clothing draped across the chair, start to seem invisible beside the more solid visitors to his bedside.

I could not do better than to recount a bit of Perl's text here: "I have read about a Romantic-Pierrot, a Lunar-Pierrot, and a Watteau-Pierrot, each of which describes some artistic variation on the original Pierrot, the slapstick Pierrot of the old commedia dell-arte. The hyphenations suggest how difficult it is to describe variations on this comic in the floppy white suit, for the scholars can't seem to help but become jugglers of meanings, much as the artists are. Pierrot becomes a romantic poet, a figure as elusive as a moonbeam, or an eighteenth-century gallant. The literary critic Frederick Karl describes a Dandiacal-Pierrot line that runs through modern literature, which thus connects Pierrot with an attitude of artistic detachment, at once witty and aloof and snobbish and austere, so that Baudelaire turns out to be a sort of Pierrot. Karl, however, draws the line at Proust, whom other people see as very much the Pierrot. I get a kick out of the loopiness of these scholarly arguments. It's superble brrainy conversation. There is a pleasing madness to all the hyphenated meanings, as if the scholars themselves were getting a little drunk on the possibilities of Pierrot."

On the Back of a Hurricane (for Rudolf de Crignis), 2008
Blue monochrome, blue plastic shopping bag mounted on panel
12 x 12 inches

Yesterday i had the pleasure of sitting at semantics gallery for some of the hours we are open on saturday. it was the last day of Touch Faith, a dense group exhibition organized by Jeff Cortland Jones that looks at various practitioners that use abstraction and painting to varying amounts and diverse innovation. Near the very end of the day, our last visitors came in and spent a respectable amount of time with every artwork in the exhibition. A small jewel of a piece by Lori Larusso (a favorite of mine as well) seemed to be the standout for them. But, with eager interest, they asked me which piece I liked most. To be sure, there are many works in the space that i really admire. But a monochrome work by Matthew Deleget on display in the back gallery (see blue piece above) has been strikingly beautiful and humble throughout the month. Yesterday it only improved on my experience of it. The blue is not paint, but actually an everyday material, isolated so that its color and the simple embossed patterning of its plastic surface function aesthetically. i've been finding every opportunity to reinforce a position of the everyday, real, functional world offering immense resources for the research of aesthetics. i hope to get to know Deleget better.

obviously, there is more. if you haven't read Molly Donnermeyer's essay about Lady Gaga's relationship to Hitchcockian imagery and characters, do so soon. Listen to Fame Monster. Watch Jewelry Television. And stop by Brighton next Saturday evening for openings at semantics and U.turn!

the sin of envy

2009-11-09T16:12:00.000-05:00

W Magazine is special among fashion magazines (although most of them have something unique that attracts me to them). There is an annual, tastefully assembled Art Issue, and this year's November issue is dense with art commissioned for the magazine and articles about lots of artists with major exhibitions and projects coming up right now.

If you haven't seen it or haven't seen particularly the article by Julie L. Belcove about Roni Horn, then perhaps you got a chance to read Roberta Smith's New York Times review of Horn's Whitney exhibition (and in many ways, her review of the piece in W). This all coincides with "Roni Horn a.k.a Roni Horn" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a two floor mid-career retrospective that continues through January 24th. I look forward to seeing this exhibition in December and writing about it somewhere after the fact.

Of special interest to Smith, the striking start of the W piece, that was the talk of several conversations at openings here and there this weekend, is a portrait of Horn by her professed pal Juergen Teller. She sits casually on a New York rooftop in ordinary jeans, one foot in a cast, and pouring herself a class of red wine. She sports a black blazer that is open across her bare torso, voluptuous stomach and breasts revealed. Her (? Horn is masterfully androgynous) skin is fair and pale; she is not skinny. And this image has haunted me all weekend.

Teller, well known for his glamorous, washed out photographs used in advertising for Marc Jacobs, is plainly skilled at composing casual, decadent, thin images where nothing is fully saturated and the white and the light of our real environments are represented by the kind of haze he catches within the frame. I love his photographs; when i make photographs, i imitate his work.

But his is not the cause of my envy as much as Roni Horn herself. The simple red wine, the humanity of her cast. She may conform closer to traditional associations with "masculine" aesthetics than i am even capable of. But it is not that she appears mannish here; she is obviously a woman. Rather, she wavers in a sensual, non-specific place that i long for in art and find as a revelation to see so effectively presented upon (or 'from out of) the body of a person itself.

In light of questions raised in another recent Times' article about the blurring of traditional gender representation in student-aged individuals, I think Horn is demonstrative of a better way (i.e. better than the flawed and obviously incomplete strategy of dualities in identity).

in one of my places of employ, we have recently been instructed thus: "If any person is not in the correct restroom (physiology, not clothing determines this), please try to identify the individual and call security immediately." i have been concerned about this, worried about the implications it might suggest about the autonomy of the individual. as very little about our physiology is absolutely consistent with gender except for genitalia, i wonder if there is subtext about extreme tactics to reaffirm biological gender. there is a politics to what might seem like a simple order. i think, were she wearing a shirt like she does in other situations aside from this Teller portrait, Roni Horn would be thought of as a man and may even be pointed out to security were she to enter a women's restroom.
huh.

i've intentionally left the image out of this post. i want you to find it among the pages of W. and then find yourself in thought.

surrealism sparks good conversations; join in!

2009-11-09T09:06:00.004-05:00

A fellow art critic and writer here in Cincinnati contacted me after visiting U.turn's opening for Jessie Bowie's exhibition Don't Be Scared Be Prepared. She began an engaging dialogue about Surrealism, a supposed Neo-Surrealism, and Jessie's exhibition. I wrote her a reply that you can read below. I wanted to continue this conversation in response to Kathy's post on her blog, the Cincinnati Art Snob. Maybe read her post (an adaptation of her e-mail) and then my repsonse?

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dear kathy,

i am so glad that you e-mailed and sought dialogue. i think we would agree that the resulting conversations are among the goals of visual art. in all honesty, i too have actively avoided Surrealism throughout most of my time in the arts. sometime (maybe in future parts of this conversation) i can go into specifics about what repelled me from Surrealism.

Did you see the Surrealism exhibition at the CAM? I thought that was a beautiful (and controversial) show.

In recent years, I have started to break down a somewhat arbitrary category dubbed Surrealism (i.e., not everyone who is remembered as one of the surrealists were (a) a signed member of Breton's group or (b) ever actually making work the way surrealists said on should make work.

I started to find that there were what I think of as "fringe surrealists" that I could actively engage with, even swoon over. Their work continues to be very psychological, not just willy-nilly dripping clocks and all that. Who I am thinking of here would be Joseph Cornell, early Giacometti (he was actually kicked out of the surrealists), Rene Magritte and Jean Arp. While leaning against some of the principals that the surrealists put forth (a connection to the subconscious, the effectiveness of juxtapositions in imagery (collage exploded during surrealism and dada!)), these four (and others) are actually very structured thinkers who paid attention to the organization of information inside their works.

i think i'll bring Jessie Bowie up now specifically, and i might get to what could be said about surrealistic-APPEARING things in contemporary art.

this might be cheating, but i'm going to paste what i wrote about jessie in the press release into this part of the response:

U · turn is proud to present Don’t Be Scared Be Prepared, which features the work of Miami, Florida based artist Jessie Bowie. Bowie received her BFA from Ringling College and has recently participated in a residency in New York City. In her first solo exhibition in the Midwest, Bowie will be presenting a body of work comprised of both pen and ink drawings and site-specific wall paintings. The former are dense with detail and exude an impulsive, paranoid approach to the ideation and creative processes. Painting, in contrast, is a markedly populist activity as Bowie uses it. Her wall paintings call the training of her hand into question, instead celebrating a sloppiness that may be more conventional for hand painted signs than for traditional, high art techniques. Served together, her intricate drawings function as contained hypothetical realities in contrast to the maximalist aesthetics at work in her installations and site-specific wall works.

Bowie draws in absolute liberation. The defined, hatched mark making with which she realizes absurd or nightmarish scenarios are reminiscent of cartoon illustration or film storyboarding. Bowie is like a child who refuses to go into the ocean after seeing Jaws for the first time, and her artmaking reflects that worrisome outlook. Her drawings depict everyday folk located in the midst of critical plot twists and dénouements for narratives that Bowie has constructed only for the duration of the artwork; missing explanations for surrealistic elements in play and uncertain conclusions to these dramas confirm the works as mental flashes in a mind drunk off of pop cultural imagery and concerned about the implications of just about everything.

Jessie Bowie is a jester whose special talent is to look at our world’s past and present without actually looking at it, as if staring at a Gorgon’s reflection in a mirror, so as not to be turned to stone. Rather than confront her stimuli head on, Bowie is an experienced escapist who retreats into realms of astounding intricacy and unexpected, obscure metaphor. To call her work ‘gut wrenching’ is not to over-dramatize the point, but to identify a place of violent extremes that she frequently suggests. Sci-fi monsters, cowboys, and menageries of extinct behemoths, exotic zoo animals and frizzy house pets populate her dreamlike alternative dimensions. Beget by Surrealist Leonora Carrington’s penchant for suspense and ambiguity and Hieronymus Bosch’s fey wit and sense of action, Bowie represents a startlingly contemporary fantasy on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Tales left inchoate frame mysterious problems rather than presenting concrete solutions. When real world events, celebrities and global epidemics do make cameo appearances, they are jarring additions to the scenery. A bounty of associations and appropriations subvert singular readings, and our attempts to formulate such prove daunting. This exhibition is built from flagrant attempts and failures to cope by means both distracted and determined in a world out of control.

It is the start of that third paragraph that I have continued to find MOST true about her and her work as I’ve worked with her throughout the week. Jessie’s work is not Surrealism through and through, in that her purposes are not related to the collision of dreams and the subconscious. She works with contrivances; there is strategy to what she makes happen inside the drawings. I’ll offer this conversation as an example. I LOVE the shrine to Prince. I think it is a fascinating piece, what with the purple rain pattern and Prince depicted as a sphinx. What I brought up with Jessie as she completed it in the space was that I felt this was a sly comment about Michael Jackson rather than Prince. A shrine to Prince at the end of 2009, days after the MJ film was released, is about more than Prince; it deals with a larger strata about the worship of musicians (and musicians come up frequently in Jessie’s work- almost always rock and roll or heavy metal). She agreed that this was the larger goal of that piece.

I encourage you to consider her work as something that is far from random. If one does, especially a thinker, a hunter for meaning within art like yourself, the drawings are rife with patterns that can start to build a logic within Bowie’s terms. For example, I have found strong gender roles in her work. The men are always warriors, hunters, barbarians, Vikings, zombies, etc. The men are always armed and usually on the site of bloodshed. In contrast, every appearance of a woman in the exhibition is paired with a grove of bare branched trees. The women are usually nude and modest like images of Eve, and are usually seen with small woodland animals like foxes (and Bowie’s renderings of foxes are particularly beautiful drawings). Jessie almost always draws the large, safari-type animals running towards the left side of the paper, so that there is really a suggested stampede in whatever space they are presented (and could even be compared to the riots of animals on cave walls that were also composed with strong directionality).

Jessie Bowie’s work is great to psychoanalyze, which is an approach to art interpretation that I am personally very interested in.

One more thing I just want to toss out there for both of us to think about is the medium specificity of Jessie’s work. That she works in these drawings on mostly undefined blank sheets of paper, I think, regards the content as hypotheses and story-telling, almost like the concocted tales told around campfires. I don’t think Jessie is trying to invent entire other worlds of fantasy, rather these pen drawings on paper are annotations that refer back to the real world. They are like daydreams, and to some extent, even resemble the properties of daydreams doodled during a class- the pen, the paper: these ready materials.

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As far as a general neo-surrealism taking place, I would agree insofar as I have seen artists everywhere (maybe even more in New York than in the Midwest) borrowing from Surrealistic uses of juxtaposition. I am a little hesitant to group what I might see as several different practices going on right now into a single movement. One hypothesis that I might offer is that young, visionary artists have been interested in portraying other realities because the past decade’s reality of Bush has been more of a nightmare to them/everyone than the Boschian scenes they depict. I think fantasy goes on the rise whenever reality sucks.

If I was to suggest any follow up texts etc. I might suggest one essay in the Unmonumental catalogue from the New Museum that looks at the relationship between contemporary art and Mel Gibson’s filmography. I also believe that a great deal of young artists were HEAVILY influenced by the tome Vitamin D, which indexed a lot of new practices in drawing. I believe you’ll find a number of precedents to Jessie’s practice there that could help it seem less random and more built into a developing history.

And I also recommend seeing Little Ashes if you haven’t seen it. It is a B film and not the best in production quality, but it looks at the development of Frederico Garcia Lorca’s poetry and Salvador Dali’s Surrealism against the backdrop of fascist Spain. The CAC showed it earlier this year and I left feeling strong connections to some of the explanations of surrealism described in the film.

I hope this is all of SOME HELP! I would love to talk more about it.

Have a great Sunday, Kathy. Thanks so much for stopping by the gallery and for writing.

-Matt.

declarations and values

2009-11-02T10:07:00.005-05:00

a series of declarations drawn out of my own value system as it collides with the art world. different folks in my life will have recently heard versions of these quiet rampages, but it felt important to at least speak them in a space that they could be revisited. like all of life, they are experiments, and despite the force of my convictions, they are not conclusions. i've just come to identify growing senses of... well, outrage about politics that pop up in the arts that i believe hinder the expansion of art as a continually relevant area of research into what we are capable of experiencing and feeling and considering through our perceptions. and so i proceed:

-i disapprove of juried shows that charge artists fees to compete, and i'm not the only one. these exhibitions, if well advertised, represent more a source of revenue for a gallery at the expense of emerging artists, than it does genuinely wholesome opportunities for artists and their work. as a curator- freelance or in one of the galleries i volunteer with- i never want to be at one end of a situation in which privilege or income is a stated component of the jurying process. it doesn't matter if you or i could afford to enter such competitions, there are indisputably artists (probably young ones with fresh ideas) that can't and to filter these demographics out of an exhibition being curated is suspicious and does not align to my hopes and dreams for the art world. if an artist is charged $10 per piece being submitted to a competition, or, say, $30 to submit an exhibition proposal to a gallery, then the proceeds that a well established gallery will take from the project will far exceed the number of artists who benefit through being exhibited. and the number of artists who get nothing but a rejection letter function as fuel for the gallery.

i am not trying to change anyone's mind on this. after i say it is wrong, other striations within the arts will still practice their business in this manner without a guilty conscience. after i call it a scam, some will refute it and in so doing, will further affirm my beliefs. but i want to state somewhere for the record that there are those of us who believe the gallery truly is a place for research in an intersectional field where aesthetics can influence discourses in sociology, politics, poetics, philosophy and many other fields of exploration. i want this to be truly accessible to all. i strive to not limit or control who or what might become part of the conversation, while knowing that my platforms have some limitations and i can only be the source or part of the source of some of the conversation. so the galleries curate things that have been coming into our periphery and can be framed as significant. i, nor my writing, nor the efforts i align with, attempt to be all things for all people (and nor do i expect that from anyone else). but all people should be invited to engage.

-i was speaking with a friend at the carnegie openings on friday. we were swapping recent horror stories about what i consider reprehensible behavior on the part of ego-driven members of the academia. my own internal jury is still out to absolutely say that the art world would be better without myopic purists. sometimes i think their incredible positions can be one way for young emerging thinkers to sharpen themselves against, but mostly, i think they should stop.

i believe drawing classes should only be taught by people who recognize the practice as one of endless discovery in every direction without a single, defined endpoint that students are meant to reach. drawing is not about a linear progression of achievements. a person making a drawing (however the drawing manifests: a figure study, an operetta, a video, a crocheted object, an etching, a manifesto, a tag left around town) is not working against some Ideal to which they should be compared. if there is any way to assign value to drawing as an act or the products that result from it, i believe the value system should be established by the educator being sensitive, accurately intuitive and careful as they come to know the personal projects of each artist they are working with. through observation, different forms of communication, the facilitator can begin to hold each artist to their own standards, their own output.

that is, if it is necessary to assign value to drawing or its resulting products. is it necessary? drawing is like transportation, it gets an artist from one place to another. and sometimes a drive with all the windows down and music turned up is entirely the point. each act of drawing almost always establishes its own logic that it carries inside itself. inconsistencies in that system should be pointed out and discussed, but not demeaned, because the anomaly- as in nature- can often present a lead for a more sustainable branch of evolution.

shame on the teacher that breaks the spirit of a student and/or an artist for any reason.

there is no justification for the abuse of a position of influence and power.

-after i began writing as an art critic, my expectations for what an artist's abilities are/should be have continued to evolve in directions that i would not have expected. through my undergraduate experience, i believe i was encouraged and trained to be a self sufficient unit that could conceive of art projects, find ways to execute them properly, talk about them and discuss them within the parameters of decidedly verbal intelligence, and to present that work in an informed, considered way. this calls for the artist to be a hybrid of artist/critic/curator unto himself, which is what i've resulted as. i am glad i was trained this way. i think that i am most likely to excel when deconstructing multiple practices and interweaving their disciplines to discover or discuss the overlapping information. i am fair at doing all of these things and i like doing them.

but as i've begun to occupy each of those roles in defined, distinguished capacities, i've separated their practices and even seen some of the harm of expecting all artists to function as a hybrid of these roles. to be clear, i am not accusing my alma mater of expecting this from artists, as much as i am admitting that a result of my time there was that i had a concrete expectation for artists to be able to not only come up with great ideas and realize them, i wanted them to be able to if not totally explain them, then to at least articulate a context, and to use an objective eye and mind to make impressive exhibitions of that work.

in 2009 i have been personally bettered through encounters with art and makers who are not concerned with the kinds of verbal intelligence that i spend my weeks with as i write, curate and even frame my own artwork. they are a different kind of artist than what i am and what i hope to become, but they are wonderful. they prove that what i ultimately hope is that beyond my abilities as a writer, there is work that cannot be translated into language. I want to continue seeing more and more art that can't be spoken about because it so resides within the highest potentials of the field of visual art.

don't disrupt these artists from the way they are working. what they are doing is good. so many visual artists say in interviews later in life that they wish they had trusted their own intuition more, so those who do this successfully should be applauded.

different ways in the studios, different spaces for the resulting work.

2009-10-15T08:52:00.004-04:00

i have been thinking throughout the preparations for this exhibition in November that perhaps when i switch gears to start work on my next exhibition (in february), i would track my efforts in writing. generally speaking, i think that it is interesting and can be inspiring to be walked through anyone's creative process. mine is certainly in evolution, and as i continue to create work that is increasingly more distilled, meditative, gentle, it might be helpful to see the actual creative thought and action that contributes to these artworks. as it is, i'm finishing up the work for PAIRS WELL WITH that opens at Aisle on November 7th (MARK YOUR CALENDARS: that night will also feature openings at semantics and U.turn, with a group show of abstract painters curated by the divine Jeff Cortland Jones, and a solo exhibition of the Miami-based Jessie Bowie at the galleries respectively. It will be a great night for art in the west end and brighton).

last night i was reminded that, whatever else it might be, the public television documentary series Art: 21 is amazing in how it fulfills that kind of curiosity that compels viewers/audiences to desire insight into the studio practice of artists. Now in its fifth season, Art:21 has done a stunning job of covering broad terrain in international contemporary art. Last night's episode included the odious Jeff Koons (responsible for some really exciting, beautiful art, but unto himself, i loathe his explanations and syrupy eloquence), the absolutely perfect Mary Heilmann (who said something to this affect in her segment after working on a painting, "I just want to sit here and think about how fabulous that painting is!"), as well as Cao Fei and Florian Maier-Aichen. Heilmann is a goddess and her segment is so chock full of wisdom, speculation and insight that I will no doubt watch it again and again. But who I was struck, nay, practically slain by is the video and internet based art by Cao Fei.

I am not sure I can even deconstruct her right now, rather, i hoped to state what an impression her work made on me and then i hope to continue to think about the work. starting off making artfully vague documentary pieces about hiphop street dancing, factory workers and cos players; she recently discovered Second Life, something i know next to nothing about except for what my pal Daniel has explained to me and the occasional references on The Office. I understand that it is an online community in which people reimagine themselves as CGI avatars. There is commerce and city structures, etc. Cao Fei began in Second Life by making a documentary, that is, her avatar made a documentary in Second Life. Her more recent project was conceiving an entire city, working with a team, and uploading this intricate settlement into the online space. They have a government and a structure, and the elaborateness of the undertaking blows my mind. She was paying attention to city planning and development and has really embraced a theoretical, if not altogether practical, inquiry into societies, cultural histories and a space that resituates and potentially collapses what, in the "real world" are (at least) two very solid trajectories of western and eastern art history. In Cao Fei's Second Life realm, the aesthetic and cultural hegemony is a fusion or even a total blending of these and other influences from "real life."
aack. it was good.

last night, Kathy Stockman, the writer and art historian behind Cincinnati Art Snob, turned me on to a project in Yellow Springs, OH called The Telephone Booth Project. Check out their blog and learn about it while I do. As I understand it from Stockman and a brief overview of their site, this is an ongoing art project in which this booth will be tasked to function as an artistic space, with imaginative takes on exhibitions or performance art. We will all have to stay posted on this. Like Cincinnati's own Symbiotic or the IMA Gallery which I have just recently been exploring. IMA is a performance based project that positions the exhibition space onto, as best as I can tell, the person of the gallery's founder. Small rooms or wearable components create the body as a location. All of these projects are rethinking and expanding the places and circumstances that art can be seen. I don't think that any have a tone that admonishes or criticizes more conventional exhibition practices, but all suggest that art need not exist only in the antiseptic 'white cube' model. Touching on Situationist or Fluxist theory and applying it to present day novelty, I think these different projects are fun and enjoyable, while underlined with a relevant inquiry.

i wanted to bring up one more interesting bit of art world news that i came into contact with this week. and that is the interesting, witty and wise decisions that went into the Obamas' picks for art to be displayed in the White House. Mostly I'll just direct you to Holland Cotter's piece in the New York Times, because I basically agree with him. I love that they chose works by well known ethereals like Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn. I LOVE the pick of works by Alma Thomas, which would, incidentally no doubt hang well near Mary Heilmann. I probably wish more artists were included, but as painters go, Susan Rothenberg (who was one of their picks) is not a quick or easy artist and I think her presence in the white house could represent and inspire scrutiny, challenge, introspection, dedication, and The Hunt (like 'the hunt' mentioned in my blog title). I also agree with Holland Cotter that I would have hoped and expected that under the Obamas we would have seen the inclusion of other formidable formats for contemporary art, such as video or installation. Wouldn't Bill Viola or Jeremy Blake's inclusion in those spaces have been fantastic? While they could have taken more risks, I think they were very informed in their choices. Particularly the Ed Ruscha, which made me roll with laughter in its new context:

fashion weeks mash up.

2009-10-02T16:41:00.004-04:00

so, my pal molly has been more generous with the way she's experienced the fashion weeks in nyc, london, milan, and the start of paris. i have enjoyed following along to see her tastes in these new lines on her blog Sister in Second Hand Sequins. i've been a hoarder, a magpie. and i think this year, my aesthetics were well represented in the lines. i've chosen selections from lines that struck me. above all, so far, Francisco Costa for Calvin Klein has impressed me most. Raf Simons is a designer i trust and appreciate some of the choices he made for Jil Sander, including the defiant blue number that i couldn't stick with anything else. Charles Anastase and Rick Owens are two lines i'm not familiar with before now. both wowed me.

i'm a sucker for architectonic approaches to garments where their planes become very stated and explored. i gravitate towards neutrals in these lines. the other big love of my life are the pillowy, almost bloated rococo throw backs that usually appeal to me most in that dusty pink that any followers of my art will be familiar with. both of these interests could be traced back to and discussed in terms of my art.

i don't know if i like how much i like the new work from nina ricci, but it is running with a new designer at the helm. Peter Copping comes to Nina Ricci from Louis Vuitton where he was Marc Jacobs chief assistant. i trust the young christopher kane to work out his shit as he keeps growing as a designer. we've seen fluorescent spandex, tattered denim, some dominatrix stuff, and now this gingham. he really creates for each season and i have trouble identifying consistent approaches in his designs, but my instincts tell me to keep watching him.

balenciaga, stephen burrows, marc jacobs and some of vivienne westwood's red line all remind me of parts of eric's art.

jil sander design by raf simons.

hello world.

2009-10-02T14:13:00.003-04:00

imagine my surprise when i found out how many of you really are out there reading this.

and more, how spread out you are. i've started tracking my statistics for the blog. here's a list of the countries that i have had readers in:

frankly stunned, i feel more connected to the world and want to thank anyone who gives a little flip about this writing. it is done in true sincerity and i am glad to be part of a larger community in the arts. feel free to chime in more if you so want to.

and welcome.

freakin' weekend- october start

2009-10-02T08:43:00.008-04:00

life is rushing, swishing around. i have been somewhere all the time lately: party nights with Projectmill at FB, a new... club? in downtown; previews of exhibitions; lots of work on U.turn's grand opening. Our efforts culminate into this weekend and below is everything you need to know for a few consecutive eveings of total engagement, absolute artistry.

CAC- Friday, 7 pm
44 E 6th Street
As I wrote in an earlier post, the Contemporary Arts Center is set to open two new exhibitions to the public. Tonight is the night. Marilyn Minter's Chewing Color and C. Spencer Yeh's Standard Definition share the 2nd floor galleries. The big draw for tonight is an artist talk with Minter herself at the Center at 7 pm. More information at their website. And read in an earlier post about my experience with Minter's exhibition.

AEC - Friday

25 W 7th Street in Covington
I know so little about what will be taking place at the Covington Artisan's Enterprise Center tonight. I ran into ex-pat Daniel O'Connor who has recently moved back to Cincinnati, to our up and coming Brighton district of all things, and he mentioned having work in the exhibition opening tonight. Daniel Brown's name was briefly brought up. He is a fellow writer at Aeqai, with an involved piece of thinking about the state of arts and how it meets public in the brand new edition. You can expect that I will be stopping by AEC sometime between 8 and 9.

my dear lindsey whittle is among the designers tonight.

Leapin Lizard - Friday, doors open at 7, show starts at 9
726 Main Street in Covington
Per my to do pick in this week's citybeat: "Leapin Lizard, the phoenix of an art gallery in Covington, possesses a penchant for presenting elaborate events packed with performers, artists and irresistible party spirit. Their latest invention is Fashion It Forward, a runway project event to benefit NKY Pride. At 9 p.m., fashion designer Nathan Hurst and emcee Mirage Love start off the second floor’s show. The show is filled out with designs from Toby Tyler, Lindsey Whittle, Madison Avenue Bridal, with a “his and his” wedding collection from Skeffington's Formal Wear as a bright finish. And still more: drag queens, silent auctions on jewelry and fashion items, Essencha Tea and a dance party until 1 a.m. Doors open at 7 p.m. "

CGQB - Friday

Unforunately, I think my night is too cluttered to get up to Clifton (big loss). But I will miss being among the Queer Bar Gang. Here is what they announced for tonight's GQB event:
"The time is here! The air is crisp. Scarves (and people) are finding their way out of the closet. Cutie queers are snuggling up all across the Queen City.But most importantly, Cincinnati is on the verge of yet another glorious injection of queer-love-dance-fantastic!That's right...Cincinnati Guerrilla Queer Bar is BACK IN SESSION!!!******For the past 7 months, CGQB has been queering up downtown Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. The city will never be the same! Now it's time to start bringing all the splendid shades of queerness to Cincinnati's neighborhoods! University of Cincinnati isn't known as an especially queer friendly institution, so in honor of the beginning of the Fall Quarter, Cincinnati Guerrilla Queer Bar will be venturing to Clifton for a special "Queer Bar is Back In Session" edition!" The bar is Arlin's Bar in Clifton.

U.turn Art Space Saturday, 7-10 pm
2159 Central Avenue

BROUGHT TO YOU BY is finally set to open!

Evan Commander. David Dillon. Tracy Johnson. Katie Labmeier. Elaine Lynch. Annette Monnier. Ellen Nagel. Rebecca Seeman. Suzanne Silver. Lindsey Whittle.

Toasted baguette served with warm Bucheron, fresh figs (pending availability), basil and cucumber spears. Yukon gold potato latkes with creme fraiche and caviar. Smokey cashews. Vodka and chive aspic tartlets with smoked salmon. Roquefort and red pear tea sandwiches. Dates stuffed with pistachio mascarpone. Strawberries drizzled in aged Balsalmic vinegar. Meringues. Rosy apple tarts. Oeufs a la neige.

In other words, it will be totally worth coming by.

semantics - Saturday, 7-10 pm
1107 Harrison Avenue
Paul Coors' exhibition Before I Start Singing is much anticipated by those of us who run the space. Legend for his work on Publico gallery, Coors is a sharp wit with a clean approach to his work that will be represented in this show mostly through editioned screen prints. It should be a super good time.

Synthetica - Saturday 7-11 pm
2157 Central Avenue

This gallery is our neighbor. Just think, if you make it over to Brighton on Saturday night, you can see three new exhibitions with more than 16 artists being exhibited between the three spaces. If there is something I am looking forward to most in the new exhibition in Mason Paul's gallery, it is Stephen Anthony Fulton's encaustic paintings. Fulton is a recent graduate from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and near the end of his time there, he began experimenting heavily with painting in wax. I was disappointed that he exhibited so few of these paintings in his thesis exhibition, opting instead to fill a large area of exhibition space with two projected videos that zoomed in close to melted wax doing its thing across a painting's surface. These were fine, but the paintings are much more interesting. I am proud that Brighton gets to show these off. For many, these will be new works and new visual experiences. Fulton's end products are rather like Northern Lights and other phenomena of plumed color of light caught in darker fields of wax.

Christopher Daniel's sculptures are another treat for the evening. With his ties to the dearly missed Pat Renick, I am glad to see his sculptures in Brighton again (Chris used to help organize exhibitions in the Mockbee building). You can bet that in the waning evening light, I will stand in the doorway of Mason's gallery, look in at Daniel's sculptures and then out at Pat's 30 Module Sphere that marks the entrance to our district.

Mark Gergen is one of the darlings of Synthetica. Exhibited with some frequency, he has developed a product that collages black and white photographs with ornately cut out jigsaw pieces of plex, all bolted together into these sleek, neo-gothic objects. they might get a little repetitive after a certain point, but they are high grade craftsmanship and deliberate.

The exhibition also includes sweetheart Charlotte Conway who has devised a really clever and interesting display method for her jewelry in this exhibition, as well as Richard Eyman, whose work I am not familiar with.

DANCE_MF Dirty Dancing Northside Tavern, around 11 pm
In honor of Swayze, our number one choice for monthly dance-crazy nights of passion is themed around Dirty Dancing. As if there isn't always a hefty dose of that to our night. Come on out. It is a friendly, lively romp in one of the most welcoming bars in town. We'll be toasting the success of the U.turn opening as well!

and ... not that we'll be home ... but SNL with Lady Gaga is on Saturday night as well. will have to find that online pronto after this loopy weekend.

hitching to miranda july's star, and others.

2009-10-02T08:22:00.008-04:00

recently, there have been this and that new inspiration that is leaking into other parts of my thinking. someone will be talking to me and i will drift sideways or offer an obvious error of fact in the conversation. it is probably because i am considering these and other works of art that are opening me wide as i am in preparation for new exhibitions (one at Aisle in November, another at U.turn in February). these are also a kind of relief while i try to save up for travels this fall/winter. Money is tight right now, so i recognized an affinity for the Suze Orman sketch on last night's SNL Weekend Update where she offered elaborate tips to stage your own vacation cruise. These little bits have broadened my scope while i feel a little confined to my current location.

Leslie Scalapino is probably my favorite poet. Of course E. E. Cummings, of course Ann Lauterbach and Gertrude Stein. And influence from Lyn Hejinian or Lynn Tillman's prose comes up with suprising frequency. But Scalapino is at once chillingly incisive with her abstract, often detached relationship to language and parts of speech, while also beaming with a luminous, Eastern sensibility. Simple mantras, Steinian repetition in all the right places. But hers is a poetry that I have also felt vibrated just outside of my verbal/aural intelligence. What do these poems sound like in the mouth of the one who wrote them? I am finally offered a still, solid answer in the form of an audio recording I just discovered that Scalapino made a year or so back.

'Can't' is 'Night' and other poems.
I am listening to this as addictively as saccharine pop music. Her voice is soft and fragile, like a stone in a brook or a shell near an ocean. a couple of times her steps falter in her words. there is a police siren outside the window of wherever this was recorded that comes in and out in one place. the spaces and air in her poems translate as jolts and skims in the way she reads them. but she is always measured; i sense her character in the reading as low and centered. the packaging, including an installation shot of friend of the poet and idol-in-my-youth petah coyne's exhibition White Snow makes for elegant counterpart to the text being offered.

i've had an ongoing relationship with Miranda July's work. years back, when i was a freshman in college (and this was long before Learning to Love You More's fame or her hollywood film), Kaira Simmons and I listened to audio works by her that gave us the heeby jeebies. They were really brill and aggressive, like old radio dramas with her acting out various emo-dada characters that veered towards identity crisis and genital mutilation. she was obviously a force and i kept her in mind.

and then of course Harrell Fletcher and Me and You and Everyone We Know.

i am deeply devoted to these projects and still reserve some skepticism about the process, about the artist behind the scenes. i think my deepest love for July came with her collection of short stories No One Belongs Here More Than You. Are you catching on? She is a banner for the unboxables like me that will never be easily a painter or a writer or a queer or a or a or a or a.
and she seems to get "love and loss and all that stuff" (how i, and no doubt many others, described by art at some point in the past). these short stories are tender and shocking, emotionally raw framed with elegant diction. the narrators are shapeshifters that are obviously different- sometimes an elderly man, sometimes a teenage runaway working in a peepshow- but her mask-play of Miranda July as different roles is a demonstration of a collective subconscious, a shared togetherness that all of her heroes and all of the readers and all of us are involved with.

and then she went to venice and created her newest project Eleven Heavy Things. Interview magazine (one of the greatest publications you can buy off of newsstands these days) did a big thing about this work in their newest issue with January Jones (who plays the neurotic, fey housewife to opposite Donald Draper's lead in Mad Men) on the cover.

these new works could kill me with a look.

these sculptures, displayed in a garden in Venice, play upon tropes we take for granted. boards through which people may be photographed are oftentimes set up with whimsical situations across the front of them and used at fairs and festivals. These objects have always dealt with roleplay, longing, something a little sticky and vicarious.
In July's hands, they are whitewashed and the 'situations' viwers may place themselves are mostly text based confessions or pronouncements. Almost all are humble. All carry the same tenderness, elegance and frank tone of July's short stories.

they also get me started on a train of thought between july's project and works recently on display in Baltimore by Franz West. For me, interactive sculpture starts at West. Not because he is the first or the most sophisticated, but because his works are decidedly psychoanalytical; a viewer can learn about themselves through the choices and manner in which they come into contact with his hand-held plaster and metal objects. In particular, in the exhibition in Baltimore, two couches were set up facing each other. On one wall, text ran "We die a little." I don't know why that didn't slap me with the kind of Relational Aesthetics for which July is known. She's usually credited as the movement's 'it girl.'

These play into my year-long research into public sculpture (that can be reached from my writer's page on Aeqai), how we engage with it, how it functions outside of traditional (or even traditionally contemporary) exhibition spaces. Most notably, I feel that these objects all make a certain kind of allowance for the viewer. Without instructions that I can see from images and descriptions of the exhibition, nor the artist shoving people through constructed spaces or preset rituals (these are some of my own anxieties about interactive art), these pieces infer there interactivity from form itself. Because of some social conditioning most of us possess, visitors seemed to intuitively take the places that the sculptures leave open for occupation.

It is not that these works complete themselves per say when they engage with a person, but it is such a simple, sweet, relational momemt in visual art. The viewer need not worry about accessibility issues in the work, because it is all right there, ready to be accessed. Lovely and I can't wait to implement some of the breakthroughs in its thinking towards my own creative process.

marilyn.

2009-09-30T15:35:00.008-04:00

monday night, in the midst of U.turn's preparations for our first show, i took a break to attend a preview evening at the Contemporary Arts Center. It was oddly not directly intended for the press at large, but rather for bloggers and the twitterazzi in Cincinnati. that i am writing this and that i am on my own blog this very moment seems to justify my inclusion in the evening, but nonetheless, i found myself a little hesitant to identify as a blogger. even when Raphaela Platow cordially spoke to each participant of the evening, asking about our own approach to blogging, i referred to this place as a scratch pad, a space for annotations between larger writing projects, a sounding board.

when i first arrived to the small group in the lobby of the CAC, i was met with the question "And what is the name of your blog?" to which i answered, "my blog?" It isn't that i didn't understand the purpose of the evening, but that the CAC in particular knows me more for my work as an art critic for publications; I usually follow introductions by offering some of the magazines or journals i write for.

there was also the darkly suggestive replacement of a formal press preview for a blogger evening. now i am rarely one to gripe; i am generally just excited by movement, by friction and discourse in a community in which people complain of atrophy. i wonder if it isn't farfetched to perceive this evening as a shift in focus, as if established venues and modes of writing and criticism might be outdated.

awkward compartmentalizations and possible obsolesence aside, we proceeded upstairs to see two new exhibitions that share the second floor. (yes, anri sala will be staying up, but, as readers of Art Papers will have seen, I find the show powerfully engaging and important, so those who haven't given it a proper chance may do so in the coming months).

Marilyn Minter's Chewing Color and C. Spencer Yeh's Standard Definition are two delicious, vidoe heavy exhibitions that might have less focused subject matter in exchange for deeply sensual, up-close and personal looks at our eyes, mouths, throats, feet and so on. These images are really superficial relationships between the two artists that I'm tossing out there, because there is really so much difference between them.

One of the most interesting commonalities is that both Minter and Yeh create work in both the fine art and design/advertising fields.

Perhaps I will get back to Yeh in a different post or in an article or essay elsewhere. As an exhibition, it is much more engaging than some of his live performances that range from being eloquent and rich to feeling a little too chancey and ineffective at times. Music videos, three-channel video/audio installation and an almost symphonic, darkened listening chamber make up a compelling exhibition that well deserves its place in this season (a question i had going into it).

Mostly, I want to ramble about Minter a bit. She's popped up in the pages of recent issues of Vogue and Interview, had work on display in Times Square and video pieces used in performances by Madonna. She was one of three artists chosen for a recent crossover into art by the cosmetic brand M.A.C. Though I haven't seen it, I'm told her paintings appear in hip television programs like Gossip Girl. She's one of the new "it girls" it seems, and, in her sixties, i think that is a lovely notion.

Okay, so she has product placement down. But if we can learn it from anywhere, we can learn it from Mad Men that the advertising and the product are hardly the same thing. Does the work hold up to the hype?

For me, it does. In spades.

Painter and photographer and well represented in both mediums, I was more engrossed by Green Pink Caviar, a video piece projected across practically the entire far wall of the 2nd floor. A model's lipsticked mouth shoves, spits, smooshes all kinds of cake decorations, gelatinous sugar mixtures, and sparkling silver and gold liquids that are sleek and shiny enough to be nail polish or enamel paint. The video is show from beneath a glass surface that the model works with her mouth. Sexual? you betcha, but it is all suggestive, pushed around with the juices and icings on the glass. this piece is irrational beauty, and while i was looking at it, i thought about Amy Sedaris once explaining that her conception of beauty would be something like Isabella Rossellini, whose powerful beauty is augmented by her teeth. I believe Sedaris said something like a truer beauty is one that's a little fucked up. I tend to agree with my Miss Havisham roots.

i was also interested in how decisively she presented the photographs and paintings as obviously different forms of production. In the past, in previous exhibitions i've encountered of Minter's work (such as her inclusion in the 2006 Whitney Biennial), the paintings on aluminum and photographs mounted on aluminum are a little difficult to distinguish at times. Here, the photos are presented with their negative frames and a border of white paper around the image and hung with black bulldog clips. I was taken aback by the presentation because it interrupted the sleek, fashionable sensibility i associate with minter's work. but then, that's the whole, outrageous point isn't it? she isn't the same thing as her fashion world subject matters and counterparts. She is interested in beauty that is furthered by bits of disgust or grotesquerie.

props to Justine Ludwig, the curatorial assistant, who spoke very intelligently about both artists. I was impressed by her breadth of knowledge and her own insights she offered.

and i look foward to Marilyn's talk on Friday night at the museum.

recently written elsewhere

2009-09-29T14:35:00.002-04:00

check out the newest issue of sculpture magazine for my review on Gedi Sibony and his solo exhibition in Saint Louis.

i've been blogging for the new gallery venture in Brighton that I am part of:
http://uturnartspace.blogspot.com/

the new rotation of exhibitions at the weston was the subject of my review in City Beat last week: Sharks, Symbols + Simulacra

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Hopefully gentle readers and followers will make it out to U.turn's grand opening on saturday from 7-10 pm. U.turn is located in brighton at 2159 Central Avenue.

In conjunction with our first exhibition's opening, Patricia Murphy and Molly Donnermeyer have edited and compiled a beautiful first edition of U.turn's zine Brighton Approach. The theme of the first issue is gratitude, and a multiple part poem of mine is included.

i have a new website.

2009-09-05T21:37:00.002-04:00

with a great deal of help from my twin brother Michael J. Morris, i have put up a website for my art and my writing.

It can be found at www.mattmorrisworks.com. I hope you enjoy it.

announcing U · turn Art Space

2009-08-26T11:16:00.002-04:00

from left to right: Zach Rawe, Tricia Murphy,
Molly Donnermeyer, Eric Ruschman + me (Matt Morris)

U · turn Art Space
2159 Central Avenue
Cincinnati, OH 45214
e: u.turn.artspace@gmail.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

U · turn Art Space is the newest addition
to the art district in Brighton, Cincinnati, OH.

U · turn Art Space is a collective-run alternative arts space that was initiated in fall 2009. The U · turn Art Space collective is comprised of five Cincinnati-based artists: Molly Donnermeyer, Matt Morris, Patricia Murphy, Zach Rawe and Eric Ruschman. Each month U · turn delivers fresh, compelling exhibitions of emerging and established artists. The gallery has a special interest in new developments in sculpture and object making, but is excited to represent the contemporary landscape of art as broadly as possible. Our goal is to bring shows into Cincinnati that are relevant; that provide an opportunity for discourse, ideas, and play to be forced together, awkwardly or elegantly, and offer itself to a viewing audience. Along with art exhibitions, U · turn hosts a range of accompanying readings, performances and events that raise probing questions and plural perspectives. U · turn’s efforts are intended for audiences in the surrounding Brighton district, Cincinnati at large and the whole of the Midwest. Opening receptions for exhibitions usually take place on the evening of the first Saturday of every month to coincide with other gallery openings in the area. The gallery will also have regular hours on Saturdays from 12-4 pm. Other viewings are by appointment. Gallery is free and open to the public, with street parking in front of the space and on nearby streets.

It announces its grand opening with its first exhibition Brought To you By, an invitational group exhibition that seeks to thank influential artists who have inspired the gallery’s collective in their creative efforts. Brought To You By features the work of Evan Commander, David Dillon, Tracy Johnson, Katie Labmeier, Elaine Lynch, Annette Monnier, Ellen Nagel, Rebecca Seeman, Suzanne Silver and Lindsey Whittle. The collective of five working artists that runs U · turn wishes to commemorate the beginning of this gallery venture by expressing gratitude and recognition to artists who have had indelible affects on each of their creative practices. As professors, mentors or leaders by example, the artists included have influenced U · turn and inspired collective members to be the artists and gallerists they are today. Individual collective members invited two artists each, resulting in this ten-person exhibition. The title of the exhibition is an Uroboros, a continuous idea that opens back onto itself. While the exhibition is brought to Cincinnati’s public through the efforts of the art space collective, the assertion of the exhibition is that, in many special ways, the exhibiting artists are responsible for inspiring and prompting this gallery into existence. Please come celebrate the opening of Brought To You By and the grand opening of U · turn Art Space on October 3rd!

U · turn is the latest art venture in Brighton, an inner city neighborhood adjacent to the Over-the-Rhine brewery district and the culturally diverse West End. It is neighbored by other arts organizations in the community, including Synthetica Gallery (2157 Central Avenue), semantics gallery (1107 Harrison Avenue) and the Freeman Central Gallery (window space on the corner of Central and Freeman Avenues). U · turn is one of two new efforts in Brighton, with the Brush Factory, a fashion co-op, currently preparing to open several blocks away on Central Avenue. While U · turn functions as a venue for contemporary art, it hopes to demonstrate an interest in the history of its space, a building that dates back to the 1800s. Originally the J. B. Lagemann general store specializing in fine dress goods, mixed paints and feathers; the first floor space has functioned as the Refuge Temple Church, the well-remembered Junior Gallery, and as a personal residence for artists.

For more information, please contact the gallery by e-mail: u.turn.artspace (at) gmail.com

while i haven't been here, i've been

2009-08-25T09:35:00.009-04:00

evidently the second half of my 2009 is not as conducive to keeping an updated blog as the beginning of the year. even now, i'm making a note just to see if you're paying attention.

pretty soon, news will be bursting out all over the place.

things that are already public knowledge:

-three of my poems have been chosen to appear in Issue #10 of the Alice Blue Review.

-THIS WEEKEND is the enormous semantics benefit that features an art auction of more than 100 works, a delectable bake sale, a titillating performance from modern dance movement laboratory Pones Inc., tarot reading, Christian Schmit's famous Draw Box, and much much more. Benefit has a suggested donation gate fee of $10 and runs from 7-11 pm on Saturday night. semantics is at 1107 Harrison Avenue.

-to closely follow the (hopeful) success of semantics' fundraiser event, the gallery collective will be releasing a limited run of Art Boxes that will include small artworks from each artist currently involved in the operation of the gallery. i am excited about my contributions to the boxes and will be sharing more about these hot collectible items soon.

-stay tuned for more information about my upcoming exhibition at Aisle Gallery in the West End of Cincinnati that will open November 6, 2009.

-the third and final installment of my series of texts on public sculpture will be appearing in the September issue of Aeqai.

along with these stirring developments, new things are in the works, like

-a new website

-a new gallery venture

-new exhibitions coming up quickly in 2010

-a conference in TX?

--------------------------------------------------------

so. where were we?

since my last post, i've been to chicago to see the new wing of AIC and the Twombly exhibition that is the first to grace its walls. the latest issue of Art Papers features two of my recent reviews. a couple of months of successful events organized by Guerilla Queer Bar.

this morning started with a span of time looking through Vogue's 2009 September issue.
this morning started out periwinkle.

i'm sorry that i don't have the time or exactly the focus to really dig deep into some ideas on my blog right now. a list will have to suffice. take these items as points in an aggregate composed into a portrait of my late summer:

-Lindsey Whittle back in the states with her fierce fashion sense.
-Its Blitz by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
-Carmel Buckley's exhibition Trace up through the end of this week at the Weston.
-artworks by dennis harrington, adam maloney, and alton frabetti i plan to bid on at the semantics auction.
-The Gossip's Music for Men
-Dana Hamblen's Chicken Lays an Egg- a "fashion gallery" currently in Camp Washington
-Shapiro's Deli in Indianapolis and all the other amazing road food had with Molly and Eric in Indiana and Illinois.
-Iris Book Cafe
-the soon to be Brush Factory- a fashion co-op in Brighton
-a building full of nice new neighbors
-Shearwater- one of the best things out of Texas maybe ever (it's a band).
-the Girl Scout cookie Blizzards at Dairy Queen (thanks to Tammy and Kevin Muente for the heads up about these majestic treats)
-Treasure Aisles (formerly Turtle Creek) flea market. Lousy with costume jewelry.
-Molly Donnermeyer's upcoming solo exhibition at Creative Gallery
-a physical collection of the containers eric and i drink diet coke fountain drinks from
-becoming friends with Benoit Maire on facebook!
-secret preivews of short stories by Christopher Backs
-The Floatation Walls with Jane Carver and Leif Fairfield at CS13, just days before Nathan Hurst's fashion show premiere at CS13.
-little vintage hats with veils
-Sandy Eichert's cocktail parties
-dressing as a haute couture mer-person on a boat on the ohio river.
-planning a year's worth of art shows for two galleries

lemon out,
matt.

freakin' weekend. planning early for the 26th-28th.

2009-06-22T11:43:00.026-04:00

with this upcoming weekend comes all kinds of new exhibitions and opportunities to take in. i am only going to concentrate on shows i believe i can make and not over-extend myself, but i hope my enthusiasm is at least contagious. it is always exciting when Over-the-Rhine comes more clearly to life during the summer months. This final friday seems to have a lot of activity all over downtown and the west end.

Rachel Heberling, titiled "Auto-Graph"

I plan on stopping at Aisle first. Their exhibition Rendered Obsolete will feature printmaking by Rachel Heberling and Katherine Rogers. I must admit that I am not overly familiar with either of these artists going into this weekend. But I trust Bill Renschler and Krista Gregory implicitly, and also do I love smart, contemporary printmaking. Heberling's image reminds me mostly of Sigur Ros music videos: elegant, elegiac, and confrontational. So, despite the fairly bleak title, let's hope that this will be a great start to the weekend.

To be honest, I haven't received word from some of the galleries I frequent on Main Street about their next exhibitions. Although 1305 Gallery's exhibition of Mindy Kober's work was set to end this weekend, I didn't notice new things going up as I was out and about in Over-the-Rhine this weekend. Creative Gallery's dense, salon-style jumble of recent work by art students was deinstalled, so I believe we can expect a new exhibition from that crew.

According to their calendar in the first volume of the new venue CS13's zine, they will be having gallery hours during Final Friday to invite a wider audience to see their inaugural exhibition Greetings from Cincinnati. All of the works are available for $25, with full profit to the gallery. An impressive number of artists and friends to the space donated their creativity to this elegantly displayed exhibition. CS13 is at the corner of 13th and Sycamore.

I haven't taken a lot of opportunities to really sink my teeth into the exhibitions that go on at Park + Vine, probably much to my own detriment. This next one I am so looking forward to, although I know next to nothing about it. Leif Fairfield's show I'm Gonna Miss the Sea conjures the Antony and the Johnsons' song "Another World" for me, and the description of the work as "laser-cut seaweed" is something I really want to see in person.

This is what I have to say about the new show EXPOSED opening at ArtWorks Gallery for the imminent issue of CityBeat:

ArtWorks’ annual Secrets fundraiser is a favorite in the city. Every year, artists contribute more than a thousand small postcard-sized artworks for sale to benefit the arts organization. At the time of the fundraiser, there are no names or labels posted, letting buyers guess at whose work they are drawn to. One of the ways that ArtWorks thanks and highlights those who participate is through a jury process that results in the exhibition EXPOSED. Artists who made the top 100 postcard artworks from Secrets are invited to exhibit new work in the ArtWorks Gallery. As the gallery explains in its press release: “Instead of being restricted to the Secret ArtWorks’ paradigm of a 5” X 7” work, artists were encouraged to show the depth and diversity of their production in this fun and eclectic exhibition.” This Friday’s opening will feature local favorites like Carmel Ellen Buckley, Jennifer Grote, Emily Hanako Momohara, Eric Ruschman, Paige Williams, and many, many others. ArtWorks is located at 811 Race St. in downtown. Reception Friday, 6 - 9 p.m.. Gallery hours: Monday - Friday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. –Matt Morris

And then to the Weston. I have heavily anticipated this last set of exhibitions in the year's exhibition cycle. Mostly for Carmel Buckley's work and Thin Air Studio, who have been taking over the upstairs gallery for the past week, creating a soaring web of wood branches that will pass over and around viewers. They have documentation of the install on their website, which is where I got this image:

I am not familiar with Ardine Nelson's work, but look forward to her photographs of green communities in Dresden, Germany.

From there, the evening kindof forks, with two options open for me.

Close to the Weston is the Contemporary Arts Center, which will host its Contemporary Friday with PROJECTMILL. This is the gang that brings us the very excellent DANCE_MF every month at Northside Tavern.
Students - $5.50
Adults - $7.50
CAC Members - free plus drink specials.

-----or-----or maybe both-----

Jimmy Baker, who was one of my professors at the Art Academy and a considerably well known contemporary artist in the city, just e-mailed me this morning with news of a new musical venture he is part of. Read below:

Hello all,
My new band Landscaping is playing its first show this Friday. It is a great line-up.
Landscaping is comprised of Jimmy Baker, Mike Fisher, and Hayes Shanesy. We are working with a mixture of open-ended rock improvisations with electronics and some more structured stoner rock part thrown in.
Think - Wishbone Ash, Electric Wizard, Comets on Fire, Candlemass.

FRIDAY, JUNE 26th:

JON MUELLER (from Milwaukee) hyper-focused tectonic weight percussion(releases on Table of the Elements, Crouton, more)http://www.jonmueller.nethttp://www.rhythmplex.comhttp://www.myspace.com/resonatingfaceMIKE
SHIFLET (from Columbus) minute tone examination http://www.myspace.com/mshifle
TEETH COLLECTION (from Dayton) primitive gravel pit http://www.myspace.com/teethcollection
LANDSCAPIN Gex-Mount Storm / members of Dungeon Thud, Hearts of Darknesses- --- heavy free rock
9pm / $5 / all ages
Art Damage Lodge 4120 Hamilton Ave. 3rd floor Cincinnati, OH 45223
for more details consult- http://www.myspace.com/artdamagelodge

Which is not to mention other exhibitions already up.
BookWorks 10 and the complementary exhibition The Keith Kuhn Memorial Artists' Book Exhibit: More Than Words: The Book as Art has some fantastic works if one is willing to wade through it. Many of the pieces are fairly typical works in this kind of exhibition, with emphasis on handbound elements and dramatic shifts in typography/calligraphy. A few pieces have stuck with me. If I have a chance, I'll get back over to the show and snap a couple of shots and discuss them. These shows are in the Atrium and Cincinnati Room of the Main Public Library downtown. Both are up until September, so you have time to see them.

Sunday the 28th presents a similar conflict. Two music shows that I would like to see, occuring simultaneously, one in Northside- Art Damage- and the other in Newport- Southgate House.

Jane Carver is just great. She is an artist and musician, often finding opportunities to blend the two into some measure of performance art. If one can assume that she has been thoughtfully paired with Julie Doiron, then this should be a sophisticated, stunning performance. $5, starts at 9 pm.

The other performance will be the first of a good friend's relatively new band Rococo Revival Parlor. It should be said though that Nick Hill and his band mates ( Nick Hill: Vocals, Guitar / Brandon Lomax: Bass, Vocals / Ben Sims: Drums ) were all part of the two year run for the band The Love Dealers, so they have come to know one another's approach to their playing and performing. Their show will be at the Southgate House in Newport.
They go on at 9:15 so I am told. Consult the venue about a cover. If I find out about one, I'll try and add an edit letting you all know.

There will certainly be even more than these things. But this is one of those refreshing signs that things are happening in our city.

maiza.

2009-06-11T16:06:00.001-04:00

If you were out and about this weekend, you may have heard rumors that Maiza Hixson has put in her resignation at the Contemporary Arts Center. Those would be true. Hixson was Associate Curator. Last year, she was the curator for the exhibition American Idyll: Contemporary Art and Karaoke, putting together a set of artists that looked at karaoke and similar real life or amateur approaches to community and singing. It was complex, reflecting her ability to load exhibition projects with strong talent and layered conceptual inquiries. The CAC has a knack for promoting and incubating talent throughout its institution. Many people who work there for a time go on to other great opportunities.

Since I moved to Cincinnati, I have seen how the arts are in constant state of redefinition. That means there is opportunity for growth and really progressive moves. With ever crop of alternative spaces that come up in Over-the-Rhine, we get new aesthetics, new sets of artists, and different raw experiments with how we can engage with art. Similarly, in the work of curators past and present at the CAC, there is quite a parade of different, equally valid views on contemporary art. Folks like Matt Distel and Sue Spaid and Maiza Hixson have each informed the burgeoning aesthetic reputation and self-awareness Cincinnati’s art world possesses. In the meantime, the CAC has a team of creative talent that is continuing to offer an array of smart, accessible experiences to our region. Director + Chief Curator Raphaela Platow and Curatorial Assistant Justine Ludwig have both proven their dedication to a broad set of exhibitions—from paintings by Maria Lassnig and Donald Sultan, to very complex installations, such as the films and photographs by Anri Sala currently on view. Also, extra events like the “44” variety shows that happen monthly on Saturday afternoons, Family Sundays, and film series (such as the one put together by Scott Boberg, formerly curator of education, in conjunction with Carlos Amorales’ exhibition, and the summer film series Kenneth Wright has organized in conjunction with Anri Sala’s exhibition) offer all kinds of enrichments and access points to the contemporary art being exhibited.

Don’t ever let someone tell you that Cincinnati’s art scene never changes. There are always things going on, always developments, reconfigurations, and new perspectives.

It Might Be Okay + Beuys' blurring of the lines.

2009-06-07T13:19:00.006-04:00

May was hectic. Nonstop business as I and the rest of the Cincinnati art scene volleyed ourselves around the CAC's gala, the exhibition I had curated at semantics gallery, performances as Permafringe in OTR, and the tail end of senior thesis exhibitions in Cincinnati's various studio art degree programs.

June, too, has started off dense. We have been incredibly fortunate with a great collection of performances for the Cincinnati Fringe Festival (and an artist or two that I took a strong shining too in the Visual Fringe component... i couldn't tell you why, but Citybeat does not have the mini review of Isabelle Schiltz's video art on the website. It ran in last week's issue). I didn't get to see nearly as many performances as I would have liked to. The official word from the Fringe festival was that press passes were only available for members of the press who were writing reviews (presumably then, reviews that were already lined up prior to seeing the performances). But I splurged a little on a couple of very worthwhile performances, most especially yesterday's It Might Be Okay, performed at the legendary Gabriel's Corner by a group called Project Gobi. Originally conceived as a form of cultural exchange with visiting international students, this project was uncannily sensitive and, I thought, integrated many forms of creative expression into a mixed media set of monologues.

(image circulated with advertising for the performance by Project Gobi)

This project was directed and organized by one Julianna Bloodgood, a gem in our arts scene who teaches at CCM at University of Cincinnati and has been active in many forms of grassroots and avant garde theatre (see also New Stage Collective and Concert Nova).

As Bloodgood explained at the end of the performance, this project was created through, as I understood it, deeply personal workshops where the actors used autobiography and shared cultural experiences to build answers to questions about our culture's identity, a holistic one, if indeed such a thing can be established. The result was a beautiful set of stories, a cappella covers of songs like Joni Mitchell's "Circle Game" and Don McLean's "American Pie." Rap, break dancing, IKEA shopping bags, and spoken prayers from a number of languages and religions made up a collage that brought to mind other rich tapestries of human experience like the 1995 film How to Make an American Quilt. Topics like politics, environmentalism, youth, romance, religion, and mortality were observed from a number of perspectives and different American backgrounds that were fluildy presented.

One of the most striking, moving moments in the performance is what essentially becomes an execution. One of the young men in the performance recites Saul Williams' "Bloodletting:"

So that we too bear witness to the short lived fate of a civilization that
worships a male god /
Your weapons are phallic, all of them....

Perhaps it is the swishy prophecy tone of Williams' work that really connects my experience with It Might Be Okay with some recent reading. I have been revisiting a reference book at the downtown Cincinnati library: Occultism in Avant-Garde Art: The Case of Joseph Beuys, by John F. Moffitt.

To talk about Beuys as "performance art" might compartmentalize an approach to art and life that was meant to dissolve any recognizable divisions such as these. Related to Fluxus and sometimes in the same spirit of Gilbert and George (in other words, the performance piece that never ends; all of life is a stage), Beuys creative acts were so grounded in real life, using formats like the lecture or the book or the commercial object to create enigmatically poetic products that approach a mystic fusion between art and life. I think, for Beuys, there is no difference between the two, but the space that he attends to- so often occupied with the crude gesture, the ritualistic act, and a deeply personal symbology (read: connections with my experience of It Might Be Okay)- seems poignantly otherworldly. Like Agnes Martin or Fra Angelico or Mark Rothko, there is an immediately pseudo-religious experience for many artists and art viewers that relate to Beuys' work.

I usually don't distinguish between art and life. It would be deceptive to not point out how slippery the mental space is between creativity and perception, between my life activities and my art with intent. Sometimes, it feels important to demark a conceptual space around a visual art object or experience, but I'm not sure I can totally quantify when and why that impulse arises.

Recently, provisional art.

2009-06-05T12:36:00.015-04:00

None of these artists have apparent ties to the visual culture I live inside of in grand Cincinnati. They've come up through reading, perusing magazines, etc. I just don't want to lose their names and their lovely work and thought I'd share these recent finds here.

Bettina Buck.

Matthew Smith.

Cecilia Edefalk.

Benoit Maire.

are there common attractors in this collection of artists? Raphael Rubenstein's article in Art in America began to offer further terminology for an approach to objects that seems very contemporary. Supported by rich histories, but nonetheless a really palpable response to the age and world in which we live. We are fortunate to have said article available online. Read it here.

Rubenstein proffers the concept of "Provisional Painting" to describe the raw, off-the-cuff, direct, awkward, seemingly unfinished, approach to making paintings that has been practiced by Joan Miro, Christopher Wool and Mary Heilmann, as well as new names (to me) like Albert Oehlen and Richard Aldrich.

Richard Aldrich
Untitled (Wouldn't You Miss Me?)
2006, collage on linen

This builds on some discussions that, for me, began with the Hirshhorn's exhibition "The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas," and the accompanying catalogues. The seminal exhibition thus far (in the U.S.) has been "Unmonumental" in the New Museum. For me, the youthful godheads of this approach to working are Gedi Sibony and Mathilde du Sordet (*thanks to zach rawe and nick hill for bringing du Sordet to my attention).

I liked how Tracy Johnson, an artist and friend of mine (former professor) commented that when she read Rubenstein's piece, there was a kind of aha, "oh. that's what they call it." I appreciate that there is a discussion that isolates what is happening right now among these artists from their heritage (obvious references to Arte Povera, Scatter Art, readymades, postminimalism, etc.). I find the subtle gesture that blithely resituates real vernacular objects and materials dreadfully appealing.

freakin' weekend- 1st weekend of june.

2009-06-05T11:51:00.007-04:00

tonight is your last chance to see The True Body Project's "Body Language II: Phys Ed" at the YWCA. the weekend rounds up the Fringe Festival in general.

Prairie Gallery opens the new exhibition "Camera Obscura" this evening. Prairie Gallery is located at 4035 Hamilton Avenue in Northside. Reception from 5-9 TONIGHT. In this exhibition, several artists make use of a room-sized camera obscura device to create various contemporary art solutions. Everything leading up to this exhibition has been intriguing and enigmatic. I can't wait to see it.

But the better part of tonight can and should be spent at the Cadillac Ranch in downtown.
yes.
the Cadillac Ranch in downtown. The one with the pit fires, the mechnical bull, and the powder blue caddy punctuating the Julian Stanzak op art facade along 6th Street.
that one.
Tonight the atmosphere will be altered by a rush of queer identifying socialites. Here's what Cincinnati Guerrilla Queer Bar organizers have to say:

Get your cowboi/gurl boots out! Find your tight jeans and checkered shirts!
Put on your ass-less chaps! Because the bar soon to be transformed into
QUEER-DANCE-LOVE-FANTASTIC issssss.....(drum roll please)
CADILLAC
RANCH!!!!
38 Fountain Square Plaza-- across from the CAC

*****Yes,
that's right folks. Our most ambitious bar yet. Call all your
friends. Make
plans to go together (safety in numbers). Cancel all conflicts.
Show
Cadillac Ranch the beauty that IS the Cincinnati Queer Community.

*****What to expect:
1. Tons of cute queers dancing and having
fun.
2. A MECHANICAL BULL. (For serious).
3. NO COVER. When you get
there,
look for GQB people on the patio (you can spot them by their purple
bandannas).
They'll either give you a bracelet and let you in for free, or
you can go to the
regular door and say you're with Guerrilla Queer Bar and
they'll give you a
bracelet and let you in for free.
4. Super cheap
drinks. ONE DOLLAR drafts
on the patio and a THREE BUCK vodka and sprite
drink all night.
5. Good
music. Cadillac Ranch is bringing in DJ SPRYTE
from LA for the night.
6. Did
I mention tons of cute, nice, and
interesting queers?

*****Remember! This
GQB is "queer country
western" themed. Dress to impress. We'll be convening on
the patio and then
making our way to the dance floor as the night wears on.
Cadillac Ranch is
expecting a busy night, so get there early so we have a
presence from the
beginning! See you on the dance floor.
♥ CGQBps.

Cadillac Ranch
serves food until 9pm, so if you want to come early and
stick around, I'm
sure they wouldn't mind. :)

I wouldn't expect to see me very costumed. But I'll be enjoying myself.
And again tomorrow.

TOMORROW,
Things I know are going on:

At Gabriel's Corner, 2 pm, the last performance of "It Might Be Okay" for the Cincinnati Fringe Festival. Fringe shows cost $12.

At 4 pm, get yourself over to the Contemporary Arts Center to hear the newest 44 event that will feature performances by Alex Bayer and the 6/6 Ensemble + Mark Bayer and Karen Wissel. As usual, 44 is a free event (yay for inspiring outings and entertainment at no cost during a recession!)

TOMORROW NIGHT:

semantics newest exhibition opens with a reception from 7-10 pm. the gallery, as you should know, is in Brighton at 1107 Harrison Avenue. If you miss the opening, don't sweat it, we have gallery hours from 12-4 every saturday.

This group exhibition, organized by Matt Lynch (of Simparch fame), is entitled "Sticky When Wet," and, according to their press release, "deals with sexuality and issues seen as controversial, taboo and grotesque." Quite a roster too: Eric Schickel, Linda Einfalt, Simparch, Amanda Aton, Regan Brown, Katie Parker, Matt Wiseman, Anthony Wolking, Kyle Penunuri, Sarah Blyth-Stephens, Elizabeth Stimson, Leslie Spears, Nicole Desender, Erin Smith, Mike Davis.

Just down the street is the kickoff exhibition for the new season at Synthetica Gallery. Entitled
"Passage & Stay," features four artists and a musical accompaniment by DJ Lady Blood, which sounds fancy and a little scary. Opening Reception (7-11 pm) open to the public. All other viewings by appointment. www.syngallery.org 2157 Central Avenue Cincinnati Ohio 45214
gallery phone: 513.602.2574

On our way to DANCE_MF at Northside Tavern, I'm hoping to swing by Symbiotic Gallery's newest project. Symbiotic has brought Cincinnati a number of really interesting alternative solutions to a single gallery site, including outdoor installations and performances in parking spaces in Over-the-Rhine or the recent gallery inside a U-Haul parked on Main Street during a final friday. "Modest Utopia," with the subtitle "art and music poised for perfection in the wake of certain distruction" (boy are there a lot of loaded words in that) will be presented at 2541 Cook Street, zip code 45214 (so it has to be close to brighton, right?). Starting at 6 pm for free and then $5 at the door from 8:30 pm onward, an evening of art installations and music. Sounds like a rad time.

Finally, for me one of the most anticipated parts of the first weekend of the month is DANCE_MF put on at Northside Tavern by Projectmill. This monthly dance party transcends anything like it that I've been to in Cincinnati. Gimme more of that big city feeling, please!
They've themed tomorrow night around disguises, but for one fabulous woman's birthday, I will be among a set of people donning jumpsuits for at least part of the night. Like usual, I look forward to shutting that floor down.

so.
see you there(s).

Profundity in Public Art

2009-06-02T12:21:00.002-04:00

The first of a series of pieces about public sculpture has just gone live on Aeqai:

http://www.aeqai.com/articles/062009.htm

This project has been several months in the work and will continue for several issues of the online journal. Enjoy!

Reading Rainbow

2009-05-27T14:03:00.001-04:00

and you know where it is, right?
1107 harrison avenue, in the humble hamlet of brighton.

stop by and bring friends if they haven't see the show.

is nature in it?

2009-05-22T11:56:00.006-04:00

this week, a review/response to the exhibition i have curated at semantics ran in City Beat. The insightful and sensitive Selena Reder spent time in the exhibition and also interviewing several of the artists by e-mail. i'm pleased with her perspectives on the work:

http://www.citybeat.com/cincinnati/article-17886-playing-with-abstraction.html

enjoy!

the problems, the visual ecstasies that present themselves for decoding or plain, direct appreciation are emerging lately from my daily walking and experiences of the city's transformations that reflect the changing seasons. I am seeing stunning exhibitions as well as some disappointments, but between these events are the peripheral perceptual fields that run along Central Parkway or into Over-the-Rhine and Washington Park, or throughout the West End. Here is a snippet of others' appreciation of these phenomena:

Did exhibitions like Peter Voshefski at Aisle Gallery or the run of abstracted nature interpretations at Carl Solway Gallery over the past six months or so prime me to see these floating seedlings, emerging moths, winding wisteria as artful experiences? I will be writing at greater length about Judy Pfaff's new exhibition at Solway for City Beat later in the summer, but I will say that apart from the sheer excitement with which I replied to her excess, I was deeply affected by the art's ability to "discuss" nature while fully maintaining the anxieties (claustrophobias?) (horror vacui?) of a city dweller, one who sees nature in postcards and ideas, one who can appreciate nature as a conceptual product more than a boundless expanse outside of urban centers. I credit Robert Irwin and the discussion with Lawrence Weschler about his contribution to a Venice Biennale (a demarked square of grass on the lawn in front of the American Pavilion) to have blurred/erased the lines that have claimed to protect visual art appreciation from the rest of our perceptual experiences. The fluffy seeds are like Voshefski's paintings on blocks- pollen and pods and organic plumes are really out there. Before Pfaff's exhibition, we were presented with fairly recent paintings by Joan Snyder, and an artist's talk that I discussed in this entry. The paintings themselves contained plant matter not dissimilar from what rises up off the sidewalks before me, glazing my view of the city in front of me with bespeckled whites and tans.

-so look around you.
-by all means, get pumped in anticipation of the new CAC exhibitions opening.
-get yourself to the West End and see the new exhibitions at Solway and Aisle.
-officially, this is the last day for "No Gallery Left Behind," an interesting enough show at Reed Gallery in DAAP that is chock full with enough clever solutions to how to make art in budget-crisis times to offer something appealing to just about everyone.
-you need to be listening to the newest Animal Collective CD. Probably their best yet?
-TONIGHT Eat Sugar is having a CD release party at Northside Tavern. I'd love to meet up with you there. Circa midnight.
-If you haven't had a chance yet to stop by the humble hamlet of Brighton to see She Keeps It In Play / They Don't Know What To Call It at semantics gallery, you are welcome to stop in tomorrow. I will be manning the gallery hours from 12-4 tomorrow afternoon.

be well.

"i am afraid for you and me."

2009-05-16T13:40:00.010-04:00

*note* i am trying to decide aesthetically how i want to approach italics and quotation marks as they are used for titles of exhibitions and artworks. bear with my inconsistency. please! * * *

yesterday afternoon, i enjoyed a medley of activities on a visit to the Contemporary Arts Center. To talk about what a positive experience it was, I need to start by addressing a passage in Adam Sievering's cover story of this week's City Beat that profiled the new arts venue from Bunk News, in the West End:

why is it that I feel out of place almost every time I visit an art gallery or check out a show downtown? Why do I feel like I’m being melted by condescending eyes for pounding a can of Busch Light instead sipping a glass of Rialto Red? Or why is it that I always feel underdressed even if I’m wearing the classiest thing I own? Because Greater Cincinnati’s art scene is pretentious in the eyes of the everyman, meaning someone who’s never experienced the toils of art school.

I feel badly for Sievering, because the atmosphere he describes is not a true reflection of the community that we have going for us. Now, I am speaking from a bias, having experienced art school (and perhaps there were "toils" there). So I am not Joe the Plumber for sure and I may not be qualified to assess the quandaries of the "everyman" as they experience the art scene I am actively involved in.

But my afternoon at the CAC yesterday offered a number of character profiles and different access points to visual culture that would hopefully alleviate some of the insecurities that Sievering wrote about. I was there on several orders of business: 1) to preview the auction that will act as a fundraising component in tonight's Gala, 2) to meet with Jaime Thompson, the intermin Curator of Education, about Christian Schmit's current installation in the 6th Floor UnMuseum, and 3) to screen Intervista, a film by Anri Sala that will not be included in the upcoming exhibition, but offers some interesting points of access into the artist's ideas and approaches to film, video, and commentary on political rupture and social change. My whole day had been coordinated by the indispensable Molly O'Toole, Director of Communication and Community Engagement. For my part, since O'Toole has been brought on to the staff at the CAC, I have had faster replies, greater access to enriching information, and more opportunities to get just a little deeper into the happenings at this renowned institution. Throughout the afternoon, my gratitude was always met by O'Toole's enthusiasm to make what they do at the CAC as accessible as possible to, well, the "everyman" that Sievering feels is condescended to and excluded by pretense.

The Schmit installation and Sala film are part of writing assignments coming up, so be looking for them in City Beat and Art Papers respectively. Below I will be making notes on the exceptional, broad range of works in this weekend's auction. But before I do, a few more words on the warm, welcoming experience I had engaging with every part of the CAC staff.

Some of these people I know personally, some know who I am, and some (like Curator Thompson) I had never met. But from the desk staff in the lobby, to the install crew preparing and hanging the works to be auctioned, to the curatorial and administrative staff, and the security in the building -- - everyone was chatty and pleasant despite the huge event they were in the midst of preparing for. Were I to be heading up an institution with a giant gala 24 hours away, I doubt I would have been as collected, excited, and engaging as Raphaela Platow, Director and Chief Curator, was when I went to screen Intervista. Kenneth Wright, the Center's Membership Relations Manager, had a packet of all the artists' information waiting for me hot off the printer, so that I had back story and bio about all of the artists and work included in the Auction. Without a doubt, no major projects go off without snags and crises, but my glimpse into the everyday working of the CAC yesterday showed nothing but intent, passionate people all working for the good of Art and an institution dedicated to bringing the fresh, challenging, and profound examples of contemporary art to our community. I've nothing but praises.

The auction committee was comprised of curators Raphaela Platow, Maiza Hixson, and Antwan Jones, along with former CAC curator Matt Distel, now of the West End (and Los Angeles) gallery Country Club, and his gallery's neighbor, Carl Solway. They were joined by Registar Carrissa Barnard and Andy Stillpass. The layout and eclecticism of the work reminded me of the CAC's 2007 exhibition Cincinnati Collects. In a moment of brevity, I thought that this auction was like Cincinnati [oughta] Collects. I might say that, reviewing my favorite works in the auction, it is a pleasing revelation to see that several of them are included in this or next year's exhibition schedule. Perhaps because of their current relationship to the Center, they contributed finer examples of their work? Whatever the reason, they are additional teasers for their exhibitions.

These are a few of the particular highlights that I got to see during the installation of the auction:

Aya Uekawa will be having a solo exhibition at the Center, opening at the end of May. I've been catching snippets of the kinds of psychological portraits we can expect, though word was yesterday that she is continuing to produce newer and newer works that may be included. And if you enjoyed the collectible t-shirt that Carlos Amorales designed for the CAC, expect an equally exquisite design from Uekawa. But nothing has gotten me more excited about her exhibition as Untitled (Preydator), a framed 2009 pencil drawing on paper included in the auction. A delicately rendered face sits near the center of a web of marks, some filled in to create a small cascade of dark shapes flowing from beneath the portrait. Her eyes are glazed or misted over, lost in thought, day dreaming, plotting? Arachne-like, this small work is full of beauty and tinged with menace, or at least mystique. Starting bid $1200.

The other artist set to open an exhibition on May 30th is Anri Sala. His piece, Untitled Yet, from 2005 is a C-Print mounted on dibond, and valued at $20,300. In the same stark but aesthetic sensibility as his documentary films, Sala's giant print offers a rough setting that seems industrial but worn down. (after seeing Intervista and discussing another of his projects in Albania with Platow, I wonder if this might be Tirana, or otherwise perhaps Berlin, where Sala lives and works). But that is the nature of the image- a displaced site, anonymous, unmarked, undistinguished, but atmospheric, soulful nonetheless.

It is well paired with a very small photograph entitled "Path to Glory" by Kate Gilmore. Now, Gilmore generally leaves me less than comfortable. Take for example her 2004 video piece "My Love Is An Anchor" where the artist's foot has been cemented into a 5-gallon bucket that she hammers away at, risking injury. I find Gilmore's work to be a new, relational-aesthetics evolution of the kinds of body politic, performance, protests of artists from the 1970s like the work of Chris Burden. But in this 2006 photograph, the scene is unpopulated (as best as I could tell on my visit), instead, it features a pyre of furniture, stacked high like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. More like moving day than the kind of implied surrealism in the elaborately staged, hi-res photographs of Gregory Crewdson. In contrast, Gilmore's image shimmers with the kind of visual static that comes from more widely used photography, in other words, the 21st century Impressionism.

Speaking.

of.

shimmer.

Pat Steir (also slated for a CAC exhibition in the 09-10 exhibition season) contributed three screenprints with glitter. Large, voluptuous, maybe even rapturous for those of us who appreciate draggy, excessive, crude embellishment; Steir's various "Waterfall With Sparkles" pieces take some of the splattering cascades found in her paintings and builds them further with layers of flakey glitter.

Just nearby is one of the knockout works in the exhibition. Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog (blue) is a 2002 work, cast porcelain with a reflective finish. By now, the balloon dog is certainly iconic of Koons' work. I for one have trouble recalling what I thought about balloon animals before Koons. This little poodle type dog is just the sort of eye candy that will hopefully go quickly to profit the CAC. But beyond its marketability, you may ask, 'what's so good about a Jeff Koons sculpture???' I think a lot of the ideas that I find engaging in Koons came from two brushes with Rococo. The first was his giant, elaborate gilded mirror included as the most recent work in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's exhibition Rococo: The Continuing Curve. The second, more insanely integrated dialogue between pre-revolutionary French art and Koons oeuvre was his solo exhibition at Chateau de Versailles that was staged not long after I visited Versailles for the first time. Considered in these terms, his place in discourse snaps into focus: the Sun King, Rococo, the way high end luxury gets cycled down through mass production and then, by way of wacky couture designers like John Galliano and humorous creative types in fields like film, art, fashion, and design, 'low-brow' gets elevated so that new fashion lines quote last year's hookers, and so forth. If Damien Hirst's "For the Love Of God" projects, foresees, brought about the cataclysmic shift in economics in the art world and rest of the world, Koons may well be remembered as the currency of that pre-recession period. And as long as he continues to stay up to date on the dialogues currently taking place, I imagine a possibility where works such as the little Balloon Dog at the CAC will act as sentimental and coy reminders of the places that art has been stretched to.

Two pieces well situated in conjunction to one another are Charley Harper's 1981 Foxsimiles and David Ellis' Extra Extra Small Flow Luan I from 2008. The Harper Seriagraph is a composition of fox faces, with a real emphasis on parallel lines composing form and texture. The colors are rich and pleasant, and, like the Ryan McGinness and Maggie Wenstrup, are pleasant recollections of Distel's cycle of design/art fusion exhibitions Graphic Content.

I would say that having the Ellis as company stretches the way one might look at Harper's illustrative image. One of his most basic elements in paintings, prints, and wall murals are these undulating black and silver striped forms. In the case of Extra Extra Small, this is the only think slinking up from the bottom of an unprimed wood panel. The materials are black gesso and enamel on panel, which is really refreshing to read: it means I'm not crazy when I sense that the specific qualities of those paint materials were selected and considered; I'm not looking at arbitrary information.

But oh there are some nice and otherwise provocative pieces from local artists interspersed as well.

Debbie Brod, an artist about who I have been writing for an upcoming project about public sculptural projects in Cincinnati, contributed Semi-portrait silk scarf, a tie-dyed, digitally printed and sewn silk scarf. When I was there, it was displayed on a rack on a pedestal near the elevator. It struck me as a carefully selected (Brod makes ALL kinds of things) object for its context.

Cal Kowal's Eye Candy from 2009 is a framed assemblage piece that simultaneously attracts and repels. Talk about draggy embellishments, the work is comprised of a number of glitter covered, enlarged bonbons that were possibly meant to function as holiday decorations in another context. Mounted onto a crocheted doily, this work is decorate, crabby, and over the top. That I normally think of Kowal as a photographer (and a former photography professor at the Art Academy of Cincinnati), this work is a bit of a curve ball. But, honestly, it seems to have a context between the Steirs and Koons I mentioned above.

It's a shame that I didn't get to experience Tony Luensman's Study (#1) for Kline Series (2009) lit up, because the intricacy of the ccft lights across the front of this wall hanging electronic piece struck me immediately. Some of his recent photographs were up at PAC Gallery before their official opening. They showed Luensman sporting an illuminated headdress and sitting in outdoor markets in the semi-darkness.

there were many many other worthy works on display, but this feels like a cohesive (relatively speaking) enough set of responses for some of my favorite art pieces. i can only hope that the Center raises a ton of funding tonight and that by the time I get to the Gala, it will be all smiles.

Keep on the look out for my pieces about the other artists I got to experience yesterday as well!

Tonight, in case you hadn't heard, we are having an evening of discussion and lecture at semantics gallery, in conjunction with the exhibition i curated, "She Keeps It In Play / They Don't Know What To Call It." 7 pm the gallery will be open, we will start swapping words just after.

Yesterday the exhibition was even mentioned in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Click hear to read the mostly correct information they printed along with one of the sculptural works by Lindsey Whittle that is in the exhibition.

Artist Opportunities.

2009-05-07T09:47:00.000-04:00

A couple of local opportunities have come into my sphere lately that offer exciting prospects for all of us. I wanted to share them with you this morning. Aeqai is an art criticism journal I write for, and every month it is getting more and more online visits. The free exposure they are offering through these ad links would be good for anyone with an online presence for their work. So if you have a website, public page on one of the community networks like Facebook, an Etsy shop, or some other place on the web, THIS IS FOR YOU! And while you're there, check out my latest review of the Vogel Collection at the Speed in Louisville.

CS13 is a new gallery/performance venue set to open in Over-the-Rhine. For those of you who miss Murmur, or else missed Murmur and never got to be a part of that rich artistic community in Fairmount, CS13 is its newest incarnation. Their first art exhibition has an open call and a publication being made in conjunction with it. Submit art, writing, or what have you as a sign of solidarity and good faith in new energy happening within our local arts scene.

AEQAI, online journal seeks artist ads for website

Professional artists in the Greater Cincinnati region are invited to submit an image (one only) of their work to be posted indefinitely on the side and bottom of various pages in the main AEQAI journal web site. The specifications are as follows (see image sample to right):

1) an image of an artwork (or a detail) with one of the following dimensions:
165px width by 200px height (right hand side area) or 265px width by 165px height (footer area)
JPG or GIF, no larger than 10KB
1b) your name on the lower part of the image
2) a web address (such as the artist's web site) for us to program if it is clicked

Please email the image and link address to editor at aeqai.com

CS13 CALLS

JUNE 1st 2009 marks the last day that you can submit works for our publication and for our first art show... Both to be made public on June 13th. Below is information about both projects.

A CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

Mobilize. Inspire. Create.

CS13 is a new performing arts space located at Sycamore and 13th streets in Over-the-Rhine. Broadly, our goal is to pull a creative community together, to create a forum for thoughts to interact, and to encourage a positive and active lifestyle.

To this end, we want you to contribute to a publication we are printing, to be released at our June 13th opening. This issue is themed around our first art show which explores and celebrates Cincinnati, offering different perspectives of a familiar place. Here are examples of the kinds of things we are looking for:

- Poetry
- Photocopiable art
- Descriptions of locations in Cincinnati meaningful to you
- Instructions for DIY creative projects

Submissions are due by June 1st 2009 to contemporaryspace13 at gmail.com or:

CS13

1219 Sycamore Street
Cincinnati, Ohio 45202

-----------------------------------------------------
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS TO EXHIBITION
"Greetings From Cincinnati: Wish You Were Here"

Cincinnati postcards appear to be limited to images of the
metropolis’s two skylines—chili and the meeting of city and sky. Let
us take a moment and celebrate what makes Cincinnati, Cincinnati.
Show us the vision of this city that you wish to have sent out into
the rest of the world.

Create the postcard you would like to see available around the
Cincinnati area!

This is an open call gallery show at CS13, a contemporary art space
opening on the corner of Sycamore and 13th, "Greetings From
Cincinnati" will showcase postcards made by artists and non artists
alike. The show will open Saturday, June 13th.

Submit your 4x6 inch postcard, made on/with mailable materials,
through the mail or drop it off in the mail slot at 1219 Sycamore.
All works must be received by Monday June 1st.

Please consider submitting up to three artworks.
All original postcards will be sold for 25 dollars a piece and all
sales go to benefit CS13, a non profit gallery and performance space.

A selection of postcards will be reproduced with the intention of
having local businesses in Over-the-Rhine and around Cincinnati sell
these reproductions. By submitting work you are agreeing to let CS13 reproduce your
postcard art. No postcards will be returned, unless special arrangements are made
with and agreed upon by CS13.

Thank you so much for your interest and support and we sincerely hope
that you will consider participating in the show!

If you know anyone who you think may be interested in participating,
please forward this along! Forward any questions to
contemporaryspace13 at gmail.com

All the best,
CS13
contemporaryspace13 at gmail.com
1219 Sycamore Street
Cincinnati, Ohio 45202

where i've been.

2009-05-05T12:46:00.004-04:00

a photograph my dad took of one of my sculptures languishing in his yard.

hi,

you're kind if you are still around reading this.

what have i been doing instead of gluing myself to this medium?

writing this.

and writing this.

and this.

and this show i curated just opened.

look for me all over town except here as the weather is as nice as it is.

i have a few updates in store, but until then, let's meet up at one of the dozens of art things happening.

love,

freakin' weekend: see PAC then get outdoors!

2009-04-17T14:51:00.004-04:00

if you pick up this week's issue of City Beat, you can read a story i wrote about PAC Gallery, set to open tomorrow night in Eastern Walnut Hills with their inaugural exhibition that features fourteen contemporary Indian artists. You can also read the story by clicking here.

Amitesh Shrivastava, Evaporator, acrylic on canvas, 36" x 118", 2009

I will be stopping into the opening there, but not before getting out of doors in the balmy spring weather we are having. One stop might be the 25th Biennial Outdoor Sculpture exhibition at the Civic Garden Center on Reading Road. I have an installation in the show that i have been checking in on periodically over the past month:

recently i

2009-04-17T11:00:00.009-04:00

brief notes about local shows i've taken in over the past couple of weeks. i have photos to accompany most of the artworks mentioned; hopefully i'll have a chance to post them later on.

I caught the opening reception of Annie, a series of paintings by Annie Titchener on display at the Over-the-Rhine Chamber of Commerce. Unfortunately time hasn't allowed a proper post about this show, and it ends TODAY. But i'm sure that if you get in touch with Visionaries and Voices it would be possible to learn more about Titchener's work (the show was organized by V+V as I understand it...).

Titchener's paintings are expressionist and saturated; one would be hard pressed to describe a bias in the color schemes she presents, though bright reds and blues appear throughout. In many of the best moments, paint is heavy laden so that the colors muddy down into subtle intricacy. Many of the paintings on board are as textural as they are pictorial. In some paintings, drawn marks bleed out from under the paint (my brother, who saw this work with me, suggested these were made with large chisel marks-a-lot). I was reminded of Joanne Greenbaum's paintings that, if they don't actually include paint pen or sharpie, reference that kind of markmaking in acrylic or oil. My particular favorite was a small painting in one of the offices that is fitted with several blocky, brownish forms. In the bottom right corner, the artist's name is painting in multicolored strokes in qualities that reminded me of Santogold singing the song "Anne."

The current exhibition at semantics, the gallery i volunteer with, is Joe Civitello's solo exhibition Brink. The editor of Aeqai wrote a small piece about the exhibition on Aeqai's main blog here. Civitello created video installation sculptures in both rooms. The front rooms broken tunnel piece is paired by a series of digital prints, while the back space is darkened completely and trembles with the volume level of the throbbing video works that are built into a kind of fort. Beyond what Frabetti wrote, I would draw viewers' attention to the aesthetics that tweaked even the equipment, such as the coils of extension cord that have been tacked to the wall. These extra hints at control seem to crystallize some of the light/dark formal issues in many of the other works, lending them to a dialogue about power, order, risk, and true aspects of the creative process that demand subtraction as much as addition. Civitello will be keeping the gallery open during its normal 12-4 Saturday hours, as well as a closing reception on April 25th.

Rawe's installation in Convergys

So far, I've made it out to all of the senior thesis exhibitions at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. I was very impressed and proud of two close friends- Nick Hill + Zach Rawe- who made postminimalism undeniably hip again. Both slip in Pop subtexts in their objects and installations. Showing in galleries nearby one another, a marked difference in approach was the sparse, airy space that Hill made with his small wall-mounted objects and glitter installations on the floor, in contrast to the whimsical, dense carnival of objects and drawings installed in Convergys Gallery by Rawe. These two have shown together a couple of times before, and I reviewed one of their exhibitions at semantics HERE. Hill has recently put up a website with more information about his work. See it here.

One of Hill's wall mounted objects.

Other graduating seniors of interest (in no particular order):

Jon Flannery's screenprinted text works mess with album titles that will be variably familiar and obscure depending on the saavy of the viewer. With sharp wit in both the idea itself and the craft of their execution, this was a sexy installation of prints that do the Printmaking department at the Art Academy proud.

Emily Davidson's paintings only partially depend on photographic source material. Throughout the paintings, almost carnal, lusty explorations into the materiality of paint- soupy, scruffy, scumbled, sprayed, dripped, impasto, you name it- are conducted into a topographic ecosystems that are built into the final images.

Rachel Talty presented large, painterly collages as well as collaged photographs. The small photographs depict grainy outdoor images that each contain a very small bit of brown paper covering some detail within the print. The scenes feel surveilled and poeticized. The scrutiny in inspecting the images is an act of play. These were beguiling, weird little pieces in gray-painted frames. I kept looking at them. And then I kept looking at them. I should probably have one.

In this week's exhibition, Patrice Williams presented a set of utterly disturbing but jewel-like, impressive airbrushed paintings. She is graduating with a degree in Illustration, and these paintings do feel like illustrations. But they stand up with boldness and intrigue as quirky, grotesque anthropomorphs and other invented characters elaborate on the realism of the portraits in each.

“Untitled” by Patrice Williams (airbrush on smooth canvas, 18” x 24”)

The drawing that appeared behind the projected video in Baker's and Helmes' piece.

Last night, a set of Northern Kentucky University's graduating seniors presented their thesis projects in the campus' gallery. The stand out was a collaborative project between Katherine Baker and M. Kate Helmes, who used the moniker The Paper Dolls as the author of their video and drawing installation. Entitled Devolution: Things Fall Apart, a room constructed within the gallery was made to feel dark and derelict. Pieces of actually furniture like chests of drawers and a large traveling chest were pushed up against walls upon which tromp l'oeil drawings in what appeared to be charcoal completed the interior space. Window unit air conditioner, shelves of scattered books, and a fully hand-drawn "wooden" floor were drawn and smeared into blurs throughout. a thick layer of powdery dust (maybe chalk?) coated the floor and furniture, and was tracked out into the gallery. low hanging draped fabric was mottled with black; the shadow of these drapes framed the projected video piece. The video is a montage of footage that conveys a loose narrative of loss, of people packing up and leaving. Ms. Baker is off to graduate school in Massachusetts in the fall.

freakin' weekend in three states.

2009-04-14T09:54:00.007-04:00

so there's been a lull here on the blog. when you start finding my articles in upcoming issues of City Beat, Aeqai, and another magazine that i'm too excited to tell you about quite yet, you'll understand that my writing attentions have been elsewhere. But I wanted to give you the skinny about this past weekend when I and a friend went down to Saint Louis by way of Louisville and returned through Indianapolis, allowing us to see five museums in three states in two days. ! ! !

I will be writing about a number of the things we saw for magazines and don't want to give it all away here. But this is the rundown in list form:

-Speed Art Museum, Louisville: The Vogel's have been bequeathing their collection in packets of 50 works to different museums. The Speed is one of the recipients. Along with the stunning number of Richard Tuttles from different periods (which one would expect as the Vogels have been major collectors of his throughout his career), I was delighted by Lynda Benglis, Jene Highstein, and Peter Halley. Outside of the Vogel pieces, I also greatly enjoyed a lithograph by Ellsworth Kelly and a large horizontal painting by Helen Frankenthaler. And I always LOVE the Hans Arp pieces there (one wall piece, one bronze sculpture).

-21C, Louisville: Will Morrow, a delightful fellow, works at putting together surprisingly current exhibitions of cutting edge contemporary art that coincides with permanent installations throughout the museum/hotel. (What I mean by museum/hotel is that this luxury hotel's 'theme,' if you will is contemporary art. it is a weird, but well done venture). One of Nick Cave's sound suits that were just described in the New York Times was one of the highlights. A piece that wasn't fully installed (i don't think) seemed to be a nearly life sized papier mache sculpture of Madonna or some other female rock star in fishnets, pink, + purple, donning sunglasses and blonde tresses.

-Moonlite Bar-B-Q, Owensboro: Along with museums on this trip, we used Jane and Michael Stern's Roadfood Guide to eat regional specialties along the journey. Owensboro has several claims in the form of a set of restaurants as being the international capitol for mutton. Another popular dish at Moonlite is burgoo, a stew with shredded meats, vegetables, and a red saucy consistency. One of the platters we split came with two vegetables; among our choices were macaroni and cheese and dressing (not really vegetables, why not call these 'sides'?). Service was fast, welcoming, and pretty fun to experience.

-Napoleon's Retreat, Saint Louis: We decided at the last minute to stay in an historic bed and breakfast. It was a nice change of pace from the hostels of our college years and larger chain hotels. It was located in a very quaint, picaresque part of the city in close proximity to the museums we were in town to see.

-Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, Saint Louis: Our main intention for this trip was to catch the tail end of Gedi Sibony's solo museum exhibition here. It ranks among most important exhibitions I have ever seen: sparse, spiritual, and playful; mostly whites and grays drawn from vernacular, recovered materials. Lagniappe was the small Bruce Nauman exhibition also on display and, upstairs, one of Polly Apfelbaum's huge + adorable relief prints. This one in fact:

-Robust Wine Bar, Webster Groves: In an outlying area beyond the edge of Saint Louis, we found one of the nicest wine bar cafes in this breed of restaurant. Compare to Lavomatic locally, but with a lot more investment, love, and attention to detail (not to knock Lavomatic, whose sunday brunch has currently stolen my heart). Every item on the menu is numbered to correspond with one or two sections that they demark their wine menu with. Basically rough sorted wine pairings for cheese courses, charcuterie (the pate de campagne was astounding and was paired with cornichons, dates, and an insane horseradish and hot mustard spread), salads, main dishes, and desserts. The creme brulee du jour was a cherry and vanilla, which rounded off the evening beautifully.

-Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis: We have heard great things about the SLAM's permanent collection, especially their choices in the contemporary wing. I was not disappointed. The main pieces I wanted to see were the four gray mirrored pieces by Gerhard Richter that I've read about and considered an inspiration (without having seen them) for a couple of years. But also: a couple of additional Richar Tuttles for the trip, hung near a Dan Flavin. A Joseph Beuys gray felt suit, a WHITE Louise Nevelson built in units that contrasts quirky, curvilinear forms (think Arp) against decorative mouldings from frames, chair legs, etc. The Kiefer in the lobby space was also striking and got me thinking about the development of my aesthetic, having seen work like Kiefer's in early high school.

-Ted Drewe's, Saint Louis: This frozen custard stand has sold its famous "concretes" as well as christmas trees in the winter for decades. We got a concrete apiece just before we headed out to Indiana. E's = the "bunny-rete," an Easter special that imitates carrot cake with shredded carrot and brown sugary bits. Mine = fresh banana and black walnuts whipped into the vanilla custard. Freaking fantastic!!!

-Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis: We barely made it here in time. My main purpose was to see the two Robert Irwin pieces that are a part of the museum's permanent collection. We got to dash through the contemporary wing, and the guard that escorted us (they allowed us to stay after museum hours) showed us his favorite piece, a James Turrell installation. Seeing these works only builds on my understanding and research of the life and work of Robert Irwin.

-Mug 'N' Bun Drive-In, Indianapolis: Our last stop took us to a wonderful old fashioned drive in that really manages to avoid much change from time as well as I can tell. The highlight here is there homemade root beer. We could talk about it like a red wine- it's creaminess and body, with notes of vanilla, clove, and nutmeg. Our first serving was in the frosted mugs they keep at the restaurant, but we got seconds to drive with.

the food and company were easily as important as the museum trips themselves. i needed this weekend getaway; everyone does come to think of it. i wanted to mention too that we listened to two very good audiobooks, both by NPR contributors: Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount, Jr. and The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell both employ semantics and history to look at lives and culture. Blount's book is a series of humorous and purist notations about grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Etymologies abound, as do Blount's delight in cultural idiosyncrasy. Oddly appropriate to follow up is Vowell's history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that also incisively examines the wording and intent in the writings of early puritan settlers. both were engaging travelmates.

faithfull.

2009-03-29T12:56:00.007-04:00

i don't really have the expertise to contextualize or articulate my experience of music in an intelligent way. if i did, i would have written a great deal after seeing performances by Kronos Quartet and The Books several weeks ago. The two nights of performances were... sublime; i was shaken to the core.

so it may seem odd that i intend to give pause and offer a light review of a recently released album in the US. Marianne Faithfull, of Rolling Stones + Mick Jagger fame, has created a record of covers entitled Easy Come, Easy Go. Faithfull is a medium of experience unto herself in my life; i have found her to fill in the gaps between other inspirations and stimuli. For example, she accompanied the quixotic androgyne Patrick Wolf on one of his songs in the album The Magic Position (and in fact, it was this song that brought his record into my sphere to begin with). Not long after, I became aware that she also portrayed Maria Teresa, Marie Antoinette's mother, Queen of Austria in Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

she also appears in the 2006 Paris, je t'aime. She is a fashion and cultural lodestone, an icon of infamy, persistence, addictions... she is the broken spirit, and this is present in whatever her voice is applied to. I should note that anything i write here will only be secondary to what Faithfull herself says in an interview in the current issue of Interview magazine. Plumbing her own motives for the songs collected in this project, Faithfull discusses one of the persistent issues in many artists' creative process- living, defining, and embedding one's life story into one's work. (and the implication is that we try to do this without being ostentatious in the process).

As I say, Easy Come, Easy Go is comprised of twelve covers. Faithfull explains her need for a break from writing in her music. It is also such a beautiful task to locate one's passions in other pieces. I imagine for a musician, singing a number of covers is similar to an artist being invited to curate an exhibition. Other art expresses the information on your behalf.

This album shines with a similar brilliance as Cat Power's Jukebox album from last year. Some of the choices are surprising, such as the opening track, a song by Dolly Parton ( ! ). A number of well known, accomplished guests join her on different tracks, and Faithfull's rendition of Smokey Robinson's "Ooh Baby Baby" would no doubt be a completely different creature without the accompaniment of Antony Hegarty. Together, they become a two-headed Nina Simone, crooning and elliciting woody, raked chirrups. Hearing Marianne Faithfull's offering of the Neko Case song "Hold On, Hold On," gives the lyrics new depth and leverage than I've ever fully appreciated: "It's the devil I love... and that's as funny as real love... and that's as real as true love." -sigh-

By far, the absolute charmer for me in this album is the cover of The Decemberists' "The Crane Wife 3." Again, the lyrics wrap easily around Faithfull's own biography so that the fable that is told seems less fantastic and unrealistic; absolutely possible. Accompanied by Nick Cave, this is a heartrending piece with expansive ache spilling out between voice and instruments.

and here is where I am least sufficient in praising this album. Many of the tracks have spacious interludes for guitar that sizzle with complexity and twang in the right spots. I could listen to just the instrumental interludes and feel a rapport with marianne faithfull's vocal effects.

i picked up this album at Shake It. When you hear it, we should talk about it more.

meeting joan snyder.

2009-03-27T11:05:00.006-04:00

last night i was invited to attend a reception for the painter Joan Snyder, whose exhibition of paintings from the past ten years is underway at Carl Solway Gallery. i felt honored to be there, especially when the artist spoke at length of the personal stories and stages of her life that compelled the paintings we have been seeing in Solway for the past several months. Closer to the opening of this exhibition, I reviewed the Snyder's paintings along with the other exhibitions also on view at Solway. The article appeared in City Beat, and you can read it here.

Snyder is certainly a painter within the lineage of abstract expressionism, but throughout her career, fugitive and collaged elements have found their way into the goopy, broiling scapes of oil paint she configures, usually at immense scales. i have long had a soft spot for the soft spots in some of her earlier paintings, such as those that were included in the behemoth exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution that travelled all over, but i was fortunate to be able to see at PS1. In these works, downy piles of flocking interrupt the fields of stains and slushy paint marks. The fuzzy texture surprised and delighted me, as if the suggestiveness of texture that painting affords was somehow alchemized into whole new physical properties.

In these paintings on view, Snyder has added herbs and plant matter onto the surface of the work. This was one of several facets of her work that were opened up to those of us in attendance through an impromptu artist's talk in the gallery space during the reception last night.

I was struck, as she spoke, by how these pieces, in her mind, evolved gradually. (I'm reluctant to say 'naturally,' although she might have. I just believe consistently in the construction of our self-views, art practices, etc etc.) There was no evident contrivance in her accounts (unlike my experience, for example, of Donald Sultan's explanations of his linoleum paintings on display at the CAC). The plant matter, for example, was introduced into the paintings during a time that her studio shared a building with a Chinese homeopathy business. When the woman running the shop decided that loose herbs were a less sanitary option for her patients compared to the available capsules, she offered the herbs to Snyder, who began embedding them in paint as a way to make what she described as "healing paintings." Eventually, she seemed to decide that the distinction between some artworks possessing some new age power more than art in general was marginal at best and began liberally incorporating them into the materials of her work.

A point she made that seemed to get noticeable reaction from those in attendance, though I'm not positive why, was that she will sometimes return to a painting, making changes and adjustments years after its supposed 'completion.' As she described this push-and-pull in her process over the long term, the rise in whispered exchanges and comments was audible, noticeable. Why was that such a radical notion for some?

Probably the most exciting element of the evening were several additional works on display, brought out and put onto easels and hung on extra wall space in the main galley of the first floor of the gallery. These prints and works on paper complimented the large scale paintings in the basic exhibition. Personally, more than the insights that an artist might offer about their own work (and Snyder's were compelling and personable), I learn so much from seeing how the habits, styles, and issues of an artist's work are translated into different media that they care about. The screen-prints and glitter-caked painting/drawings on paper subdued some of the torrents that are set loose in the larger oil works, but were still toothy and aggressive.

Actually, one was familiar to me, because several weeks ago, I had seen it awaiting a frame in Bill Renschler's frame shop upstairs from the gallery. I was struck by the piece's vulnerability, lying there on the table, a slightly warped, heavily painted sheet of paper. It occurred to me that Renschler and Krista Gregory (who run Aisle Gallery just outside the frame shop) are privy to levels of exposure in artworks that common viewers don't get to see. I can say that this piece was very different framed than unframed. The frame allowed its stormy qualities to gather and exude; it reinforced a notion that many many aesthetes have proclaimed, but I believe I read Lynda Benglis saying it, so it has stuck with her in my mind: context is everything.

Freakin' Weekend- march 27-29

2009-03-27T09:12:00.012-04:00

first, a giant happy birthday to Sister in Second Hand Sequins. everything you see me attending this evening will be tinged with celebrations for her special day.

It's final friday, and several streets of over-the-rhine will be bustling with new exhibitions, parties, and sites for community building + socializing. i suggest you meet us there.

there could be any of the below:

Art Academy of Cincinnati presents their first of this season's senior thesis exhibitions. Horror Vacui features six artists: Anthony Birchfield, Jill Griffith, Kimberly Hart, Meghan Hicks, Aaron Kent and Alex Scherra. I stopped in yesterday to get a handle on what comprises the show.

In the lobby Convergys space, Kimberly Hart has interpreted cartoon creatures into a number of drawing projects. If Tamagotchi grew up in the punk scene and lunched on graffiti, Hart's work would be a logical result. At every turn, the 'cuteness' of the different figures is matched by rough, edgy marks. Installations of dense, maze-like images that have been cut out into complicated cloud shapes that have been floated across the back wall. Beside it, the same drawings have been put across a shower curtain. I'm still considering the implications of those characters being transferred onto a clear shower curtain. There is also a dense field of paintings on panels and other gathered surfaces that remind me of Barry McGee's wall installations.

Meghan Hicks, who is one of the founders of the nearby Creative Gallery on Main Street, has created two installations in the downstairs Chidlaw Gallery. These are dense with an air of decadence and disaster. In one of the two implied rooms, furniture and art supplied have been toppled across the floor, with piles of print outs of softcore porn and 'glam' amateur fashion shoots. The other room (pictured above) is hung densely with mirrors and a hanging fixtures that are both disco ball + chandelier. These rooms reminded me of early Karen Kilimnik installations and some of the tense psychologically charged interiors of Sandy Skoglund.

Anthony Birchfield has packed a collection of drawing projects into Pearlman Gallery alongside Kent's sculptures and Scherra's various painting projects. Birchfield's work was probably the surprise of the show for me. I've been familiar with his earlier work, oftentimes paintings of crowded, surreal scenes that possessed the idiosyncrasy of Bosch. By comparison, these pieces are stark and distilled. The drawings are mounted several inches from the walls. They are hung on, clamped into cases made from what appears to be sheets of plex and metal bolts. They are backlit so that the resulting images are composed of cross-hatched lumpy figures interacting with blocky forms created from the drawings being backlit. These little, abstract figures seem almost like claymation sketches: nondescript blobs with little appendages reaching and lifting. These scenarios are filled with pathos, tension, and tenderness. The number of these works may perhaps overcrowd, but I was very pleased with the simple beauty of the materials Birchfield employed.

AAC is located at 1212 Jackson Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
Closing Reception: Final Friday, March 27, 5:00 – 9:00 pm

Speaking of Creative Gallery, you may have heard that Jake Constantine's exhibition A Comma in the Sky has been extended for another month. You can read what i wrote about it here. Creative is at 13 15 Main Street.

Paul Coors notified me this week that he will be presenting new prints at Mark Patsfall's Clay Street Press this evening as part of their "Prints and More Prints" event. Coors' work will be for sale along with Terence Hammonds (who had a very successful exhibition at the Weston Gallery last year; i reviewed it here), along with some heavyweight names like Nam June Paik and Raymond Pettibon. Like the name of the gallery/press suggests, it is on cozy Clay Street at 1312 Clay, just next door to where Publico used to be. Tonight's opening is from 6-11 pm.

Lily Mulberry has announced the next exhibition at her 1305 Gallery on Main Street (1305 is the gallery's address as well). Since I haven't seen this work, I am going to let Lily's eloquent description of the work sell you on stopping by as it has me:

Camille Cier graduated two years ago from "Ecole de Conde" in Lyon, France, although she has been working on the series of photographs featured in this exhibition for four years. Cier started the project as a documentary about her cousin Alma when she was 13 years old. "Qui suis je?" (who am I?) is the question teenagers continually ask themselves on the road to adulthood, and "Chrysalide" is a series that focuses on one girl's tumultuous quest to find an answer.
As the series evolves we see Alma transition from a girl not yet ready to part with her childhood to a young woman with a sense of peace and identity related to her body and her perceptions. The photographs portray Alma as a character in a story we've all played a role in. Her individual struggles and triumphs come across in a third person narrative that lets each viewer see their own face, their own identity, and their own realizations mirrored and transposed. Camille Cier photographed Alma without giving her instructions or directing her actions, they simply "walked in the places we were discovering together, letting her mind go to her girl preoccupation, her world."

But if you want to know where i will be spending most of my evening, it will be with Sandy Eichert at the fundraising party she is hosting in the new Trideca Lofts on Vine Street. This is how i described the event in this week's City Beat:

"A fundraising party to benefit the Know Theatre takes place Friday in one of the new Trideca Lofts located at 13th and Vine streets. Sandy Eichert, the resplendent local arts socialite, is functioning as host for the evening. Suggested donation is $10, but all are encouraged to show support and solidarity in attendance.
The night will be filled with music and performances from some of the Know actors and will coincide with an open house party at Joseph Williams Home, a store on the ground level of the building. Raffle prizes from the theatre, City Cellars, the Taft Museum of Art and more will be at stake.
Stop by anytime between 6 and 11 pm. Guests can enter through the gate on Vine Street or through the home interiors store."

Eichert made this fun-filled flyer to accompany.

and that's only tonight. (^_^)

Saturday.

As Leapin Lizard Gallery redefines itself in our burgeoning economy, the ladies Godfroy, Lizz + Jill, have been focusing more on lively events like costume parties, drag shows, performance art concerts, and this weekend a craft fair called Craft Mafia. Cincinnati and the surrounding area is a hotbed of new, subversive, oftentimes punky crafters, many of whom will be gathered at 726 Main St in the MainStrasse Village in Covington this Saturday and Sunday from 11 to 6. If you've never been to Leapin Lizard, just taking in the eclectic, funky renovated church-cum-gallery is worth a visit.

Tomorrow night at semantics gallery will be the send off event for My Tiger, My Heart, the spectacular solo exhibition of my friend Eric Ruschman. The exhibition closes with Between Aging and Anti-aging, a night of short films and video pieces that Eric will be presenting in conjunction with the exhibition. Longtime sweet tokens like The Red Balloon alongside surprising, lesser known trifles. Per usual, the evening events at semantics will begin at 7 pm, and the artist estimates a running time until about 9:30, at which point, most of us will rush to OTR to wish our beloved Sarah Niblack farewell as she prepares to move across country to Aspen. A going away party will be in full swing at Grammers. You are welcome to bring whatever comfy blankets or pillows you'd like to feel at home in the gallery. We've been promised candy. semantics is at 1107 Harrison Avenue in the sweet hamlet of Brighton, a neighborhood just off Central Parkway before one gets to the Viaduct that heads out to the West Side.

But all of the bells and whistles of the evening aside, this is a memorable, tenderly fun exhibition of paintings and installations that you will kick yourself for missing if you've not yet seen it. If you can't make it to the evening event, remember that semantics has (mostly) regular gallery hours from 12-4 on saturdays.

there are a few more possibilities for the weekend that i'll let you know about if they become a little clearer in my sphere. hope to see you out!

remind me of what we're hunting.

2009-03-21T15:09:00.004-04:00

one of the small installation elements
that wind themselves up the two story lobby space
at Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church.

Tomorrow, following the normal service times at Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church, I will be speaking about my installation that has been on display since the beginning of February: A White Hunter, a white hunter is nearly crazy.

I expect to begin a discussion about the installation some time after 12:30 pm. The church is located at 103 William Howard Taft, with access to parking directly behind it by entering off of McMillan.

Here's what we initially released about the project:

Boxes of tissues, snapshot photographs, drawings on tissues in rosé champagne and graphite, and ‘doo-dad’ sculptures make up the installation that ascends the multi-level exhibition space at Mount Auburn. What is included in the installation acts as an elaboration and commentary on the spirit and structure of the space it occupies. This collection of objects deal in abstract ideas about the soul and a quiet sadness that always seems to underpin transcendence. Titled after a poem in Gertrude Stein’s collection Tender Buttons, the exhibition reflects the complicated and contradictory efforts at reaching the heart of a matter.

if i was a shoe;

2009-03-20T09:35:00.003-04:00

maybe i would be Creative Recreation's Turino Suede low top trainer.

"there is no beyond painting."

2009-03-17T18:33:00.004-04:00

Paige Williams

Remains Unconvinced

2009

Ink on Paper

18" x 15"

This week, a story that I wrote ran in City Beat about the two-person exhibition Almost Certain at Aisle Gallery. Unfortunately, due to constraints in length and some heavy editing outside of my control, I wasn’t left feeling like the world got as much from the interview I conducted with Paige Williams and Jeffrey Cortland Jones as I would have liked. So I am posting my original interview/review piece pre-editing here, along with lengthier portions of their own insights into the work.

Jeffrey Cortland Jones

Wilder

acrylic + resin on OSB panel

There Is No Beyond Painting
An interview with Jeff Cortland Jones and Paige Williams
By Matt Morris

There are few exhibition spaces in Cincinnati that are as dependable and consistent in the quality of the aesthetics they purport as Aisle Gallery, managed by Krista Gregory and Bill Renschler on the third floor of a complex on Findlay Street, shared with Carl Solway Gallery, the Country Club project space, and a range of artists’ studios. Aisle’s current exhibition, Almost Certain, which features two series of abstract paintings by Jeffrey Cortland Jones and Paige Williams, will not disappoint. It’s remarkable that this exhibition is the seventh these two painters have mounted together.

Matt Morris: Why do you make paintings?

Paige Williams: I think one of the reasons I paint is because I need the limits. Was it [Dave] Hickey that said ‘If everything is possible, then nothing is possible’? If I can do anything, then I don’t know what to do and I get freaked out. That’s what painting is; I like having limits to react against.

Jeff Cortland Jones: [Fiona Rae] talks about how painting is still there while installation is dead, photography is dead because these other things happen instantly, while painting is this process that you have to go through and go through. And to quote Chuck Close, ‘It’s always wrong before it’s right.’

MM: Am I assuming in advance that you would both describe yourselves as painters?

JCJ: I call myself a painter before I call myself an artist. I’m not an artist. We can start talking about Art with a capital ‘A’ versus art with a lowercase ‘a,’ and what that means. I introduce myself as a painter no matter what I’m making.

PW: “Painter” seems a little more humble too.

JCJ: Everything I produce is failure, because it’s not the absolute. I hope that I never get to the absolute.

MM: Paige, you said to me once that when you didn’t know what to do about a painting, you would describe it back to yourself.

PW: That’s how I figure out what it’s about. I just start describing it. I analyze them on a formal level, and then I recognize my daily stuff in the work, as opposed to putting it in the work. I think the trick is finding a way to make the work no matter what: when you’ve got angst, when you’re happy. But… I was just going to go back to the ‘why you paint’ thing. I think on the one hand, I’m too insecure to say that I’m looking for the perfect painting, because I know I’d never find it. That would be defeatist for me to have that kind of attitude. It’s a different kind of ego where I just like to make stuff and I get to say “I made this out of nothing.”

Even before they had met, Jones and Williams were running in the same circles; both are part of close-knit communities of artists with shared aesthetic concerns. Though, by their own admission, they don’t get together and catch up often, as Jones says, “We run these parallel lives.” When the three of us were able to meet at the gallery and discuss their work and the commonalities they share, both artists would relate their practices to their art educations in the area, the parenting of their small children, and their experiences as art professors (Williams teaches painting at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, while Jones teaches foundations classes at University of Dayton). With unassuming candor, they disarm cynicisms that abstract painting is detached from real life, instead presenting the direct relationships between the lives they are living and the products of their art careers.

From stunning local exhibitions at the Weston Gallery, the Art Academy and the Dayton Art Institute, Paige Williams’ paintings have the reputation of being colorful and awkward with designed minimalist leanings. So the biggest surprise in this body of paintings on paper is the near-total absence of color. The grids and blocks that have populated her paintings for some time are painted in even, flat layers of black, gray and silver, and framed with mattes that are the palest ice blue. For Williams, “The grids reference a lot of domestic things, like windows, doors, quilts, nets and ladders: things that are found in ‘the home.’” I wondered aloud if the bending, irregular lines in these grids made them more into “griddles,” in line with some of her references to home life. “They’re waffles?!? I make a lot of waffles,” she exclaimed back, looking around at the works. When asked about color and other tropes that had been in her paintings for a long time now absent, she explained, “I read Operating Instructions by Ann Lamott right after Max was born. It was about having a kid, but even more so, I think it relates to the artwork. She said that as kids grow up, the things you’ve loved about them in earlier stages don’t disappear, they just become incorporated into them. I think the same way about the things you work through in your work. It’s not like you get rid of it, it just gets incorporated as you move on.” I find this newest series to be wizened and gently grim, with a tension Williams intentionally creates between the shapes. To this, Jones added in admiration “Your work is so honest,” which seems to be the largest reason he continues to enjoy exhibiting alongside her.

For his part, Jeffrey Cortland Jones presents a series of paintings on OSB panel and a series of small transparent vellum works marked with black paint and installed ethereally across the entrance wall to the gallery space. I had heard that these were sections of Jones’ studio wall, cut out like a Gordon Matta-Clark piece and then worked over with layers of resin and acrylic painting. He confirmed this: “After my last big show, I looked at my studio wall and thought that it was the most beautiful, honest painting I had ever made. It was simply the accumulation of making paintings. So I ripped the wall down, took it to the woodshop, and cut it down into squares.” To which Williams added, “He’s way braver than I am. He’s gutsier than I am.”

MM: The paint on the front layer is from the wall?

JCJ: Yeah, these paintings are three layers: the painting already on the wall, the resin, and then the acrylic on top.

MM: Jeff, what kind of conversation do you want to have about the layering of paint and resin in these paintings?

JCJ: The resin is for multiple reasons. It’s to cover up a lot of the really bad paintings that goes one. It allows me to start a new painting without having to physically start over. I can go through and negate things and choose what I want to be seen. I can start creating physical, three-dimensional space on a two dimensional surface. I’m a big proponent of ‘versus’ in art. In painting: big vs. small, matte vs. shiny, thick vs. thin. The resin helps me get that really rough texture [from the wafer board] versus the smooth resin.

MM: That’s insane how that happens! That’s one of the things I get inside of in those. The information that I’m receiving optically is telling me this is a rough surface, but there is just enough information to create contrast and show that it’ would be smooth to the touch.

JCJ: Somebody asked, “When is a painting done?” And I said, “When I can touch it.”

PW: That’s awesome!

JCJ: The resin helps me touch it. It has a certain, velvety feel to it. I will tell you that the resin is a crutch. I have a love/hate relationship to it. It’s so easy to slap resin onto something.

Apart from clear admiration of each other’s painting projects, I wondered if there was more we could articulate about the consistency with which they contextualize one another’s work. Williams answered back, “We may be saying different things, but we’re using the same language. We don’t think about painting in terms of rules. I’ve tried to help make a community out of what I want my work to do. Jeff is so able to let the ego go when it comes to the work. There’s a humanness there. For me, it’s relationships and how we navigate our life on a day to day basis with what we encounter.”

As we finished up a nearly two hour conversation, I brought up Jeff’s installation of small works, asking if these were drawings or if they were somehow beyond painting. Engaged and defiant, he offered back, “There is no beyond painting.”

Aisle is located at 424 Findlay Street, Third Floor.
Almost Certain continues through March 27th.
Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 1-4 pm
and by appointment by calling 513-241-3403.

spring cleaning and point zero.

2009-03-16T18:59:00.001-04:00

Before I got all the way through the expanded edition of Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees: over thirty years of conversations with Robert Irwin, I only had a partial grasp on the significance of reading this work at this specific time in my life. Throughout the last few days in which I’ve been almost totally steeped in the singular influence of this text, I’ve often trotted down the hall to tell Eric Ruschman, who I live with, this or that quote that fits squarely into my sides of debates and discussions about art and life over the past six to eight months. As Weschler tells it, he met Irwin by jotting a note to him asking if he had ever read Merleau-Ponty. He speculates now that if he had sent that note even weeks earlier, Irwin would have disregarded it. It was timing.

My time now.
Is hitting the studio and house with serious spring cleaning with my roommate, so that the floors are soft and clean to walk on and the open windows and thrown back curtains flood the house with cool light and air, and the soundscape of the city around me—an endlessly soothing way of locating myself.
Is the amazement of organizing a survey of images for a website in the works- how ideas can be traced several years hence.
Is eyeing my closet and shelf of clothes, wanting fewer, wanting less filler, thinking about it the way I’ve been thinking about food. Which
is an a priori consideration about what is going into me. Increasingly plant based. Almost totally organic. This weekend, I made a barley risotto with lemon zest, new young asparagus, and toasted hazelnuts. It sang springtime.
Is the cat cajoling with more zestful and adventuresome readiness that the deeper grays of winter have inspired.

Is the crisis between the questions that arise and how I perform in response to them. The problem of time management and seeking solutions within my creative means to get deeper. For several weeks, my time in the studio has resulted in an increasing array of humble, fragile visual hints and traces that can be held in waiting until they can be utilized within installations at various galleries and other situations through the next year and a half. Likewise, I’ve produced this or that piece of writing for this or that publication. All is basically well, except for how clearly I recognize the current of my own thoughts continue to move in spite of my attention to a singular act. By the time the plaster sets or the oil paint is smudged, I am (a) downstream in a series of questions that spun off from the impetus for making the creative work in the first place, or (b) somewhat displaced in the sacrifice of time given to the endeavor itself, so as to lose my footing in my own running discourse. Often the latter is the case, leaving me without a firm grip on my words when I spend evenings out with friends. My offerings to my context is a dopey, post-intellectual kindness. Happily drifting beyond phenomenological junctures and a political effort to undermine the social conditioning surrounding gender, love, sex, and aesthetics. Not long ago, I would sketch out a rough to do list of how I might spend the next few hours; of late, I want to find the time to be only in thought, or only in love, holding hands, or only confronting the slightest traces of life-affirmation, jubilation, and inter-connectedness through visual/sensual means.

Today I’m sitting in that Cat Power piece where she performed for a meadow itself.

Grappling with Irwin’s ideas, his progresses and evolutions has driven a new permanently helpful point of reference into my own artistic and aesthetic considerations. Few others have so struck me. Only Cy Twombly and Richard Tuttle come to mind immediately, though I feel I would be remiss in not citing Lynda Benglis and Petah Coyne as other identifiers in my creative growth.

Irwin has been wildly original, striking out on paths that are as clearly unsound in their application to economics, renown, and venerable legacies as they have been awfully and astoundingly important at getting to a level of engagement with pure visual and perceptive experience that maybe no other visual artist has ever dared toward.

On Thursday, I will be moderating a discussion of the Irwin book, so I don’t want to dig in too directly into the specific contents of the book. But there are such moving bits of insight in areas of the chapters small enough as to be likely overlooked in the short conversation being offered at the Contemporary Art Center. In one such area, Weschler brings up his grandfather, Ernst Toch, the German-Austrian modernist composer:

You must listen without always wanting to compare with the musical basis you already have. You must imagine that you inherited from your ancestors different compartments in the musical part of your brain, just as you inherited any other physical or intellectual qualities. Now when you hear a piece from the pre-classis, classic, or romantic periods, the sounds fall without any trouble and agreeably into the already prepared compartments. But when music for which you have no prepared compartments strikes your ear, what happens? Either the music remains outside you or you force it with all your might into one of those compartments, although it does not fit. The compartment is either too long or too short, either too narrow or too wide, and that hurts you and you blame the music. But in reality you are to blame, because you force it into a compartment into which it does not fit, instead of calmly, passively, quietly, and without opposition, helping the music to build a new compartment for itself.

A further possibility here is that in gracefully allowing new terms of engagement to develop around the music, likewise, previously instated contexts for the perceiver may also be adjusted, so that a mutual adaptation towards clearer specificity emerges, one that is respectful and keenly attuned enough as to suggest love. For example, in a Barnett Newman painting, the ‘zips’ (vertical lines placed at intervals against monochrome applications of color) do not occupy total fields as much as the suggestion or invocation of the idea of the total field. One can activate this suggested experience further by nearing the piece: the intimacy causes a loss of the points of reference outside of the painting, so that all a viewer perceives optically takes place within the expanse of canvas. The context for the field—a gallery in MOMA, of a page of Greenbergian explanations of Abstract Expressionism’s existential drives—fall away and a sensational encounter with formal information sparks profundity. Nearness, intimacy, trust, closer inspection, scrutiny, tenderness, a romance with the specifics of someone’s (oops, something’s) information would allow a context to emerge that doesn’t depend of antiquate or unhelpful models.
If it seems like a rant, it might be. Change is in the seasons and in this afternoon with a now drowsy cat and a glass of iced tea.

Bob Irwin and a Freakin' Week.

2009-03-11T13:04:00.012-04:00

i'm sorry. i may have broken all of your trust in me from not writing here for a week's time. you are better than that and you deserve more. preparations for Eric's opening, a lot of extra time in the studio and long shifts at work have have demanded my attention. if you haven't yet read my article about stewart goldman's solo exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum, read it here.

and if you haven't explored our latest issue of Aeqai, check it out here.

in the not too distant past, in reaction to a series of personal crises, i admitted aloud an almost post-buddhist idea of wishing to cease to exist [corporeally]. i didn't mean this in any tragic, emotional way, as much as i was contemplating the possibility that important ideals that we hold about the psyche could be translated into an invisible presence. since hearing Lawrence Weschler's succinct and totally interesting presentation at the CAC last monday, I would say that few of my influences, artistic or otherwise, have come closer to this than Robert Irwin.

Since the lecture, I've been asked by the Contemporary Arts Center to lead a discussion of Weschler's book of interviews with Irwin. Next Thursday evening (march 19th) from 6-8 pm, member and non-members are invited to come hash through the ideas in this book. Many of the ideas feel much bigger than me, but I am looking forward to navigating some of it with you. More info about it here.

other than that, i had a friend recently ask me about twittering. if that is even the verb form of this even newer medium. it came up as we speculated whether more involved blog entries such as the ones i try to write here are becoming passe already. at the risk of overwhelming you, readers, after a bit of radio silence, i'm opting to give you a list form of recent interests, developments, and concerns:

Francisco Costa's minimal garments for Calvin Klein feel like worthy and relevant counterparts to the bodies that wear them. These aren't the only things in the crashing wave of Fall 2009's Ready-To-Wear lines that I'm engaged in, but they are the ones that keep cropping up in my dreams. Might I also recommend Comme des Garçons (if you want to know what i wish i could wear to work every day, scroll to the end of this collection where things get black and tailored, then layered with small sweaters), Alexander McQueen (these are CRAZY), and Isaac Mizrahi's show he called "Smile." I was disappointed with Viktor & Rolf (but would like to know what you think. maybe peter pans have to grow up?), but pleasantly surprised by Vera Wang's subtlety (she has a new boutique. she showed the collection there).

but more than any of the fashion lines themselves, the coverage of Beth Ditto doing the Paris shows has totally seduced me. Ditto is the freshest mouthpiece for every kind of fringe and exemplifies how the edges can come crashing into the center of attention. As lead singer of the band The Gossip, I actually first learned about her music in Paris at a store called Colette.
she is sculptural, soulish, powerful, bodacious, imitable. Agnes Deyn cites her as a main inspiration, and in turn, Deyn is the muse and inspiration for designers and dressers across the land. go fat girl, go!

a friend went to france. he came back telling me about Mathilde du Sordet, a French sculptor who makes post minimalist installations and in one referenced Harlequin (I've been incorporating traces of the Comedia del Arte into my installations for the past bit). He saw her work at Palais de Tokyo; I love it and at the same time I am jealous.

TONIGHT: the Kronos Quartet and the Books are performing at Memorial Hall as part of Music Now.

! !!!! ! ! !

If you don't yet have tickets for this, you can get them at the door. Doors open at 7 pm.

I will be attending both nights.

Then Friday is "This Season," in which my brother along with other dance students at OSU will present an evening of performances in Columbus. More on that here.

Madonna has the cover of W's March 2009 issue. The photo shoot by Steven Klein called "Blame It on Rio" twangs with smutty narrative, shame, indication, and defiance. In many many of the photographs, the star's face is turned away or hidden behind giant shades. A random nude model enters the scenario for a handful of pages. I think his reference to A-Rod is obvious and intentional. Suspense comes and goes like a hangover. But Madonna just keeps going.

brunch at Lavomatic.

and of course, we should all be outside taking walks and talking about camping.

For those of you not in Cincinnati, you may not have heard of the brutal murder of thirteen year old Esme Kenney. Her body was found on Sunday after she went missing from a jog. As part of my own process of decompression with this horrific news, I've been going through the blog that this young woman kept. You can read it here. She had a zest for life, a consistent love of musical theater and her family, and seems to be all of the good things classmates have said about her and more. I'm left speechless in my environ of aesthetics, looking for contexualizations and points of reference for tragedies and calls for justice.

lindsey world (went global).

2009-03-05T09:25:00.022-05:00

for a couple of years, i shared a studio with Lindsey Whittle, an amazing woman whose approach to making art blasts through easy categorization and unapologetically draws from pop culture, contemporary fashion, and an aesthetics of shape/color/composition that owe largely to Modernist and Abstract Expressionist sensibilities.

last year she moved to japan and, while teaching English to high school students, maintains an impressively active studio practice. Recently Lindsey sent images of new projects to various friends in the states, hoping to get feedback, suggestions, criticism.

later in the spring i have plans to curate her into an exhibition i am currently plotting. i've decided to dig around and place some of her new works into an art historical context, and attempt to describe my experience of them. this will allow her to receive my thoughts, but also to boast over the quality of this work, and to use it as another place for my note-making about this exhibition. i'll try to set up her work, giving a little back story and making connections between different projects; then i'll try to dig into some of the experiences one has with the work, artists that are brought up in her visual conversations, and a discussion of what this work does as art.

Whittle's degree in painting continues to stay evident in a lot of the drawings, collaged works, and painting-based projects that she makes. these are populated by irregular shapes in bright colors that bring up play as a mode of working in the studio. I like the term critical play, which suggests that experimentation, risk, and discovery are meant to happen during the use of materials, as well as during time considering the work, journalling, or however else artists deal in their ideas. working with children a great deal, and also collaborating with performance artists and doing projects in her own art that have elements of games, dress up, and fantasy has laced most of her work with a performative element, even if it is sometimes implied rather than enacted. the drawing directly above is enclosed in a plastic envelope, with many of the shapes free-floating so that they can be shaken around and played with. i find this hysterical in one sense, because it is a loony, pleasant retaliation to Hans Hofmann's pursuit of the perfect composition, believing that he could find "the right" placement for shapes and rectangles in his paintings.

the drawings are sometimes intended as preparatory work towards sculptures. this is just one of the several ways that i think Lindsey Whittle should be considered in the lineage of Louise Bourgeois, whose own Insomnia Drawings (a huge inspiration in my life) are implicitly involved in the sculptures and installations she produces. observe:

drawing...

then sculptures.

other things in common with Bourgeois is the abstraction + internalization of the figure, the fluid integration of personal interests and biography with art history and art problems, and the easy movement from medium to medium, however they serve an end goal. my friend creates bodies of work that become inhabitable conceptual spaces, populated with the objects that come about from her sculptures (this is also a very Bourgeois idea).

this yellow form is part of a new series of objects that are made from a lycra she's found in japan stuffed with other fabrics so that graphic and cultural information can be gleaned through the different holes in the exterior 'skin' of the work. for almost as long as i have known her, Whittle has made various versions of biomorphic sculptures. these are often made in fabric, but have also been made from cut out shapes of plywood and carpet, bulky polystyrene forms nearly as large as a refrigerator, and clunky bundles of black clothing that have been polyurethaned and (if i remember correctly?) soldered upon.

these biomorphs are almost always (in my mind) versions of bodies that are meant to be stripped of a lot of the defining details of human bodies while still aiming to get at the girth, sensuous curves, and appendages that make up the figure. there have been different situations where these sculptures have been worn (and what else is the extreme forms of haute couture if not wearable sculpture?), like here, where my twin brother was one of the dance performers wearing her objects:

even now, one of her most recent works constitute at least a garment, although subversions of how a garment is taken to be meant may be in question.

part of what i'm attracted to in these giant green pants is that they feel like they fuse aesthetics from east and west, along with something alien, referencing fashion avant gardes from the 1990s (and maybe a little earlier). The earliest I could find in the way of images of Comme des Garcons came from the 2000s, but it's safe to say that the ideas one can see in these garments come from precedents Rei Kawakubo established earlier on in her career:

More recently, additional fashion houses have gotten a little more gumption to distort, expound, or abstract the figure with the forms their clothing takes. These Balenciaga pieces from 2008 have always reminded me of Lindsey's art:

i think these are subtle, the shoulder and hips and the way parts of the garments fit together, but they have sculptural considerations that change the shape of the body, and i find that idea interesting.

While Lindsey Whittle's work operates in sutleties at times, she herself explained to me recently how she envisions her art projects being combinations of Saturday morning cartoons and the explosive sections of Handel's Messiah. She engages her loves of basic visual building blocks rampantly and passionately, generating compositions that are as beguilingly awkward as often as they are symphonic in their sense of celebration. Compare some of her sensibilities with this print by Lynda Benglis (like Warhol's blue images of Jackie, I believe Benglis to be an undercurrent through many of the expressive visual objects being made and appreciated today. Look for constant references to her work):

Like Benglis and Bourgeois (who have been gracefully paired often enough by Cheim & Read Gallery that represents them both), while her art sometimes gives deliberate reference to the body in pieces that are wearable and conjure dialogues about fashion, her sculptures and installation projects contain largely proportioned physical presence. In some cases like this early installation element from a performance piece she created (see below... and i hope she's not embarrassed that i am pulling up older words to reinforce some of my observations), Whittle steps away from direct use of fashion forms a little by creating this dresslike object that is abstracted and has received painting and collage:

I wish she (and I) could have seen the full exhibition of Franz West's work in Baltimore. His ideas, as people describe them, juggle with critical play, interactive body works, pushing sculptures into things one carries, wears, sits on like furniture, and responds to directly in one's own body rather than just conceptually. Am I crazy to bring a little of Joan Jonas up when I think about West? He is much more aestheticized, never abandoning the sensual pleasure of color, object-ness, textures played against one another. But, like Jonas, visual objects are pushed into performative territory

a new love in my life is a brilliant, non-American art magazine called Art World. In the current issue I just got, there is an involved piece about Franz West's 'serious play.' And this amazing sculpture:

I may continue adding to this post as things occur to me. To be sure, this artist friend of mine (who I am awaiting approval to use her name on the internet) deserves more and better critical dialogue than I am providing here. And yes, I am totally unobjective. But I hope this little pile of words and references builds some references, gives some ideas of how I see her work, and opens some ideas up for me, you and her.

and the hairy ones shall dance there.

2009-03-03T13:40:00.007-05:00

the chic sister of second-hand sequins called my attention to the newest issue of Vogue in which Sara Mower tracks down Julien D'ys in her story on page 462 called "the magic maker." It seemed a relevant follow up to the "Hair Affair" at the Cincinnati Art Museum last week that i wrote about here. Hair seems to be an important conversation in art beyond my personal interests.

D'ys is not well known, but indelibly alters our initial impressions of all sorts of fashion lines in the hairstyles he produces for runway shows and photo shoots in many of the fashion magazines. he has been a foundational inspiration ni my own use of hair and a cornerstone in what can be done with the material that not only calls up historical stylizations, but updates and reconsiders how they will meet the body and clothing. almost always he explodes the concepts of hair into full blown whimsy and lush, voluminous piles. i could kick myself now for not taking up the offer his manager, Francois Leroy (i look for excuses to say that name), made for me to meet up with them in Paris in 2007. I got shy at the idea of meeting a master.

i first became a fan when he did the wigs for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute exhibition AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion:

It was enough to inspire me to see what else this hair artist was up to, and i discovered how often he works directly with the likes of John Galliano, Madonna, and museum exhibitions around the world. A couple of other quick samples:

Encountering D'Ys' artistry only continued to feed some of the updated ideas of period pompadour wigs that came up in Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. And also a wave of advertising from Juicy Couture (not by D'Ys):

these different points of using high piled wigs as a commentary and trend in contemporary fashion-cum-culture marks one of the rare incidents, now that i look back over several years, where i've felt compelled to get involved with the use and re-application of an image that makes its way through culture. At least from around 1997 when Petah Coyne did the hairworks you can see an image of in this post, this conversation seems to be staying relevant. As recently as Comme des Garcon's Spring 2009 Ready to Wear line, D'Ys was giving us these:

During her talk last week, Althea brought up how unknown and niche hairstylists are outside their field. Last night, Lawrence Weschler made a similar remark about muscle car detailers- this vast aesthetic field that is mostly totally unobserved by the art world. [if you are wondering why i am not giving you my notes from Weschler's talk, it is because it made a big impact on me and i'm still processing it]. If there is a main point to Mower's piece, it is the obscurity in which D'Ys operates, while he so dramatically influences our views of fashion, art history, and music videos. A reminder to take note of where all inspiration comes from as we are making and thinking about what's been made.

the freakin' weekend (we just had)

2009-03-02T10:25:00.014-05:00

for, um, years now, R. Kelly's jiving song "Ignition" has run through my head whenever we near the end of a week. Specifically when he pronounces with gusto "It's the freakin' weekend, baby/ I'm about to have me some fun" just before dissolving into bouncebouncebouncebounce... etc.

in the future, look through my posts labeled 'freakin' weekend' for a look into openings that will happen or have happened. when i can, i will try to give you a head's up for shows, openings, and events coming up that i've taken a shining to. and, like in this post, try to recap what i've seen after the fact.

this weekend, i had quite a bit of writing to do, namely completely the review i've written about Rebecca Seeman's exhibition that was recently on display at Pearlman Gallery at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. You can read my thoughts about Stellar Attraction here. What I did get out to see was a preview of Jake Constantine's exhibition at Creative Gallery entitled "A Comma in the Sky." Then on the following day, just before heading over to the French film marathon at the Art Academy, I got to swing past the opening of exhibitions by Cheryl Dunn and Antonio Adams at Country Club. Saturday night was the closing of a two person exhibition at our own semantics that featured installations of drawings by Kim Burgas + Steve Kemple. Because these two are friends and because I help run that gallery, my comments can't be objective, but they are sincere and heartfelt. So read on.

detail of painting by Jake Constantine

Constantine has found a number of ways to employ painting to comment on a fascination with technology. That's oversimplifying it, because the work included in the exhibition draws on unidentified flying objects, and two large paintings of views looking out from within open boxes of cereal to create alien terrains for the viewer to implicate themselves into. Obsolescence comes up several times, as the VHS is the subject of at least one painting and a couple of odd little sculptures (the sculptures are two small caskets, each containing a VHS of a well known film from the 1990s). Constantine has found about half a dozen different ways to use painting techniques and panel constructions to comment on television technology (and presumably our relationships with it) throughout the space, making the work itself like a kind of laboratory of options.

i was totally surprised and impressed by Cheryl Dunn's exhibition. the photographs themselves are easy to place into a history of documentary photographers that capture fringe groups in the american experience. Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin spring to mind, along with Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley from a contemporary set of art stars who capture a full spread of the sexual and life-of-the-party antics of their groups of friends and subcultures they participate in. in Dunn's case, at least for this exhibition, were I to guess her targeted subject matter, I saw concert revelers, images that brought up issues of poverty and homelessness, and scenes from more rural American areas.

what captured my attention was the nonlinear, unexpected ways in which the photographs were displayed in the space. the series of framed prints became an aggregate of objects for an installation, sometimes hung from the ceiling with string, mounted on the posts throughout the gallery space, and hung at different heights on the walls. a repeated image of chain link fence, printed off in a salmon colored glow, repeats, unframed, throughout the installation, interrupting, covering, and drawing together areas of the work.

these are images of other installations Dunn has made with her photographs that should give you some idea of what i'm describing of her show at Country Club.

i was impressed.

My words will fail and ruin most of the uncanny, clever moments of painting, imagery, and social commentary that take place in Antonio Adams' paintings. I did not like his work any less than Dunn's, in fact, quite the opposite. I was enchanted with his busty, surly portraits of several of the women who work at ArtWorks, and most of all, with his giant painting made in collaboration with Brian Joiner that is filled with superheroic depictions of comic book characters (superman, iron man, invisible woman, etc.), world political leaders (adolf hitler, osama bin laden, fidel castro, sara palin...), and pop icons like Paris Hilton as the superhero "Pink Plaster Paris." Occasional figures one would recognize from Joiner's other artwork, such as his exhibition at the Weston in 2004. It's been described to me by several people as Adams' Guernica, but I am dubious about defining a thing's legacy and future. Rather, I am happy to speak directly to this work.

drawing by steve kemple

Saturday night was the closing reception of:

It Is Raining & It Might Be Raining Or It Could Be Raining Though It Might Be Raining Or Maybe Not But We Could Be Wrong We Don’t Know But This Much We Already Know*
*new work by Kim Burgas and Steve Kemple

The title reflected well the pile up of poetic fragments of small drawings and drawing on long, scrolls, like run-on sentences that wrapped their way around the walls of the front space at the semantics gallery.

Last year sometime, I had the idea to introduce these two artists and see what would happen in a gallery between their art. Both had been making intricate drawings in ink of abstract contour lines and geometries that erroded into philosophical suspense. Burgas' work was featured in the Coffee Emporium's (my other office) first forray into the Final Friday gallery walk in OTR. I wrote it up, and you can see those remarks HERE by scrolling down a bit and finding the heading Art: Coffee Emporium. In 2007 and 2008, while Kemple was making reference to Chinese scroll paintings, Burgas, after living in Yemen, was drawing similar inspiration from the drawings and paintings of the Middle Eastern Region. Both were building vocabularies of abstract forms in both drawing and in electronic music. Steve performs music as ∆. You can hear samples of his work here. Kim has also explored a musical identity that is strikingly related to the work Steve makes. Her music as Helobiousgnome can be listened to here.

So you see that, coming into this exhibition, their ideas were crashing into one another and overlapping in the most interesting ways. They took the proposition and flew, unwinding scrolls and leaflets of drawings across the walls, and in steve's case, a fluorescent painting directly onto the walls themselves. For the closing reception, the artists invited several local poets to give a series of readings along with Steve Kemple's recent bits of prose. You can read his recent writings at one of his blogs. Oh, here's one of them. I was another one of the readers and it was a pleasure to share several newish 'skit' poems that portray a series of Scenes that take place between the clowns Harlequin and Pierrot. The bulk of their lines are drawn from Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot. In preparing for the reading, I decided to act out both parts myself. The audience seemed responsive. Two other close friends- Nick Hill + Kirsten Johnson- read as well. Kirsten blew the rest of us away. Damn, she writes and reads well.

beyond that evening, we've been working like mad at the front end of Eric Ruschman's install in the gallery. remember, that opening is this saturday from 7 to 10 pm.

and tonight, is Lawrence Weschler's lecture "Divergent Voices, Convergent Visions" at the CAC. Starts at 6:30. After 5 pm on Mondays, the CAC is free, even for non-members, so stop in!

he is missing a cheek. (jean (hans) arp takes the show)

2009-02-28T15:13:00.012-05:00

newly opened at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Surrealism and Beyond In the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (February 15 through May 17, 2009) continues the thoughtful, sweeping exhibition designs that I've come to appreciate at the museum since Aaron Betsky has been around.

White fabric partitions that evoke the kind of dreaminess of theater scrims meander through one of the two gallery spaces committed to the exhibition. Works by Marcel Duchamp, all basically "readymades" are suspended and spotlit in front of the various screens making a bold, sparse tableau that runs through the more densely hung walls of the spaces.

Even more breathtaking is the other gallery space where an array of surrealist objects by Duchamp, Man Ray, Jean (Hans) Arp, Joseph Cornell, Meret Oppenheim, and others are sitting scattered across an elevated mirrored platform. The cool lighting and irregular curvilinear edge of the dais is pond-like, almost evoking dreams, levitation, and the innovative installation art settings of Surrealist exhibitions in the time that these pieces were produced.

BUT i should say that I've hardly begun to absorb this exhibition. What I jot here are my initial impressions from a cursory walkthrough. These are the standouts from my first visit, and i expect that as i see this more times, i will write about additional pieces.

He Is Missing a Cheek.

Jean (Hans) Arp

Plaster, 1964

By standouts, I think that hands down the work I most gravitated towards was the collection and presentation of an unparalleled set of works by Jean (Hans) Arp. The Israel Museum will let you look at their collection online and you can savor all of these pieces on their site, here.

I work with abstraction in my own art and most easily relate to it in other artworks. Compared to many of the other selections on display, Arp realizes the extraordinary without clashing unnecessarily with the real world outside of the artwork. Simplicity, biomorphic solutions that bear some resemblance to Giacometti's surrealist objects in plaster (before he became disassociated with the movement) are practically psychoanalytic in how they can sustain viewers' projections and assumptions about meaning, no matter how far fetched.

Mediterranean Group

Jean (Hans) Arp

Plaster, 1941-42

In one space, a group of these stand in a procession down a broad pedestal, acting as an additional division between more two dimensional works. The resulting ghostly population seems to me to premise all kinds of sculptures since the time he made these works.

Navel and Two Thoughts

Jean (Hans) Arp

Bronze, 1932

There is a large Rene Magritte in the exhibition that is being used in most of the promotional material for this exhibition. But it is a small, somewhat crudely painting work also by Magritte entitled The Quandary of Painting, hung alongside a Morandi, whose legacy was recently rewarded with a fine exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here are those two paintings. Together, they are a lovely, contemplative little corner of wall almost near the very back of the exhibition:

If I were to express some crisis within my experience of the selections presented, it is the alarmingly sexual work of Hans Bellmer. I'm no prude. My aesthetics are a whirlwind of psychosexual, queer theory politics, but Bellmer's work insinuates violence and malevolence to me. That is not what disturbed me so much as the viewing public seeming to find his sex-toy dolls endearing. In future visits, I want to watch more of how the audience interacts with these works to ascertain if my observations from the one night were skewed.

Okay.

I'm off to an opening at Country Club and then to see a French film at the Art Academy.

Adieu.