Provocative Things: A Profile and Interview with Jo Ann Callis
In the early 1970s, Jo Ann Callis left Cincinnati, where she had grown up, for California. Some forty years later, FotoFocus brought her back. On February 24, 2016, she gave a lecture—really an annotated slide show of her work—at the Cincinnati Art Museum as part of its Lecture and Visiting Artist Series, and the following […]
On the Verge: Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape at Taft Museum of Art, February 20-May 29, 2016
How newly-founded must an American art museum be not to be awash in paintings by the painters of the Barbizon School, either on display or, perhaps more likely these days, in storage? The works of Corot, Rousseau, Millet, Daubigny, and a number of artists loosely allied with them represent an important but frequently not fully […]
as if hauntingly, it isn’t my home, it’s just where I live: on Do Ho Suh at the CAC
“and none of these is wholly compassed by a certain pernicious understanding of reading as escape. Escape from what? The “real world,” ostensibly, the “responsibility” of “acting” or “performing” in that world. Yes this reading posture registers as extroversion at least as much as introversion, as public as it does private: all a reader need […]
Living Things: Jochen Lempert’s Field Guide
Because we are so exposed to and distracted by images in our lives, we become desensitized to one of photography’s chief purposes: to observe. Jochen Lempert’s photography, now on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum in Field Guide: Photographs by Jochen Lempert, presents a captivating retrospective of the artist and biologist’s art, and one that, […]
Matthew Kolodziej’s “Patch Work” at Carl Solway Gallery
In the early part of last century abstraction began considering something as simple as the power of multiple intersecting lines. The clarity of the grid evolved to become, in Rosalind Krauss’ words, “modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” Matthew Kolodziej’s paintings begin at this point in more ways […]
“52 Tuesdays”: A Survey of a year before the easel
The works chosen for this landscape exhibit represent one artist’s efforts at the easel on a Tuesday, any given week of his sabbatical year. Kevin Muente’s successful descriptive representations are on the spot plein aire paintings which were not additionally edited in the studio. The paintings depict common landscape, not ostentatiously landmarked but painted closely, […]
Overwhelming Landscape: Jonathan Queen & Matthew Metzger at Miller Gallery, January 7-February 6, 2016
In the artist’s statement accompanying Matthew Metzger’s showing of ten new paintings at Miller Gallery, Metzger articulately lays out some of his goals: “In an overwhelming landscape, harsh, indifferent, opposite to arguably our most endearing human traits, we recognize our humanness.” In a nutshell, Metzger is here describing our relationship to the sublime, an aesthetic […]
Off the Wall: “The Other Window: Emil Robinson and Matthew Yaeger” at Wave Pool
One of those shows that hits you over the head in a good way, “The Other Window” features lush, rainbow-bright paintings both stationed on walls and on pedestals and the floor. It’s a funhouse sort of gig, but beautifully, self-consciously serious too. Emil Robinson has taken care of the wall portion with handsome, studious but […]
Authentic Narratives: Ohio’s Regionalists, 1915-1950
Looking back historically, one sees that Post World War II critics and curators endorsing the trends of expressive experimentation emanating from New York as the mechanism of modernism in the visual arts, eschewed figurative and narrative representations and the artists who employed these elements as outdated and behind the times. Regardless of the critics’ blessing, […]
“Fiber?” at C-LINK Gallery, Brazee Street Studios, through February 26, 2016
“Fiber?” is this year’s material-based exhibition in C-LINK Gallery at Brazee Street Studios. It features 13 Cincinnati-based artists: Sandra Palmer Ciolino, Judy Dominic, Cris Fee, Jennifer Zimmerman Garter, Kelli Gleiner, Pam Kravetz, Carla Lamb, Jacob Lynn, Karen Saunders, Barbara Stewart, Jenifer Sult, Jonpaul Smith, and Lindsay Whittle. When I walked into the show, it took […]