Grim Fairy Tales: “Panjereh (Window)” New Work by Sheida Soleimani at Prairie Northside June 9th through 30th 2012
By: Regan Brown Photographs courtesy of Eric R Greiner “The Valley of Understanding: Here we all choose a different way and different rules to disobey.” ― from The Conference of the Birds (منطق الطیر) by Peter Sís (adapted from Farid ud-Din Attar) [ 1 ] My first of several consecutively less disfigurative “windows” onto […]
Geometrically Ordered Design: The Wholly Trinity
By: Dustin Pike “The triad is the form of the completion of all things.” -Nichomachus, Pythagorean philosopher This is my third article pertaining to the design field and again it is necessary to distinguish between art and design. Design in essence cannot be accomplished without specific degrees of control, and almost always has a definitive point […]
Hidden Architect
Althea Thompson shapes generations of young artists at the School for Creative and Performing Arts On a rainy day in Over-the-Rhine I arrive at the school. It is an odd feeling pulling over on Central Parkway alongside parents dropping off children in front of this colossal feat of modern architecture. It is not the […]
The Possibility for Framing: Suzanne Silver’s Cartoon Geometry
French sociologist Pierre Bordieu contended that all art functions as coded meaning for his study on art museums and their visitors in The Love of Art (1990). Differentiating between lower level of meanings – “superficial [and] fragmentary” – and higher level of meanings – which “incorporate and transform” – Bordieu maintained that both responses created […]
Production and Disclosure
In the current exhibition of Land of Tomorrow, E.V. Day’s Pollinator Series features pink-purple grid-like projections of the flowers from Giverny onto etched glass. They were constructed using digital scans of original flower pressings. So too was Serkan Ozkaya’s David (inspired by Michelangelo), a giant gold-painted, fiberglass double-sized reproduction of Michelangelo’s David, recently acquired by […]
Letter from Chicago: Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective
Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective Art Institute of Chicago May 22 to September 3, 2012 “Whaam! Bratatat! Varoom! The Art Institute of Chicago explodes this summer with the energy of Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) in the largest exhibition of the seminal Pop artist to date. More than 160 of Lichtenstein’s works, from the familiar to the completely […]
Master of the Not-So-Still Still Life
Still life is the most problematic—and most abstract—of genres, as the paintings seem to lack the grandeur associated with landscapes or with figures that can assume allegorical or mythological-religious resonance. Because the objects depicted are taken from ordinary life, however, they intimately speak to our daily existence and to our interior lives. Sheldon Tapley revitalizes, […]
A Godfather of Pop Becomes the Pop-father of a God: Jim Dine’s “Pinocchio (Emotional)” outside the Cincinnati Art Museum
With his new bronze sculpture, “Pinocchio (Emotional),” a scary-monster/sweetie-pie welcoming people outside the Cincinnati Art Museum, Jim Dine conjures a lot of pop-culture ghosts and nightmares while also paying homage to the original 1883 children’s novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. The statue is imposing, and the glazed patina of it harkens back to Rodin. High […]
Letter From New York: Anti-Gravity
This is the third in a series of a quarterly letters, which will cover painting shows in greater New York. Paintings shouldn’t simply be seen, they should change the viewer, suspend him or her in an altered moment. Although this is the hope each time a visitor enters a gallery, it is a rarity. A […]
Joseph Winterhalter at Clay Street Press
Joseph Winterhalter’s show “The Revolution Says:” at Clay Street Press, presents a portrait of a contemporary American society lacking political will and stifled by emotional inertia. He presents two large paintings on canvas, a series of small sculptural paintings, a wall sculpture of hand made tiles, and some lithographic prints. When listed this way, the […]