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, […]
Dana Michel and the Yellow Towel
Black Hoodie. Back Turned. Hands reaching in pockets. That’s all Dana Michel did at the beginning of her performance piece. She didn’t sashay out, say a word, or turn around. Yet this simple combination seemed to symbolize more than just a casual introduction. It reminded me of the “Ferguson” painting by Titus Kaphur that graced […]
Nanook of the North
The Woodward Theater started as a movie house and this February it lit up again with the black and white flicker of Film. The cold light of ‘Nanook of the North’ seemed to produce an uncanny feeling of familiarity, as if this space remembered its calling as a silver screen instead of a punk rock […]
“Vestiges,” YWCA Women’s Art Gallery
The thesis of “Vestiges” is set out on the announcement card: “. . . Brenda Tarbell, Cheryl Pannabecker, and Carrie Pate explore the natural world and relationships, bringing to the surface the unnoticed, hidden, or unexpressed.” There was something about the exhibition title that seemed off to me so I went to the dictionary. “Vestige” […]
Happy Limbo of Suspended Metaphors
First Impressions Looking at a body of work is like looking at a person. As the acquaintance (or viewer) you are given clues about the person but without context, you’re shown their present with no sense of the past, and it’s up to you to piece it all together into one sum of a human. […]
Who are WE– The Jimi Jones Worldview
Jimi Jones, ever the graphic designer, is in the billboard business as evidenced by his current show at the Springfield Museum of Art. Jones views his role as an artist who explores and celebrates the African American cultural production as well as being a storyteller in an historical context. His large oil and acrylic canvases […]
The Battle of Versailles
November 1973, the Palace of Versailles. In what is now known as The Battle of Versailles, five American designers took on five French designers in a runway show originally organized to help raise funds for the iconic palace. Everyone was there, and truth be told, it was well assumed that French designers Marc Bohan […]