Versoza’s World
“All things resist being written down,” Franz Kafka writes in an October 13, 1913 diary entry. Joey Versoza’s 2011artworks survey that resistance – objects refusing to go along with meaning, and meaning finding its way out of the experience of seeing. It’s hermeneutics […]
Insects and Astronauts:
Jeff Casto’s “Future Tense” at 1305 Gallery Jeff Casto’s shadowboxes and assemblages in “Future Tense,” his current exhibit at 1305 Gallery ending July 15, 2011, conjure Joseph Cornell’s Utopia Parkway workshop, as well as Pee Wee Herman’s Playhouse, extracting wistfulness from detritus, seriousness from folly. The toys, junk and other materials used in Casto’s art […]
Majr (Self) Gazn
Majr (Self) Gazn “Maidens of the Cosmic Body Running: Majr Gazr” is a collective exhibition featuring the work of area artists Denise Burge, Lisa Siders, and Jenny Ustick at the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art. The installation is an intensely immersive experience in which the group employs color, video, geometric abstraction, wall-drawings, […]
Meet The New Century
Same as the old century. (thankfully) Anytime an exhibition promises The New –whether by title or press release- I hear alarm bells. My immediate thoughts conjure up images of artworks that question, examine, provoke, or reconsider some previously ill-considered idea; and above all else, I expect to have my expectations challenged. So when I received […]
Odd Man Out
WHITE PEOPLE: A RETROSPECTIVE Photographs by Melvin Grier Quite a lot is going on in the engrossing exhibition of Melvin Grier’s photographs at Kennedy Heights Arts Center.. One narrative line is this city, reflected in a daily newspaper over a period of more than thirty years. Another has to do with the photographer himself, a […]
Narrative Figuration
Late Modernism, the last and least worthy phase of a wonderfully creative 150-year movement, petered out before the births of most of the painters in this show. In its wake, the art world, then mostly western in emphasis, embraced a new pluralism that […]
2 Artists/2 Perspectives
Jeff Shapiro and Don Reitz Although the exhibition at the Thomas J. Funké Gallery is named “2 Artists/2 Perspectives: Jeff Shapiro and Don Reitz,” the “perspectives” of these two ceramic artists seem more aligned than not. Visually Reitz’s and Shapiro’s work shares a roughness that borders on crude. It rudely slaps the refinement of much […]
‘New Male’ Portraiture at the Carnegie
Rob Anderson’s 24 small (3.5×5″) paintings (2009-present) of mostly male faces form a file along the south wall of the Rieveschl Gallery at the Carnegie. Anderson’s skill with his medium is evident. He precisely renders diverse hues, in defiance of the small dimensions of the board. The background is graphically reduced to large swathes of […]
Chris Bucher Goes the Distance at Prairie Gallery with Little Kings
The current show at Prairie Gallery, Little Kings, features documentary-style photography by Chris Bucher, who followed a group of youth boxers as they trained for the Ringside World Championships held in Kansas City, Missouri in 2008. Bucher worked with boxers who were training at a gym in Indianapolis called Jireh Sports Ministry. The kids he […]
What Would Nam June (Paik) Do?
What Would Nam June (Paik) Do? The University of Cincinnati’s College of Design Art Architecture and Planning hosted the Nam June Paik and the Conservation of Video Sculpture, Symposium and Exhibition (April 15-16, 2011), a coup for the College of Art, (long the red-headed stepchild of DAAP’s other more financially-driven Colleges). Thanks to a grant […]