WHERE IS THE LOVE? Julião Sarmento at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center
The wall text for Julião Sarmento’s exhibit (closing January 22, 2012) at the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art promises an exhibit built on “the concept of the book as an aesthetic and visceral object.” It goes on to report that many of Sarmento’s drawings exemplify the “sensuous gesture of holding a book.” […]
Love of Money is Relentless: Michael Scheurer at the Canco Gallery
To quote Alan Watts, a much wiser man than I, “A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.” Walking through the hall of the new Canco Gallery space in Northside, I got the feeling I was entering someone’s intrapersonal mindscape, filled with its fair share […]
Beginnings: George Inness in Italy
George Inness, as currently featured at the Taft Museum of Art through January 8, 2012, was not yet the master of a united nature concept when these early paintings were completed. Often noted as the most influential artist in the development of American Impressionism, that title would have been angrily denied by him, had he […]
“The Artist’s Craft” at The Carnegie
Though hardly indicative of the full breadth of contemporary craft art, the diversity of work presented in the “The Artist’s Craft” exhibit at The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center is a window into the ability of artists to use traditional materials to create surprising compositions that challenge, and resonate with, the viewers sensibilities. Arturo […]
Stupid on Purpose: “Peter Saul: Print Retrospective, 1966-2011”
Like doodles scribbled on the edges of homework, Peter Saul’s exquisitely moronic pictures (on display mostly in lithographic form at Carl Solway Gallery through December 22, 2011) have a rote yet somehow ominous quality, a blurry merger of the popular and profane. While seeming to be birthed from boredom and cynicism like punk rock, they […]
The Miller Gallery presents Contemporary Realism
Currently on display at the Miller Gallery on Hyde Park Square, is an exhibition featuring 25 artists whose work offers outstanding examples of contemporary realist painting. A movement towards figurative painting among artists has accelerated in the past five to eight years. Whether artists are painting portraits, interiors or still lifes, the work is incredibly […]
Bessie Wessel, A Historic Model
Once I thought of Bessie Wessel with some pity, a victim of her times, when women were permitted to study, but not to enjoy a full, satisfying career. Men, like Bessie’s husband, Herman, would pursue success in the world, while the ladies, God bless ‘em, tended the comforts that would enable the men to fight […]
Island Reflections
“We’re the reflections of our ancestors / we’d like to thank you for the building blocks you left us / ‘cause your spirit possessed us” – Talib Kweli, “Africa Dream” Emily Hanako Momohara’s current exhibition at PAC Gallery, “Islands,” consists of fifteen archival pigment prints on rich Somerset Velvet paper. The exhibition is a […]
New Gallery Opens with an Exhibition in Visualizing Ideologies
Third Party Gallery opened its first exhibition with a group show (the curator isn’t listed, but I assume it was Wyatt Niehaus, one of the co-founders) called Reductio ad Absurdum. According to the press release, the curator claims that its artists have “composed a dialogue between their work and a preexisting ideology, convention or concept […]
Take It Off
Manifest Gallery’s “3rd Annual NUDE” international competition showing through September 9, offers more than the vast undulating landscape of skin to be considered. The subjects have been folded, stretched, posed and exposed in every manner from hypnotic fragility, as in Bain Butcher’s “Untitled” graphite rendering of a young woman, to the Diebenkorn-ish palette knife interiors […]