Ghost Clouds

Ted Borman at The Miller Gallery Ted Borman’s astonishing new paintings, Ghost Clouds, are his most evolved work to date. They manage to combine rich references to art history and to contemporary popular culture wittily, intelligently, and seamlessly. Selecting a deliberately faux-naif painting style, Borman’s work is reminiscent of other artists prone to radical reductionism and […]

Shifting Beneath Our Feet

A Theory of Context and the Failure of the Ready-made. The ready-made is so entrenched in contemporary practice that its status is canonical.  So much of today’s  -and yesterday’s- conceptually driven work would be unimaginable without it, and yet by redefining art making for the past half-century or more, the ready-made has become emblematic of […]

Sheida Soleimani

Namaz Khaneh at Semantics Semantics opened Namaz Khaneh (house of prayer in Farsi) on Saturday, January 8; the first solo show by promising young Cincinnati artist Sheida Soleimani. The permanently semi-finished gallery space at Semantics serves as a good venue for this work which consists of a series of images showing the artist’s own roughly […]

Aaron Cowan

The Stories We Tell On January 7, Aaron Cowan wrapped up a respectable exhibition of new paintings at Aisle Gallery. The works on display –some exquisite, some ordinary- were predicated on an elaborate mapping mechanism developed by Cowan. Daily activity was collated, categorized, and compressed into a system of color codes deployed across the surface […]

Todd Reynolds

At The Weston Gallery Todd Reynolds’ oils’ and watercolors’ most salient contemporary features depict an America in which chronic violence is implied, hope is in abeyance. His quasi-narrative, usually large scale paintings rip the niceties and pieties off of middle class life, portraying, instead, a near-Surreal world of low-life characters, drug-induced or -inspired people in […]

Sara Vance

Art Collector and Patron Who does not have a collection? From Imelda Marcos (shoes) to Wayne Gretzky (coins), the urge to amass prized objects is widespread. When we fall in love with the tactile or the purely sensory, the things or events that talk back to us of their history, their beauty, their thrill, or […]

Towhey and Storer

                      The Greenwich House Gallery’s current show, DUO, features new work by two prominent Cincinnati artists—Tom Towhey and Greg Storer. Tom Towhey’s paintings have been described as surreal fantasies—fairy tales conjuring thoughts of Alice in Wonderland. Towhey often fills his canvases edge to edge with […]

Diana Duncan Holmes

Movement, Light, and Chance Diana Duncan Holmes presents a body of photo-based work in her solo exhibition Movement, Chance, Light at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery opening on December 17 and continuing through February 27th, 2011. Holmes’ work falls squarely within the contemporary mode of art-making in which traditional media are […]

Rosson Crow

The Artist is Present Place is the ostensible subject of Rosson Crow’s painted dreamscapes, and out of the seven canvases in her exhibition, Myth of the American Motorcycle, at the Contemporary Arts Center, only two are outdoor scenes. In all, the artist’s depiction of space is loose and layered, barely hinting at architectural detail or expansive […]

Fire In The Sky

  Looking Upward at Manifest Gallery Ivan Fortushniak returns to Manifest Gallery this month with a solo exhibition of 15 modest sized works that range from the prosaic to the superb. A god in his own way, Fortushniak fashions painted worlds that resonate with ambiguity and unease. In his universe figures from the past stare […]