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 […]

“Outsiderness”

                        Outside of “Outsiderness” Thornton Dial, Courttney Cooper, and other “Hard Truths” In an essay in the catalog for “Hard Truths,” Thornton Dial’s brilliant retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (up until September 15, 2011), Greg Tate takes on the “hard truths” involved […]

The American Circus Poster

Out Of Kitsch and Into Dream: “The Amazing American Circus Poster:  the Strobridge Lithographing Company” allows art to encompass life in a way that transforms both.  The show, beautifully and meticulously curated and installed, has an epic quality, as if the curator were pulling together props and sentiments for a big-budget fever-dream/movie showcasing tropes from […]

Tony Dotson

Weebles Wobble and Boy Do They Fall Down “Tony Dotson: Shock and Awe” (up through April 9, 2011 at PAC Gallery in Walnut Hills) pushes Dotson’s smart-alecky yet innocently streamlined aesthetic into newer and fiercer territories. The show comes off like Philip Guston took all of his gritty/funky oeuvre through a car-wash and arranged each […]