Review of Happy Valley or Helltown

The inaugural exhibit of Prairie Gallery's Happy Valley or Hell Town anchors it to a sense of place, the Northside community. Voss Finn's sculptural installation Figment 7 and Samantha Johnson's photomontage Spring Grove Avenue act as an archive of the neighborhood. According to the Northside Business Association the area was originally called Cumminsville, but it was also known as 'Happy Valley' or 'Hell Town' depending on which side of the tracks you chose to stand. Hell Town was the western side of Cumminsville occupied by honkytonks and barrelhouses. 'Canawlers,' the boatsmen who worked on the Mill Creek, frequented the bars and 'raised hell.' As for 'Happy Valley,' Dave Rosenthal, founder of Prairie Gallery, says the name could be derived from the circuses that paraded down Knowlton's Corner. Cumminsville was a lively entertainment and business district and a place for Cincinnatians to escape the city.
In the context of this exhibition, Voss Finn uses the discarded objects of closed factories and discarded trades. He 're-purposes' these discarded objects, materials of 'forgotten lives and activities,' into site-specific installations. Finn strung these found objects from ceiling beams and exposed ductwork, including such materials as piled cardboard tubes, dowel rods in a painter's bucket and plastic ties fixing drumsticks to tent stakes. It is appropriate for the artist to exhibit at Prairie, for the building is re-purposed architecture: an appliance store, turned gallery with a bakery on the ground floor.
According to Finn's statement artists are 'the keepers of society's dream life,' and by shaping these found objects into a sculpture he is 'bringing forth a reordered reality.' This concept was more apparent in some of Finn's other work such as his 2002 installation at the Carnegie Center for the Visual and Performing Arts. His large, richly colored machine tool compositions were fantastical. The elements assumed new form and personality, spiraling up from the floor and cascading down from the ceiling like geysers and cyclones. The blurring line between the real object and the artist's imagination was more visible. Figment 7 has strong points of interest; for example, a seat cushion and green cellophane appear to be splattered against the upper wall. His past 'cumbersome' machine parts may have balanced out the lighter materials in the present installation.
Johnson's photomontage seems to crawl across three sides of the gallery wall, acting as a virtual walking tour of Northside. It stretches from lower Spring Grove, just north of Dalton Street, to somewhere just shy of the cemetery. Johnson photographed Spring Grove Avenue over a course of days, traveling by bike and foot. Her photographs illustrate different approaches to the same object. Some are black and white and grainy, with uneven tonality. Others have a Technicolor quality of early color film. There are close-ups of brick buildings, which provide textural information, and also wide 'documentary' shots. She printed the digital photographs with a copy machine, then transferred them onto paper using lacquer thinner. She stitched together the resulting images with black thread.
She does not place the street signs, warehouses and numerical addresses in a linear order, revealed by the repetition and displacement of objects. For example, the sign for interstate 75 north and a bent chain-link fence are repeated in the compositions. The effects of time are visible in Johnson's weathered-looking photographs: by the 1960's most of Northside's once booming industries packed up and left. The final effect is that Johnson's walking tour of Spring Grove Avenue is more like James Joyce's Dublin, a stream of consciousness. From an archival perspective it is actually a more accurate depiction of how we truly remember a place. Our minds rarely travel an orderly, fluid path. Our memories are fragmented into snap shots and impressions.
Johnson takes a street with wide expanses, desolate, and sometimes ugly spots and condenses it into something beautiful. By stitching together the photographs with black thread they almost become delicate, like a quilt, and yet the thread also resembles barbed wire. Johnson chose not to have exposed more of what gives Spring Grove Avenue its rough edge; the softness of her work provides an interesting contrast to the sharp angles of Finn's installation.
Northside has undergone decades of change, but its revitalization is a throwback to its past. A circus of characters parade down Hamilton Avenue every Fourth of July. Northside is still known for its bars, restaurants, and galleries and even for its crime. Thus, the dichotomy of Happy Valley and Hell Town persists.

- Selena Reder