A Modest Scale
An interview with Dennis Harrington and review of the current exhibitions at the Weston Art Gallery
Some of the best shows in the city take place in a space only marginally hospitable to art, the Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts, 650 Walnut Street. Despite space challenges, the exhibitions are inviting and handsomely installed. Artists showing there often say how pleased they are with the way their work looks in the Weston space, and how good it is to collaborate with director Dennis Harrington and his staff. As a frequent viewer, I've noticed again and again how well the artists play off each other. Recently, I asked Harrington how he does it.
"In going over proposals, which we do on an annual basis, connections begin to appear. It's subjective. I might see something while a different person would see something else. But I've always thought the Weston's three spaces - the public space upstairs and particularly the two galleries downstairs - lend themselves to solo exhibitions. We always have at least one group show a season, though. It's more difficult and challenging but important to do. You may remember 'Altered States' from a few years ago. It was twelve artists, with one exception all photographers. The idea was manipulation, the notion of something being somehow altered. It was a way to show a larger group of artists without doing twelve shows."
The Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery's ongoing mission is to expand exhibition possibilities for artists of our portion of the Midwest, and to give the general public recurrent opportunities to see what's going on in the studios and in the heads of those artists. Its location in the Caesar Pelli - designed Aronoff Center for the Arts is an afterthought. When the Center's plans were well underway a number of people said "Whoa! If this is for the arts, where are the visual arts?" Hum, hadn't thought of that. Alice and Harris Weston were prominent among the questioners who helped to make the gallery happen. Space was found in the still shaping plans, street level and basement at the Walnut and Seventh Street corner. As I say, it's not ideal.
"The upper gallery is always challenging," Harrington says. This street level space is twenty-four feet high, except where it shoots up to forty-four feet, and windowed on two sides. There are two large, load-bearing columns to work around; the south wall is masonry. There's a staircase down to the lower galleries and another up to the Arts Center's main section, as well as a Walnut Street and a Seventh Street entrance. It is, in fact, a lobby space that must accommodate people moving through. Challenging is certainly one way to describe it. "The pool of artists who can work in that space continually shrinks. We'd love to be able to offer larger commissions. We've always stretched a bit to try to make these projects happen. Installing Tom's work (Divided House, by Thomas Macaulay, in place through June 7) was very labor intensive but Tom, thankfully, was flexible. Because of the previous installation we had only three days to put it up, but we had assembled the boxes downstairs once the other two shows - all wall-mounted - were hung."
Divided House, a site-specific work if there ever was one, is perhaps the best use that space has ever been put to. Macaulay takes commercial corrugated containers, cube-shaped, eighteen-inch cardboard boxes in pristine white and others, twice that size, in work-a-day brown, to line out a house-like space one can walk through, coming on surprise turns and unexpected vistas. The big brown boxes cut a diagonal shaft through the space, with a small zag midway, allowing the viewer to form a personal take on what divides this house. The piece rises approximately twenty feet into the gallery's expansive upper reaches - what to do with all the space up there is one of the problems the room poses for artists working in it. The boxes' squared corners echo shapes of both the windows and the bricks of one wall. During installation, the director says, "I was fretting about problems with people who were just walking through, but I think we've gotten past that."
Downstairs, also through June 7, are two photography shows, very different from one another. "As you put individual shows together, you try to group so that there's some link," says Harrington. "I intentionally put Michael [Michael Wilson: 'The Day of Small Things' and Fredrik [Fredrik Marsh: 'Transitions: The Dresden Project'] together. I think they complement each other. Michael's work is small and intimate, using traditional processes, while Fredrik uses transparencies and works large-scale. What's been interesting is that people seeing the shows link Tom's and Fredrik's work - the grid, the portals. It's a pleasant surprise, because I didn't see it. I thought Tom would be the odd man out."
We are now walking through the downstairs galleries and I say, about the interesting mix in 'Transitions' - both black and white and color prints, in three different formats - "It seems to me that this just flows. One picture leads to the next. How do you make that happen?"
"I always say it's a two-way street. We want to put the artist in the best possible light. Kelly O'Donnell [assistant director] and the staff at large are very supportive of what the artist wants to do. Both Michael and Fredrik had so much work to choose from. Fredrik gave me contact sheets, and I just went through and circled everything I liked. Two days later he sent down a layout, so I followed up that, then he came down, and we moved some stuff around, we modified, I added some pieces." Needless to say, it's in moving "some stuff around" modifying, making choices, that what looks like serendipity takes place. Actually, it is the exercise of a particular talent. "Fredrik was happy with the final result."
As he should be. These splendid photographs of spaces made for people but absent of human presence command the eye. Black and white prints are mixed in with color, and the three different formats Marsh uses keep things interesting. The works come from an extended series of photographs made over a period of several years in Dresden, Germany, featuring interior spaces of abandoned factories, apartments, hotel rooms. Transitions begins in the space surrounding the staircase and continues in the immediate gallery beyond. Farther on, to the left, is the other downstairs gallery. Ceilings on this level are ten feet high, adequate but not expansive, and the walls in my memory are always white, so never detract from a necessary sense of space.
"Michael, on the other hand, was completely happy to not be involved," Harrington says as we move into 'The Day of Small Things.'"This space seems to me more intimate and right for Michael's works, so much smaller than Fredrik's." The works are very small indeed, often a few inches each way. If Marsh's work, formal, fixed, almost seems to stop time, Wilson catches moments on the fly.
Where Marsh finds subject matter in the absence of people, Wilson often finds it in people themselves. Much of the personal work, done not on assignment but for his own satisfaction, abstracts out a portion of a figure. For instance: bare legs, in high-heeled sandals. He can also find poetry in unlikely places, as in "Tires, Dry Lake Bed" or the delicate "Leaf Like Lace." Although Wilson is best known for album covers and photographs of musicians - he's worked with Lyle Lovett, for instance, since 1991 - Harrington was interested in showing the full range of his work.
The problem: how to make these tiny prints, some as small as four and a half by four and a half inches, look good on a wall. One solution: three somewhat larger prints Harrington calls "an odd ball series," echo Wilson's own matching up of prints as triptychs and hung together provide a focal point on a wall with a number of small prints framed in large mats. "He has always experimented with different formats, and I thought of this as a way to break out these smaller images, with the mats around them. Makes it not one continuous row. But because of the mats, you can hang various things together. I like some as units. There are 50 or more images here, but I still think - at least it doesn't seem to me - it's not overwhelmingly crowded. The mats add breathing room. This is an overview of twenty-five to thirty years of work."
I say to Harrington that I know I've asked him questions without easy answers, and he says, of installation, "For me it's one of the most interesting aspects of the job. It's a puzzle. It's partly intuition. Someone else would do something different. But I think it's critical to present work cleanly and neatly. Sometimes, in commercial galleries, there's too much stuff, too much clutter, it detracts from the work. Sometimes artists want to show too much work, and lose the power.
"I'm grateful to be working on a fairly modest scale. This is a fairly small space. I've been here from the beginning, and it always provides a challenge."
House Divided: Site-Specific Environmental Installation by Thomas Macaulay.
'Transitions': The Dresden Project. Photographs by Fredrik Marsh.
'The Day of Small Things': Photographs by Michael Wilson.
The Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery, 650 Walnut Street, Cincinnati, OH. April 10 - June 7, 2009.
Michael Wilson's work also showing at the Iris BookCafe, 1331 Main St, Cincinnati, OH through August 7, 2009.
