Talk and Quaff: Our Annual Celebration and Fundraiser
To thank the community for its support of the journal and to solicit help to sustain its future, ÆQAI is holding a fundraiser, the 2nd "Talk & Quaff", on Friday, April 8, 2011, from 5:30 - 8:00 p.m. at The Alice F.and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery, located in the Aronoff Center for the Arts, 650 Walnut Street, downtown. The suggested minimum donation is $15.00 and includes a wine tasting, hors d'oeuvres, door prizes, and a silent auction of works on paper by local artists, including Robert Anderson, Daniel O'Connor, Tim Parsley, Emil Robinson, Tina Tammaro, Barbara Selnick, Alan Pocaro, Eric Griener, Dan Newman and Cynthia Hoskin. Attendees will also enjoy The Weston Art Gallery exhibits "Fibercations" and "Narrative Figuration," the latter a group show curated by Daniel Brown, ÆQAI's editor, who will speak at 7:00 p.m. Proceeds from the event will support ÆQAI and its activities. Email editor@AEQAI.com for more information.
Click here for a PDF of our full press release.
Off the Wall, Into the Night
Editor's note: ÆQAI welcomes this essay by the Cincinnati Art Museum's Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Jéssica Flores and we also welcome Executive Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum Aaron Betsky as ÆQAI's regular architecture and design critic.
The environmental context is often an afterthought when we view art, although the surroundings set the stage for the work. Everything from the size of the room and the lighting, to the formality or casualness of the venue affects our perceptions. The default installation setting of white gallery walls, especially when dealing with two-dimensional art works such as painting and drawing, is supposed to provide a clean slate allowing for total focus on the art. However, even the white cube has countless variables, demonstrating the absence of a truly neutral viewing experience.
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"I Became My Dream" - Jymi Bolden
What instincts guide us when we first meet other people? Is it our reading of gestural clues, a tilt of the head or an expression? Or, is it something more basic that leads one to know that Jymi Bolden is a warm, intelligent man ready for a hug?
Bolden presides over Art Beyond Boundaries on Main Street in Over-the-Rhine, a four-year-old gallery that does not so much try to foster art by the disabled as to create a space that is a platform for art first, circumstances second. The gallery embraces a variety of media, from poetry to paintings to ceramics.[Full article]
Made Space: The Forms and Absences of Everyday Landscapes
In the religion of architecture, space is the deity, or the guiding spirit. It is the mystical property by which architects want their buildings to be judged, it is that which, when it is truly great, transports them into rapture. The strange thing about space is that you cannot see it. Nor can you feel it, smell it, hear it, or taste it. It emerges out of proportions, lighting conditions, sequences, and landscape arrangements in ways architects can articulate only in form. Space is always implied. [Full article]
Jun Kaneko: An Exhibition of Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings & Prints
Entering Jun Kaneko's solo exhibition at the Carl Solway Gallery, I was smacked in the face by his Nagoya Wall - Tile Wall, 1987, even though the ceramic work is installed on a freestanding wall at the back of the corridor gallery. It did more than draw me into the space, it compelled me to enter, passing by—or bypassing—the artist's wall works of oval platters and rectangular wall slabs. [Full article]
Heimlich Maneuvers: "House, New work by Tony Becker" at Prairie
I have lived in Northside for almost seven years now, so I am embarrassed to admit that my recent visit to Prairie Gallery to see House: New Works by Tony Becker on a rainy Wednesday afternoon was my first trip to the space. A second floor walk-up with a mission of "Engaging communities through art," Becker's installation of hand-folded and hand-decorated paper houses is a perfect counterpart to Prairie's altruistic purpose. Bringing my two-year old son into a gallery space with artwork installed at his height might not have been the most obvious good decision...but much to my surprise, it was the perfect kind of art exhibition for him to experience. [Full article]
Jimmy Baker: Remote Viewing
Jimmy Baker makes difficult art, and makes it extremely well. His solo show at Contemporary Arts Center, Remote Viewing, is only ten paintings but they are quite enough for the long, thin gallery that stretches along the south side of the CAC's second floor. The works hang at a distance from one another, as they should. Any closer would invite visual chaos. [Full article]
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 piece in a parking lot for an impromptu flea market. Like Guston, Dotson uses composition to eliminate decoration, and most of the images, painted in house-paint hues, come off as simple and egalitarian as illustrations in elementary-school text books. [Full article]
Space Odyssey: Selections from the International Drawing Annual 6
his year's Selections from the International Drawing Annual 6 at Manifest Gallery boil down to a duel between two conceptions of pictorial space. On one side, representing a traditional approach to an illusionistic environment is Lance Moon's 34" X 46" graphite on paper Untitled (Child With Bull). On the other, California artist Alexis Manheim's True Love Machine —a 42" X 46" work of ink, pastel, and graphite- epitomizes a shallow, post-cubist, abstract space. Hung as if facing-off, each of these pictures make a persuasive argument for its own graphic vision. [Full article]
In Dutch: Contemporary Design from Local Collections
When I walked into "Going Dutch: Contemporary Design from Local Collections" at the Cincinnati Art Museum, I was overwhelmed—by the volume of words covering all four walls of the diminutive gallery—and under-whelmed by the number of objects on view—19. Given that ratio, I thought the words better be good. [Full article]
