While the advent of Contemporary Realism was prompted by what seemed like a competition between abstract and realist art, Cincinnati artist Emil Robinson convincingly dismisses this division. The realist painter said, “I believe that all good painting stems from invention. Painting is the act of constructing an abstraction. The most intelligent and powerful realist work exists as a formal masterpiece.” This is evident in his work. In all of his paintings we see a connection between realism and abstraction. 'Axis Mundi' is a realization of such a connection pulling together form and content, style and genre, space and spirituality, art and viewer.
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“We were flying blind,” Jason Franz says of the founding of Manifest Gallery, which has in its short life (first exhibition, January, 2005) become one of the most interesting and dependably high quality art venues in the city.
Had the founders (Franz, his wife Brigid O'Kane, and Elizabeth Kaufmann, then a graduate student under his tutelage) patterned Manifest after an existing gallery? My question brings a laugh and a “No.” Nobody was doing what they projected: a space where student work and professional work could be shown together, without artificial separations.
Franz, then teaching in the art department at Xavier University, had become increasingly frustrated at students' lack of opportunity to show their work. He knew some of it was strong, deserved being seen, should be judged against established professionals. Not everyone realizes, he says, that “great work can be made by very young people.” He cites the high energy of youth and mentions Michelangelo, making masterpieces in his twenties; Picasso and Rembrandt, precocious in their teens; Dali, who “supposedly made such excellent work as a boy that his father gave up painting.” Franz had sponsored a project at Xavier that brought in established artists to work with the students “and they learned from each other. Why not show together?” he wondered.
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Leif Fairfield's recent exhibition, 'I'm Gonna Miss the Sea,' which was on view in July at Park + Vine, aptly encouraged awareness and contemplation about the materials and forms that make up the natural world. The exhibition's content complimented the store's mission to “ offer environmentally friendly and ecologically minded merchandise from suppliers in Cincinnati and elsewhere,” and to encourage “ people to become more aware of the environmental impacts of their consumption choices.” In three distinctly different modes of realization, Fairfield employed ink drawings, mounted photographs, and laser-cut sheets of dried seaweed towards what he referred to as a “ site specific installation.” That's a tricky phrase that is often interpreted by its users to direct the viewer's attention to the art's relationship to its context. In Fairfield's case, he makes mention of using discarded materials from Park + Vine's storeroom in the work. And while I struggled to find where these materials manifested in the works on display, I was interested in the link forged between the physical nature of his artwork and the exhibition space allocated to it within a shop.
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Axis Mundi: 
