Aeqai’s one combined summer issue, July/August, has just posted, and we think it gives an exceptional overview of the visual arts throughout our region, including both Dayton and Lexington. And with the 2016 FotoFocus biennial just around the corner, we’re including some extra reviews and articles about photography in this issue, as a kind of […]
Archive for August, 2016
Exhibition Review: “Dress Up, Speak Up: Costume and Confrontation”
August 14th, 2016 | by Tony Huffman | published in *, Summer 2016
The headless Food Faerie–a small, winged mannequin dressed in bright batik fabric carrying a satchel of artificial mangoes and poised to take flight–greets visitors to the exhibition Dress Up, Speak Up: Costume and Confrontation at 21c Museum Hotel in Lexington, Kentucky. The inaugural exhibition coincided with the opening of the museum-hotel on February 29, 2016, […]
The landscape of Performance Art in Cincinnati: Part I
August 14th, 2016 | by Chelsea Borgman | published in *, Summer 2016
To be quite honest, watching performance art has always kind of sqeaked me out. More often than not during a performance, I find myself shifting in my seat, picking my nails or enamored by a particularly interesting speck on the chair in front of me. It’s uncomfortable for me- something I could never do. It […]
“Bookworks XVII,” The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
August 14th, 2016 | by Karen Chambers | published in *
The 17th edition of the “Bookworks” exhibition boasts 48 works by 30 members of the Cincinnati Book Arts Society (CBAS), which organized the non-juried show. CBAS, founded in 1998, is dedicated to “creating a spirit of community among hand workers in the book arts and those who love books.” Aiming to showcase the most expansive […]
“Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt” Cincinnati Art Museum June 28,2016 – September 11, 2016
August 14th, 2016 | by Fran Watson | published in *, Summer 2016
In a world of “Soft Kitty”, “Hello, Kitty”, and endless cute kitty videos, an ancient era which revered, feared and exalted cats is pretty hard to imagine. Yet, these quite ordinary, household pets are historically elevated at the Cincinnati Art Museum to “Divine Felines”. Loaned from the Brooklyn Museum’s vast collection, it reveals a dignified history […]
“Everything But the Meaning”: A Review of Joel Meyerowitz, Seeing Things: A Kid’s Guide to Looking at Photographs (New York: Aperture, 2016)
August 14th, 2016 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
In the past 35 or so years, Joel Meyerowitz has seen more than a dozen monographs of his photographs published, and has contributed pictures and text to others. He has become known by now, more or less successively, as a street photographer (one of the earliest to have worked extensively in color), a landscape photographer, […]
George Dureau’s Singular Family Portrait
August 14th, 2016 | by Zack Hatfield | published in Summer 2016
George Dureau took photographs of amours and amputees. He took photographs of athletes and artists and the anonymous. Mostly, he took photographs of nude black men. He posed them gently into sturdy postures so that their bodies echoed the images of classic Greek deities. He called these people family. Now, Aperture has bound up a […]
Photo Road Trippin’
August 14th, 2016 | by William Messer | published in Summer 2016
Recently I took a road trip from the Queen City to the Motor City to see The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip at the Detroit Institute of Arts. On the way back I stopped at the Toledo Museum of Art to catch The American West: Photographs of a New Frontier. Appropriately, The Open Road is a traveling […]
The Antarctic Sublime & The Elements of Nature: Water at the DAI
August 14th, 2016 | by Susan Byrnes | published in Summer 2016
As I write this, there is an excessive heat warning in Cincinnati, with heat index values reaching 102 degrees. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has just reported that June temperatures marked 14 consecutive months of record-breaking heat across the globe, with the average sea surface temperature also reaching a record high. One thing […]
The Great Change
August 14th, 2016 | by Jenny Perusek | published in Summer 2016
Changing Times for Changing Fashion is the tagline for the costume design exhibition, Dressing Downton, currently on display at the Taft Museum of Art. With those five words, the curators perfectly sum up the societal changes that serve as the show’s main theme. In just over a decade, nearly every aspect of British society changed. […]
Intimate (and Inspiring) Relations
August 14th, 2016 | by Katie Dreyer | published in Summer 2016
Walking into Brazee studios Friday night the last thing I expected was to find inspiration outside of the art world, but that’s exactly what was waiting for me. As soon as I walked into the room I headed to the back installation space and was taken by Sophia Shiff’s drawing “Cordelia”. Her style may look […]
REMNANTS and RESONATE
August 14th, 2016 | by Marlene Steele | published in Summer 2016
The Dayton Visual Arts Center presents four artists in a themed exhibit entitled “Remnants” that seeks to message re-actualization, memories and dream-visioning with the detritus and castoffs in life. The rising tide of accumulating residue in our lives both domestic and at the work place is undoubtedly a common experience. Even when we have tidied […]
Engaging, Eerie, Odd and Also Beautiful, Erica Rawlings’ New Series Bares Raw Emotion
August 14th, 2016 | by Anise Stevens | published in Summer 2016
“Art begins with resistance–at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.” – Andre Gide The life of an artist requires discipline, determination, and the willingness to fail. More so, it requires a level of perseverance that can become increasingly difficult to sustain when life itself […]
Lisette Chavez’s “Three Hail Marys, Two Our Fathers”
August 14th, 2016 | by Jack Wood | published in Summer 2016
Lisette Chavez’s Three Hail Marys, Two Our Fathers opened on San Antonio’s Second Saturday, July 9th at Provenance Gallery located at 1906 South Flores St. Provenance Gallery is located within a much larger complex. It’s a warehouse of sorts, situated around a railroad crossing, full of other gallery spaces and artists’ studios opened to the […]
Man Cave as Museum Piece
August 14th, 2016 | by Annabel Osberg | published in Summer 2016
“Man cave” is a term used by both Guillermo del Toro[1] and press materials for his exhibition, “Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters” to describe the celebrated film director’s atelier. More formally styled “Bleak House,” it is a suburban abode filled with panoplies of objects that inspire del Toro and some artists and designers […]
Judge for a day: The “Big Show” and its “Refusés”
August 14th, 2016 | by Joelle Jameson | published in Summer 2016
To be an artist is to be a perpetual reject. That is why we are constantly trying to find ways to “hack” submissions, to catch juries red-handed rejecting something good for bad reasons. Stories abound nowadays of a writer submitting with both female and male names to see which gets accepted first, or submitting already-published […]
Make or Break: Oscar Guerra
August 14th, 2016 | by Jack Wood | published in Summer 2016
Make or Break: Recent Work by Oscar Guerra opened at Silkwörm on July 9th on San Antonio’s Second Saturday and featured a healthy selection of Guerra’s paintings and collage works. Inasmuch as there are paintings and collages, Guerra thinks of almost everything he does as part of the same process which he considers to be […]
Fotofolio – Carol Isaak
August 13th, 2016 | by Kent Krugh | published in Summer 2016
“Optical Images” Carol’s statement: The human eye can be teased and entertained, can struggle to find what is real and what is artifice, what is on the surface and what is in deep space. I have produced […]
A Conversation with Mandy Kordal
August 13th, 2016 | by Tim Karoleff | published in Summer 2016
Mandy is an incredibly amicable person, with design talent and know-how that far surpasses her peers. Her feel-good fashion is not only an ode to her optimism, but a call-to-arms for sustainable practices in the fashion industry. Mandy is unmatched in her ability to create ethically produced high-fashion garments that exude the pleasures of the […]
Profile of Kim Krause
August 13th, 2016 | by Jane Durrell | published in Summer 2016
Kim Krause’s paintings are teasingly near to representational, until you realize they are all about the interaction of shapes and colors to the exclusion of other considerations. These colors are seldom nuanced; they are flat and precise but infinitely varied. The shapes themselves are nearly figurative, with hints of being more so. What goes on […]
Civic Garden Center: An Oasis in the City
August 13th, 2016 | by Laura Hobson | published in Summer 2016
Need a respite from a busy office, deadlines and a hectic work schedule? Look no further than the Civic Garden Center located at the intersection of Reading and William Howard Taft Roads in Avondale. An oasis originally named Sooty Acres owned by Cornelius J. Hauck, Senior, who settled in this location in 1942, lies […]
A Simple Gift
August 13th, 2016 | by Christine Huskisson | published in Summer 2016
This is our fourth installment of the Louis Zoellar Bickett Series produced by UnderMain in collaboration with AEQAI and so many others. For the first three installments visit: By The Hand of a Conceptualist, A New Broom Sweeps Clean, and Collapsing Art and Life. The series was inspired not only by Louis’ life and work, but […]
Poems by Louis Zoeller Bickett
August 13th, 2016 | by Louis Z. Bickett | published in Summer 2016
THE HANDSHAKE OF A LITTLE GIRL Shaking hands with the left hand is awkward and upside down. I lift my right hand with the left just below the elbow and deploy the handshake of a little girl, the grip of which makes any egg safe. July 14, 2016 STILL SINGING A STORY […]
Mischa Berlinski’s “Peacekeeping”
August 13th, 2016 | by Daniel Brown | published in Summer 2016
Spring and summer of 2016 have brought us some of the best new fiction in ages, particularly and unusually during the summer season best known for steamy beach reading and lifestyle novels. Younger writers from around the world are flocking to the novel, and/or short fiction, with great success, and we don’t even have to […]
Jo Baker’s “A Country Road, A Tree”
August 13th, 2016 | by Daniel Brown | published in Summer 2016
With the loss of the great English novelist Anita Brookner, we are most fortunate to find a near equivalent in the quality of her writing and the penetration of her analyses in Jo Baker, whose very recently published A Country Road, A Tree is one of 2016’s best offerings in fiction. I first read Baker’s […]
Stephanie Danler’s “Sweetbitter”
August 13th, 2016 | by Daniel Brown | published in Summer 2016
Stephanie Danler’s debut novel, Sweetbitter, is one of the summer season’s great hits, and it richly deserves all the praise it’s been garnering. Danler’s narrator/protagonist, Tess, is one of thousands of small town/provincial seekers of a more urbane, fast-paced life (two of whom, historically, included Andy Warhol and Halston) in New York. Determined to shed […]
Adam Haslett’s “Imagine Me Gone”
August 13th, 2016 | by Daniel Brown | published in Summer 2016
Mental illness is one of the most difficult topics to make into fiction, I think, so that Adam Haslett’s new novel, Imagine Me Gone, is that much more exceptional in its complete success in tackling this issue in the first place, and making its ravages on one family intense, realistic, and all-encompassing. Since the novel […]
Lauren Belfer’s “And After The Fire”
August 13th, 2016 | by Daniel Brown | published in Summer 2016
Lauren Belfer’s new novel, “And After The Fire”, joins Sunjeev Sahota’s “The Year of the Runaways”, Jo Baker’s “A Country Road, A Tree”, and Kelly Kerney’s “Hard Red Spring” as one of the four best novels published to date in 2016. It’s part fiction, part real history; I used to be annoyed by books with […]
