July/August 2018

A Humane Touch in Product Placement

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in *, July/August 2018

A Humane Touch in Product Placement

Over the last year, Thunder-Sky, Inc. has been probing visual culture vis-à-vis consumers, products, and marketing, as this year’s theme has revolved around “Product Placement,” with the gallery presenting exhibitions that frame production and commerce. Certain shows over the last year at this gallery have been right on the mark regarding pop art aesthetics and […]

Traipsing Ballroom Halls

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

Traipsing Ballroom Halls

Carl Solway Gallery’s director Michael Solway has organized the first installation of video art and kinetic sculptures at Cincinnati’s newly and ornately restored Memorial Hall ballrooms. The intermedia exhibition, titled Body Language, features a myriad of carnal moving images and works by Detroit artist Cynthia Greig and Cincinnati natives Rachel Rampleman and Alan Rath. The […]

Ivan Ivanov at the Eva Ferris Gallery at Thomas More College

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

Ivan Ivanov at the Eva Ferris Gallery at Thomas More College

One of this summer’s most impressive shows, paintings by Ivan Ivanov, was on display at the Eva Ferris Gallery at Thomas More College.  Ivanov tackles big, heroic themes in his works, which are abstract, reminding us  in many ways of American Abstract Expressionism, but his themes are very much his own and his painterly style […]

Textuality: Art Incorporating Text and Letterforms

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

Textuality: Art Incorporating Text and Letterforms

For the most part, human beings are a verbal species.  Since time before recorded history, people have utilized language, both written and spoken, to communicate with one another.   The exhibit Textuality : Art Incorporating Text and Letterforms, now on display at Manifest Gallery, sets out to explore the notion of text and wordplay via the […]

Benjamin Cook: History Abridged at Swanson Contemporary, Louisville, Kentucky August 15th – September 22nd

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

Benjamin Cook: History Abridged at Swanson Contemporary, Louisville, Kentucky August 15th - September 22nd

Currently situated within Swanson Contemporary are paintings and installations composed of paintings situated within murals that make up Benjamin Cook’s exhibition, History Abridged—they’re fun, they’re difficult, they’re comedic, and they’re nostalgic. The show could easily feel overworked with this much imagery—but it doesn’t. It references a certain conflicting brevity of time and expansion of time […]

Sophie von Hellermann Experiments with Cultures in her Painted "Petri Dishes"

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

Sophie von Hellermann Experiments with Cultures in her Painted "Petri Dishes"

Cleverly convoluting scientific and sociological meanings of the word “culture,” Sophie von Hellermann’s paintings portray clear disks brimming with mysterious vignettes in “Petri Dishes,” her show at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in Los Angeles. Each canvas functions as a petri dish for von Hellermann’s painted explorations where microbiologic vessels serve as symbolic spheres for testing paint’s […]

Lloyd Library Exhibition

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

Lloyd Library Exhibition

The Lloyd Library, to my knowledge, is the first entity ever to use as exhibition title the key word broken into syllables, with accompanying accent.  Phar’-ma-cog-no-sy Illustrated: A History of Natural Pharmaceuticals, on view there now, does just that, and those of us not pharmacologists are grateful. The term, the exhibition tells us, “is planted, […]

Running With Freedom

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

Running With Freedom

If there’s one thing the Taft Museum of Art is known for, it’s the museum’s history.  Home to the art archive of late and great Cincinnatians Charles and Anna Sinton Taft, the museum is a history rich capsule of people, place, and objects.  Making her mark among the masters and makers is Duncanson artist- in […]

Dolan/Maxwell’s at the Seattle Art Fair

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

Dolan/Maxwell’s at the Seattle Art Fair

Dolan/Maxwell’s booth at the Seattle Art Fair was well laid out and well attended. Though they brought a multitude of prints, it was a sculpture by Helen Phillips that drew my attention. A direct carving, the gessoed wood of “Untitled” bears small pencil marks and other traces of its making. Although not more than 12” […]

Virtuosity at Wash Park Art

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

Virtuosity at Wash Park Art

Holly Spraul’s Wash Park Art gallery came alive with an art exhibition expanding upon the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra’s MusikArt auction of 5 violins by 5 noted area artists. Actual violins were ‘artified’ in the stylistic tendencies of each artist and exhibited as a highlighted wall assembly. The violin silent auction drew a supportive crowd who […]

Women of Strength at the YWCA

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

Women of Strength at the YWCA

A purple figure faces away from me, her strong back standing at attention. One hand raised, shading her eyes as she looks on into a fiery-red dreamscape, ruminating on her path through an abstract terrain. This is “Woman,” by local abstract painter Eunshin Khang. Khang is one half of the artists being exhibited at the […]

Weaver’s Guild of Greater Cincinnati, Inc., A Fiber Arts Center, Offers Wide Variety of Hand Work

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

Weaver’s Guild of Greater Cincinnati, Inc., A Fiber Arts Center, Offers Wide Variety of Hand Work

Many hands make light work.  Read more about the Weaver’s Guild of Greater Cincinnati, Inc., a Fiber Arts Center, that is a hidden gem of woven artistry. Head north on Winton Road from Spring Grove Ave. and turn left on Gray Road, best known for its nurseries. It’s an unlikely spot, at first glance, for […]

Direct Message Me

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

Direct Message Me

Ah, August. Quite the interesting time in the fashion world. After luxury designers have unveiled their Resort collections and before hitting the runways for Spring, it’s an extremely busy month behind the scenes for designers and buyers. Consumers, however, will need to wait until next month to see what their favorite designers will showcase for […]

Julian Barnes’ “The Only Story

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

I’ve never quite been able to define why I find English novelists so compelling, so engaging, so smart, but I do.    Three of the finest writers of the century, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Pym, and Anita Brookner are all gone now, though they leave a vast legacy of astonishing fiction. Still alive and writing are A.S. […]

Rebecca Makkai’s “The Great Believers”

August 26th, 2018  |  by  |  published in July/August 2018

I’d not encountered the writing of Rebecca Makkai, until her new novel “The Great Believers”, which is a rare novel dealing with the advent of the AIDS crisis in l980’s Chicago.  This highly sensitive account of the lives of a number of young gay men in Chicago, all more or less just starting their post-collegiate […]