It was a drizzly Tuesday afternoon. With long sleeves balled around his hands, Matt Distel opened the front door of The Carnegie. The previous Friday would have been a big night for the Exhibitions Director, but along with art and cultural events across the country, the opening reception for four new shows was cancelled due […]
March 2020
Perin Mahler: “Storytellers and Other Works”
March 28th, 2020 | by Marlene Steele | published in *, March 2020
A contemporary analysis of social stress is the subject of investigation of Perin Mahler’s colorful, large scale narrative figure paintings at the Manifest Gallery in Walnut Hills. On viewing this work serially, one cannot avoid becoming cognizant of the artist’s social perceptions as well as his personal introspections which inspire the narrative scenarios of these […]
Amid Social Distancing, Clay is a Unifying Medium
March 28th, 2020 | by Annabel Osberg | published in March 2020
Few materials embody human experience as naturally as clay. In its malleable state, clay is fleshly, easily wounded but easily healed. Fired, it ossifies. Surface glazes pool and congeal like bodily fluids. Priceless porcelain masterpieces and preschoolers’ art projects attest that the urge to mold clay figures transcends age and class. No wonder people throughout […]
CURATOR ESSAY: Daniel Brown, “ATMOSPHERICS”
March 28th, 2020 | by Daniel Brown | published in March 2020
The exhibition “Atmospherics” coincides with the beginning of spring, when, after the long grey days of winter, color begins to burst forth in Nature’s annual spectacle of new life, hope and resurrection. All sixteen of the regional artists whose work is included in “Atmospherics” look at and interpret the glories of Nature in her/his own […]
Michael Casselli: ‘a tacit agreement’ at the Blue House Gallery
March 28th, 2020 | by Steve Kemple | published in March 2020
A Dayton, Ohio living room has been converted into a simulation death chamber. Walk through the door and it hits you in the stomach: the smell of disinfectant and an uneasy superposition of the state and domicile. There is a gurney primed for lethal injection. You can see it through plexiglass picture windows in a […]
Your Past Needs You: “Cat Mummies Came First” at Sheherazade
March 28th, 2020 | by Megan Bickel | published in March 2020
In mid February I had read Alex Greenberger’s overview of several New York Museum exhibitions that all mirrored the strained sensation that is overwhelmingly pervasive at the moment.[1] In it, Greenberger covers Rachel Harrison’s mid-career survey, Life Hack, at the Whitney and makes the observation that Harrison taps into our contemporary media overload: . . […]
Fotofolio: John Blom
March 28th, 2020 | by Kent Krugh | published in March 2020
“Common Sources”, 2018-2019 John’s statement: Currently, I am creating digital works using my own photographic images. I found a passion for photography late in my career. My earlier work consisted of urban designs and photoshop stacks. I have studied all the works by Robert Rauschenberg and Aaron Siskind. Their own unique observations and photographic exploration […]
Profile of Bonnie Goldberg
March 28th, 2020 | by Jane Durrell | published in March 2020
“Blue will give me fits. Red, I can tame” Bonita Williams Goldberg told me. We were in her studio, the walls alive with her paintings. Some coast along pretending to be landscapes – well, actually, they are landscapes, but the color sense and design of her abstracts hold true here as well. “I learn something […]
“The Mirror and The Light” by Hilary Mantel
March 28th, 2020 | by Daniel Brown | published in March 2020
The astonishing English novelist Hilary Mantel has completed her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and his relationship with King Henry VIII in “The Mirror and The Light”. I am in absolute awe of her vast achievement in this third and final novel, as I was of the first two novels, which both won the prestigious Booker […]
“little gods” by Meng Jin
March 28th, 2020 | by Daniel Brown | published in March 2020
“little gods”, a debut novel by Meng Jin, is exceptionally fine; the author deeply understands aspects of Chinese culture in this novel about a woman physicist and her daughter, the former poised for greatness which she never achieves, and her somewhat bitter daughter, seeking her own identity (she’s American) and that of her missing father. […]