Moon in the wall, hope it don't dissolve: new work by Joey Versoza

moon in the wall, hope it don’t dissolve:

new work by Joey Versoza

 

 

 

January 8th—29th, 2010

Opening reception: Saturday, January 8th, 7:00 – 10:00 pm

Cincinnati, OH—U·turn Art Space is proud to present moon in the wall, hope it don’t dissolve, a solo exhibition by Joey Versoza. The exhibition will feature seven individual works that allow shadow play, the outdoor weather and overlaid soundtracks to augment seemingly ordinary objects on display in the space and in video. The physical world of objects is never without an underlying politics, and Versoza suggests as much by lighting the exhibition with only a series of house lamps that cast large shadows of the gathered found objects across the walls of the space. The work strikes upon the roles of memory, desire and the signification of inner psychological information that we inscribe onto our material environment.

By combining, say, a video of a red upholstered chair with excerpted sound clips from a Transformers animated film in which Orson Welles portrayed the voice of the devious Unicron, a planet sized robot, Versoza calls attention to existing tensions in our everyday environment, to how drastically different experiences can occur side by side, and to possible meanings that can be found in absurdist mash-ups. 

 

As part of the exhibition in the month of January, a window will be left open in the gallery. Please dress accordingly.

Artist Statement

My primary concern in this show is with the object & its oscillating efficacy, moving between brute generic symbolism & wild over-determination. The pieces on exhibit here are bound up with my concerns with futurity, community, & love. The ability of these objects to clearly communicate these ideated concepts is integrated literally into the show by subjecting the objects to interrogation through deliberate use of lighting that both produces auratic effects and effaces them by locating this production in malignancy--the harsh, unsentimental light of administrative power. "Dear Summer" investigates the absurd lengths one goes to in order to achieve pleasure & the often humiliating, disappointing results of this pursuit while keeping in mind the poetic intensity & openness attention to this fact yields. "Talking Chair" acts as a brooding, quixotic antagonist refusing the received terms & assignations of the show more generally. All of these operations are undertaken in hope—the hope that rigorous attention may continue to problematize our relationship to the object as a site of perpetual folly along the fault line of our critical minds & our subjectivity. 

Artist Bio

Joey Versoza was born 1978 in Marquette, MI, and currently resides in Covington, KY. He earned his BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and did course work at University of Illinois at Chicago. He has presented solo exhibitions previously at Warsaw Projects Space, Linda Schwartz Gallery and Publico, all now defunct Cincinnati galleries. Last summer, Versoza presented a one evening project at the Art Damage Lodge entitled J.O.S.E (Jealous Ones Still Envy). It featured a cycle of the artist’s video project, a construction paper sculpture and collaborations with poet Dana Ward. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in spaces such as The Nightengale (Chicago, IL), Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati, OH), New Center for Contemporary Art (Louisville, KY), Monique Meloche Gallery (Chicago, IL), Linda Schwartz Gallery (Cincinnati, OH) and semantics gallery (Cincinnati, OH).

The Mechanics of Joy

December 4^th—18^th, 2010

Opening reception: Saturday, December 4^th, 7:00 – 10:00 pm

Cincinnati, OH—U·turn Art Space is pleased to announce the exhibition with which we will close out 2010, The Mechanics of Joy. The exhibition will feature Judith Brotman, Tracy Featherstone in collaboration with Krista Connerly, William Howe and Dale Jackson. Through deconstructed installations, interactive sculptures and activities, relief prints and text-based drawings and collages, these artists have sought out visual languages with which they consider the implications of form and the implications of function.

The exhibition comments on an ongoing cultural exchange between art and industry, aesthetics and utility. Particularly, the assembled artists use aesthetics as a means to process the complexity, absurdity and even pervasive sense of detachment that accompany our ever-advancing manmade environment. Mechanisms, industrial materials, or the context of our urban environment are employed to locate joy, sublimity and surprise in the world we have created for ourselves, rather than perpetuating an overly romantic idea of man-in-nature. 

These lines of inquiry hold particular relevance to our region’s art institutions. U·turn considers this exhibition a response to a local heritage in which art has been conscientiously applied to industry. As early as 1870, Alfred T. Goshorn (who was to become the Cincinnati Art Museum’s first director) organized “industrial expositions” that highlighted Cincinnati’s industries and the raw materials from this region that were used to produce consumer goods. The 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia—in which feats of industry from Europe and the U.S. were showcased—prompted a group of men and women to meet and make plans for a Cincinnati museum that would be an “institution dedicated to art in its various uses and applications” (as Goshorn described it on the Museum’s opening day). To this day, the CAM collects and exhibits examples of art and industry’s potential to cross inform, and their 2008 handbook reiterates this ideal in saying, “Art could enhance one’s world on mundane levels as well as lofty ones, industrialization could be tempered by concepts of beauty.”

The Mechanics of Joy seeks to identify some of those tempering concepts of beauty. The gathered artworks are not direct examples of design or engineering, such as one can see in the Art Museum. They borrow the look of usefulness by repurposing gears, tools and other traces of machinery. This exhibition converses with past, current and future explorations into this larger topic of art and industry, and the part it plays in the self-image of Midwestern arts culture. We are pleased that this project will coincide with Rosson Crow’s The Myth of the American Motorcycle, an exhibition of paintings and custom-detailed motorcycles at the Contemporary Arts Center. We hope that viewers will consider the different perspectives presented in The Mechanics of Joy in this larger context of other venues, innovative artists and ongoing topics of research.

Artist Bios

Judith Brotman is a Chicago-based artist who holds a Bachelors and a Masters Degree in Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Brotman has exhibited extensively in the Chicago area at such venues as Slow Gallery, the Illinois State Museum, the Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400 and the Betty Rymer Gallery. She has also shown in Evanston, IL; St. James, NY; Boston, MA; Gary, Indiana; and Overland Park, KS. Her recent solo exhibitions have been shown at Northern Illinois University, Three Walls, Chicago Cultural Arts Center, MN Gallery and Artemisia Gallery. Brotman has a forthcoming solo exhibition in 2011 at the DeVos Art Museum, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI.

Brotman will present selections from a larger body of works entitled “Captive Audience.” Abstract sculptural forms are constructed from industrial felt, bits of tools, foam tubing and other ordinary materials that may seem to hearken more from a garage than a studio. To reach their final configurations, elements were taken apart and assembled to suggest utility and resemble tools, weapons or traps. About her work, Brotman writes: My recent work includes mixed media sculptural objects that suggest or imply a use or function. Often these objects appear to have already had a history.

Krista Connerly's work has been featured in a range of national and international venues, including the WOW Women's International Film Festival in Sydney, Australia, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the New Museum's online art community Rhizome, The Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Michigan, the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne. Currently she lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

What forms of intimacy take place in the city? How can poetry replace efficiency? These questions drive the work of artist and poetic sociographer Krista Connerly. To investigate these questions Connerly seeks to turn "art viewer" into collaborator, provoking forms of interaction that through humor and poetry temporarily override the efficiency and rationality of contemporary life.

Tracy Featherstone has an MFA in printmaking and a BFA in drawing.  Her current art practice focuses on mixed media sculpture.  Featherstone’s work has been exhibited Nationally and Internationally in such venues as Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH, The Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, and The Institute of Art and Design at the University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic.  Featherstone’s work has manifested multiple research, teaching, and travel grants such as the Ohio Arts Council Award for Individual Creativity and a nomination for the Joan Mitchell Foundation award. 

Featherstone collaborates with artist Krista Connerly on an ongoing project called Envirotouchers, a series of prototypes for a more connected world that seek to replace rationality with sensuality and isolation with relationship. Through this series of actions and wearable sculptures individuals can experiment with and ultimately create new and individualized environmental connections. An earlier work, the “Building Snuggle” will be presented, along with documentation of its earlier manifestations. The blue sleeping bag-like form is a physical mediator between a person and vertical architectural elements like columns and posts. Featherstone and Connerly will also present a new work conceived for this exhibition and U·turn’s space. The Envirotouchers offer a simple and playful solution that allows us to re-imagine our selves and our relationship to our built and natural environment.

William Howe is an artist living and working in Cincinnati. His work moves through a variety of media including painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation and performance. Along with the sculptor Will Cannings, he was Fal-Con International, a performance art collaborative focused on the emancipatory nature of the automobile and its relationship to American life and culture. These themes have recurred in Howe’s own work over the past decade. As well as a working artist, Howe is a writer and one of the co-founders of Slack Buddha Press, an organization with the express desire to produce chapbooks and performance objects showcasing work by innovative practitioners. They have published over 29 chapbooks and a number of performance objects and ephemera by practitioners from Europe and North America.

In a new body of work entitled A440f, Howe is working through the internal forms of a Toyota automatic transmission and transfer case for his 1989 Land Cruiser. In the process of rebuilding the transmission and transfer case, he began using various housings and galleries as printing plates—inking them and printing them after he had cleaned the residue of 300,000 miles of wear off of them. He has collected all of the old oil seals, gaskets, clutch plates and pads, bearings, o-rings, and other worn elements of the transmission and transfer case, and these, along with some of the housing prints are the basis for the work in this show.

Howe writes about his work: I am interested in the ghostly and fragmented quality of these elements in combination as monotypes, as well as the simplicity of the wear patterns on the steel and ablative materials of the clutch surfaces. It all becomes a kind of residual body of evidence of where my Land Cruiser has been, both while I have had it and throughout its history with other people. What is represented in this work is the lifetime of an exceptional piece of machinery exposed to you in a way that I hope is both intriguing and aesthetically pleasing.

Dale Jackson is a Cincinnati artist that has exhibited previously with Visionaries + Voices and Thunder-Sky Inc., including a two-person exhibition with Kendra Bayer-Foreman at Thunder-Sky in spring 2010. Most recently, Jackson appeared in the Raymond Thunder-Sky Folk Art Carnival and is currently being featured in Eastern Kentucky University’s literary magazine Jelly Bucket with a full-color insert of his artwork.

Jackson is a human and like a machine. He takes something vulnerable and expressive like writing and makes it into something mechanical, ongoing, prolific. Those who know him have observed that he listens much more than he talks. His work is a kind of testament to that listening because he finds ways to give form to the ambient noises of modern life that many people may no longer be ‘tuned in’ to hearing. Rather than writing deeply personal confessions as you might expect from the diary-like appearance of these pieces, he is actually filtering, isolating and re-telling fragments from our overly commercial, materialistic, fabricated environment. He is like an interpreter for car commercials, soul music, cable television and city street chatter. 

Stuff Art

Stuff Art

November 6th—27th, 2010

4th Floor Award Kick Off Party + Exhibition Preview: Friday, November 5th, 6-8 pm.

Opening reception: Saturday, November 6th, 7:00 – 10:00 pm

Cincinnati, OH—U·turn Art Space is very pleased to present Stuff Art, a group exhibition that includes works by Deb Brod, Michael Hunter, Pam Lins, Paige Williams and B. Wurtz. Along with an opening reception on Saturday, November 6th, we are excited to also celebrate the kick off to the Cincinnati Art Museum’s second biennial 4th Floor Award with a preview of the exhibition that is free and open to the public on Friday, November 5th.

Perhaps more than any previous exhibition at U·turn, Stuff Art draws attention to a central concern in all of the gallery’s aesthetic decisions. These gathered artists allow the materials from which their works are created to remain evidently themselves. Whether it be wood and particle board, paint, or other collected detritus, the ‘stuff’ in this exhibition remains basically untransformed. Rather, through shifts in context (especially the relocation of humble materials into the gallery environ) and control, everyday objects and non-illusionary uses of art materials are aestheticized. These artists use spatial relationships and juxtaposition to increase our awareness of the common by approaching a free-for-all range of materials as freed form.

This discussion has its origin in early collage and assemblage art, as well as Duchamp’s notorious Readymadesfrom the beginning of last century. The evolution of these art practices is also in dialogue with “truth to materials” philosophies that began in the International Style of Modernist architecture, which was such an influential shift in thinking that we continue to live in cities and environments that embody those ideals. This conversation has cycled through other art movements and modes of working, such as the Italian conceptual art movement called Arte Povera and even the Post-minimalists who sought to call attention to a material’s potential by using it in blunt, casually experimental and straightforward ways. Even in our own gallery’s history, artists like Ellen Nagel, Keith Benjamin and Shinsuke Aso, as well as work from our collective, have demonstrated a faith in the potential for surprise and profundity that resides in the most humble or mundane of materials. Stuff Art seeks to isolate this trait in contemporary art practices by pairing two of Cincinnati’s most interesting artists with artists from Chicago and New York.With this light treatment of materials as a point of convergence among the artists assembled, each also introduce their own variously idiosyncratic or reductive visual languages into the exhibition, as well as conceptual concerns about time and space, the significance of the rarified art object, and the escapism associated with the creative practice. 

The conceit of this exhibition predisposes it to sculpture in the round, but solutions that address the wall and the history of painting are included as well. Paige Williams, for example, presents brand new paintings that allow the supports she is working on (wood panel or, in other cases, thick paper) to operate in their final visual experience. Revealed wood grain is interfiled with a sparse visual language of horizontal lines in paint. Michael Hunter also explores the potential of a painting as an object in raw, poetic installations.

Deb Brod’s work recycles a hodgepodge of her everyday life into installations and arrangements that reflect on the human potential to imbue objects with associations and symbolic meaning. Furniture, clothes, books, yard clippings and knick knacks are practically enshrined through Brod’s thoughtful placement and consideration. Thus composed, these still lifes flash with memory and secrets, appearing obviously meaningful without their direct sources explained.

In some ways, Lins’ practice reflects the variety of this exhibition. Traversing sculpture, painting and the repositioning of cultural artifacts, Lins builds constructions that wobble between the totally familiar and the totally abstract. For Stuff Art, Lins is presenting several works that play critically with reflectivity through simple constructions of boards and mirrors. Like small, smart cartoons of Robert Smithson’s indoor sculptural experiments with mirrors, these pieces are positioned so that reflections of their environment are mapped across their surfaces.

B. Wurtz is the final word on poetic, minimal and humble assemblage art. Wurtz is at the heart of this exhibition, around whom the rest of the artists were selected. His quirky oeuvre has searched out all sorts of strategies to augment the everyday with the slightest gesture. For Stuff Art, Wurtz has curated a number of diverse works that summarize his interests in objects and how they operate in conjunction with one another. Plastic shopping bags, various food container lids, screws, bits of wood, a wire hanger and a sock without its mate are brought together in a series of works to be displayed on the wall and in space.

Artist Bios

Deb Brod has an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Cincinnati (1992), and a B.A. from Oberlin College, the Sorbonne (Paris, France) and the University of Cincinnati (1980) in French and Fine Art. Her multi-media artwork has been exhibited regionally and nationally, including at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center’s UnMuseum. With a background in painting and drawing, her artwork incorporates many media and approaches, including textiles, digital imagery, and installation. Grants include City of Cincinnati Artist Grant, Summerfair, Kentucky Foundation for Women, two Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowships, and Arts Midwest/NEA Regional Visual Artist Fellowship. Brod has lived in France (1977-78) and England (1984-87), and has traveled in Europe, Israel, Russia, Mexico, Canada, Dominica, Sri Lanka, and India. This exhibition coincides with another of her exhibitions: Savedat the Pearlman Gallery in the Art Academy of Cincinnati (1212 Jackson Street in Over-the-Rhine). It is a three-person exhibition that also includes Kate Kern and Migiwa Orimo. On view through November 12th.

Michael Hunter—originally from Birmingham, AL—is a painter and a sculptor who lives and works in Chicago, IL. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. Selected exhibitions include: Summer Group Show at The Contemporary Art Workshop (Chicago), Winners Circle at Scott Projects (Chicago), Casual Object Garden and Other Material Matters at Roots & Culture (Chicago), Pattern at Hallway Projects (San Francisco), At Them Not Through Them at Knock Knock Gallery (Chicago) and Days of Plenty at Hyde St. Gallery (San Francisco). For more information please visit the artist's website.

Hunter’s statement:

I make work that deals with formal elements of painting and sculpture. I am interested in the juxtaposition of these two modes of art making and often work between them in order to discover how one method can inform the other. I am interested in the constraints of painting and the seemingly endless possibilities of sculpture. I use both found and made objects in a combination of arrangement, installation and spatial investigation to further my understanding of mark making, abstraction, form, collage and material play.

Pam Lins is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Lins received her B.A. from State University of Minnesota and her MFA from Hunter College, CUNY, NY, NY. Lins has exhibited extensively and prominently in New York, California and in exhibitions throughout Europe. Recent notable exhibitions include projects at the Portland Institute of Fine Arts, Hunch and Fail—a group exhibition at Artists Space curated by Amy Sillman, and solo exhibitions in 2008 and 2010 at Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York, NY, by whom Lins is currently represented. Lins has been awarded numerous prestigious honors, including a 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship Award, as well as residencies at Yaddo Artist Colony, MacDowell Colony and the Farpath Foundation, a residency in Dijon, France. Lins is a faculty member at the Cooper Union School of Art, NY. Lins appears in Stuff Art courtesy of the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery. To read a New York Times review of her October solo exhibition, visit this link.  More information about Lins’ work here.

Paige Williams is currently a professor of painting and drawing at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, Ohio. She exhibits locally, nationally and internationally including exhibitions in Germany, the Ukraine, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York. Of note are recent two-person exhibitions at Aisle Gallery (Cincinnati, OH, with Jeffrey Cortland Jones), Pearl Conard Gallery (Ohio State University, Mansfield, OH, with Rebecca Seeman), and Blank Space Gallery (New York, NY, with Karen Schifano). She has been selected as an Artist in Residence at the Millay Colony for the Arts in New York, The University of Alaska in Anchorage, The Neu Rathaus Gallery in Munich, Germany and The Vermont Studio Center. Grants include an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and a Summerfair Award to Individual Artists.

Williams’ work explores the space between us: the physical and psychological disparities that exist in relationships along with the joys and tensions that arise as a result of navigating these intervals. The works are about discovery, the struggle to relinquish control and reveling in the absurd and unexpected. More information about Williams can be found here.

B. Wurtz is an artist based in New York, NY. Born in Pasadena, CA, he has exhibited widely since the early 1980s. Wurtz is represented by Feature Inc. in New York, where he has presented solo exhibitions since 1990. He has been included in numerous notable exhibitions at Castillo/Corrales (Paris, France); Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France; Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; Leo Koenig Inc., New York; Mudam Luxembourg, Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Galerie van Gelder, Amsterdam; Cabinet, London; Cokkie Snoei, Rotterdam; and many others. His work has been written about frequently in The New York Times, Artforum, The Village Voice, Frieze, Art in America and The Brooklyn Rail. Wurtz is included in Stuff Art courtesy of the artist and Feature Inc. More information at can be found here.

About 4th Floor

The 4th Floor is an upper level affiliated membership group of the Cincinnati Art Museum for fans and supporters of contemporary art. Members deepen their knowledge of contemporary art and the local art scene through a variety of events, including visits to artists' studios, behind-the-scenes tours and members only programs.

The 4th Floor Award is a biennial regional art competition open to professional (non-student) artists in the Greater Cincinnati Area. Juried exclusively by 4th Floor Members, the Award seeks to recognize emerging local talent in the visual arts while creating dialogue between collectors, artists and enthusiasts. Three finalists and the winner will receive monetary awards. The winner receives a solo exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum. More information can be found here.

I Must Be Brave You Must Behave : Recent Work by Molly Donnermeyer

I Must Be Brave You Must Behave:
Recent Work by Molly Donnermeyer
October 2nd—30th, 2010
Poetry reading featuring Matt Hart, with selections from his new book Wolf Face:
Saturday, October 16th, starting at 7 pm


Cincinnati, OH—U · turn is pleased to present I Must Be Brave You Must Behave, a solo exhibition of the collective’s own Molly Donnermeyer. At the outset of U · turn Art Space, now in its second year, the five artists who operate the gallery chose to include exhibitions of their own art in the schedule, as an opportunity to explore their intimate relationships with the space they maintain. Donnermeyer has done this with installations of furniture and ritualistic collections of household clutter, accompanied by photographs.


In this new body of work, Donnermeyer produces haunting, mocking, and sometimes tender explorations, which call to mind classic tales and nursery rhymes interlaced with glimmers of personal narrative. Like Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber—a seminal collection of short stories from 1979 that reimagined fairytales with dark feminist spins—these artworks take elements from such narratives, allowing the artist’s personal life and her incisive takes on contemporary culture to reset the shape of the stories and form them anew. As they have always been though, Donnermeyer’s take on fairytales are metaphors. Just as these stories are translated and shaped by new contexts, the artist asserts that our belongings and even our conceptions of self are reinterpreted when we move from place to place and nurse longings for escape. As if preparing for flight, the gallery is strewn with pieces of furniture, folded clothing, tangles of hair, piles of soil, and fragile keepsakes in want of wrapping. These effigy-like installation elements are punctuated by the presence of works on paper that function as delicate inventories, cataloging objects that still need to be packed. In contrast with the quiet emptiness these previous modes of working provide, Donnermeyer also makes photographic images of herself reacting to her physical surroundings in order to examine the discordant feeling of feral unrest which comes with a sense of displacement in one’s own home.

Molly Donnermeyer is a graduate of the Art Academy of Cincinnati, holding a BFA in Fine Arts, with an emphasis in photography. She has participated in exhibitions at local venues such as ArtWorks Gallery, Chidlaw Gallery, CS13, Rohs Street Café, semantics gallery, Creative, InkTank, and the Campbell County Public Library. She is a founding member of the art venue U · turn Art Space in Brighton. As well as mounting gallery exhibitions, Donnermeyer has also been published as a photojournalist in publications such as The Messenger and Sparklezilla. Along with Patricia Murphy she is a contributing editor for Brighton Approach, U · turn’s literary and arts zine. Donnermeyer also keeps a personal blog through which she explores her interests in art, fashion, music, and the likes of Lady GaGa, Alfred Hitchcock and other cultural deviants. I Must Be Brave You Must Behave is Donnermeyer’s second solo exhibition.

Polyphonic Improvisation: Works by Alex Paik

Polyphonic Improvisation: Works by Alex Paik
September 4^th—25^th, 2010
Opening reception: Saturday, September 4^th, 7:00 – 10:00 pm
Cincinnati, OH—U·turn Art Space is very pleased to announce Polyphonic Improvisation, a solo exhibition by Alex Paik. All of the works in the exhibition are small-scale paper constructions that emphasize their own thoughtful physicality and colorful compositions. By giving our large gallery space over to such discreet visual objects, U·turn hopes to present them with the breathing room they merit and to invite the viewer into a mental space that playful, casual, jazzy and liberated.
Paik’s work comes out of a tradition of painting and experiments with formalist languages of geometric abstraction, patterns, arabesques and cartoons. As these works are constructions and collages with irregular edges and elements that curl forward into space or bend and overlap back onto themselves, they interact with their surroundings and viewers more directly than conventional paintings. Their color schemes are jubilant, joyful and sly in how saccharine Paik dares them to become. Paik suggests that through the studio and somewhere over the rainbow there is a visual landscape that is terribly specific while remaining undefined. The glimpses and fragments of such a place are presented in Polyphonic Improvisation. They are fragile and slight, carriers of the fizz of imagination and the pop of a Non-Objective visual language that exists with total self-awareness in a contemporary world overrun with stimuli.
About Paik’s own work he has written:

My work lies somewhere between a painting, a toy, and a song. I guess you could call them visual toy songs, but that would sound really lame. I’m not really a formalist in the sense that I agree with the Platonic undertones or the inherent Modernist dogma associated with it, but more like the 5 year old son of a formalist who is inventing a sandbox formalism – a formalism that is more interested in problem solving and invention rather than answer-giving or unified systems of thought. It’s not that I’m not serious about making art but I just think that artists seem to take themselves and their pseudo-philosophical ideas way too seriously. Besides, what’s more serious than a kid playing with his toys?
Maybe if Ellsworth Kelly, Paul Klee, Thomas Nozkowski, and Richard Tuttle were the Lost Boys on Never Land and grew up on video games, classical music, and indie pop, this is what they would make. Or maybe they would focus on fighting pirates.

Alex Paik currently lives and works in New York. He holds a BFA (with honors) from Pennsylvania State University and an MFA from University of Pennsylvania. Paik is the co-founder of the Philadelphia alternative gallery Tiger Strikes Asteroid, where his work has been featured in several exhibitions in the past two years. He has exhibited extensively in Philadelphia at Fleisher Ollman Gallery, Air Space, Gallery Siano, Little Berlin, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Stella Elkins Tyler Gallery and Sweatshop. He has also shown at the Altered Esthetics in Minneapolis, MN; Around the Coyote, Chicago, IL; Emporio Peroni, Puerto Rico; and Pocket Utopia, Brooklyn, NY. Paik’s work has been reviewed and featured in numerous publications, with frequent appearances in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and notable inclusion in the #69 issue of New American Paintings. For more information about Paik and his work, please visit his website here.

Cincinnati, OH—U·turn Art Space is pleased to announce The Place You Made to Find One Another, an exhibition of new work by Patricia Murphy and Eric Ruschman, two of the venue’s progenitors. Both artists will share some ideas and inspirations for the exhibition with an informal artist talk and film night to take place on Saturday, August 21st.

The exhibition’s title is a quotation drawn from the series finale of the science fiction television program LOST. It refers to a pre-heaven dimension that the show’s main characters subconsciously created during their adventures and trials throughout the show’s six seasons. Similarly, The Place You Made to Find One Another presents an opportunity for two artists in U·turn’s collective to create works specifically for the gallery they help maintain. Drawing from personal experiences and sourcing material (both physical and conceptual) from popular culture, Murphy and Ruschman have created an exhibition that highlights where their concerns overlap and where their modes of creation and representation diverge. The artists’ shared occupations with color’s emotive power and the autobiographical potential of unaltered found objects are invested into island-like sculptural installations and highly chromatic, offhandedly personal remarks in painting.

Murphy's suggestive sculptural arrangements are explorations into discovering the histories of materials and objects through not only their use in the studio but also their previous functions and lives, which may have been in her own home, a nearby hardware store, or the homes of friends. Some are completely constructed using leftover paper, tape, and cardboard from other projects, such as a work in brown paper, which fits into an installation of other materials that bursts open at the top. It was once the outer covering for a mail order gift which Murphy tore open with animal hostility in order to check its working order before gifting it. Many objects have been 'fixed' or glued together. A small ceramic horse with one leg glued back on was the guardian of multiple apartments before getting knocked over in a frenzy of company at her current home. Paint as employed by Murphy is an accentuation, a gesture to breathe life into other works. These assemblages populate the gallery like a chain of island formations or a line of inquiry, inviting intimate inspection as well as inclusive views of the overall exhibition.

Murphy seeks to begin a dialogue in her constructed environment, whether it be an unsure, even underdeveloped connection, or else an exhilarating and in-tune radiation of associations, recognitions, and responses. Most important in the formulation of these sculptural landscapes and platforms, is the dialogue that is asserted when these works interact with each other, with Ruschman's objects, and the viewer.

Meanwhile, much of the gallery’s wall space will be inhabited by Ruschman’s highly crafted and colored paintings and shelf installations. He has introduced new levels of formalist daring-do into previously distilled portrayals of coming-of-age fables. For several years, Ruschman’s paintings have followed the quirky narratives of black cats and other whimsical animal characters, all carefully rendered in oil across the paintings’ glossy enamel surfaces. In these new works that are sometimes shaped into off-kilter parallelograms or strange polygons, the picture plane is broken down into geometric compositions, with noticeable absence of the charming creatures for which the painter is known. Where critters do occur, they insert themselves into Modernist complexities, a painted space both joyous and analytical. In several works, Ruschman has tiled out hand painted patterns that contrast more reductivist explorations found elsewhere in the space. These wall works are joined by one large freestanding sculpture by Ruschman, a meditation on wildlife afflicted by the oil spill in the Gulf. The narrative undercurrent in much of Ruschman’s paintings and objects can be sly and unassuming; presenting a high chroma, saccharine glimpse of something more complicated and involved. He and Murphy both employ very specific titles as an important material, offering alternative departure points into the work through these accompanying texts. Taken together, the artists offer a playful environment, full of camaraderie, coloration and occasional, plunging concern.

Artist Bios





Patricia Murphy is a native of Northern Kentucky currently residing in Cincinnati’s Brighton district where she collaboratively runs and lives behind U·turn, an alternative art space. She participated in the New York Studio Program operated by the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design in the fall of 2008, located in the heart of DUMBO in Brooklyn, NY. She has been teaching for Artstop, a program through the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center in Covington, KY, since spring 2009. She graduated Valedictorian with a BFA in Sculpture in May 2010 from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. In addition to art making, Murphy writes poetry and co-assembles a printed publication released in conjunction with U·turn’s exhibitions entitled the Brighton Approach.


Eric Ruschman is (primarily) a painter. He graduated from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 2007 with a BFA in Painting. He has an established exhibition record in the Cincinnati area, having shown at the Art Academy’s Pearlman and Chidlaw Galleries, ArtWorks Gallery, Synthetica Gallery, The Cincinnati Visual Fringe Festival and Museum Gallery Gallery Museum with solo exhibitions at semantics gallery and The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center. In addition to art making, Ruschman is also a curator and collective member of semantics gallery and U·turn Art Space, two alternative gallery spaces in the Brighton District of Cincinnati. His free time is usually spent reading fiction novels and watching films and television with his best friend and a little black cat named St. Kitten (the latter of which being a subject of many paintings). For more information, please visit the artist’s website.

It's the season for it mother darling

Summer Some Aren’t
July 10th—31st, 2010
Opening reception: Saturday, July 10th, 7:00 – 10:00 pm


Cincinnati, OH—Summertime is, for us, characterized by those lazy evenings where a handful of casually produced suggestions is cause enough for a balmy nighttime adventure. One can’t really figure out how everyone at an impromptu backyard party even learned that it was going on, but you end up seeing a dozen friends that it’s been forever since you were able to catch up with. You and everyone you know are possessed with effortless savoir faire.

Summer Some Aren’t, U·turn Art Space’s July exhibition, is compelled by similar impulses. It is a reason to gather some local and distant friends together to see new or previously unseen works. Artists in Summer Some Aren’t include Krista Gregory, Hollis Hammonds, Terence Hammonds, the creative project called Moxie and Avril Thurman. We’ve set out some structure and we’ve laid out some plans, but we thoroughly expect the unexpected, and like a summer party tends to, we look forward to other artists popping up in the curatorial process late in the game to be added to this exhibition as a playful addition to visual discourse. Also, we’ll keep you updated for various activities and sudden excuses for drinking in sunlight and expressing our own happy sense of community.

The opening of this exhibition will coincide with a solo exhibition at semantics gallery of new concrete and resin works by Josh Rectenwald, along with the rest of the Brighton Art Walk. PLEASE NOTE that our July exhibition will open a week later than in other months due to Independence Day (so will all of the other galleries on our street). We would love to visit with you at the opening or at any number of gallery hours or events during the rest of the month.



Artist Bios

Krista Gregory holds an MFA from the University of Cincinnati and is one of the two curatorial forces behind the inimitable Aisle Gallery in the West End. Gregory is trained as a printmaker, but the works she makes often traverses printing techniques and enter into a drawing practice from unexpected angles. Drawing from compelling, pared down imagery, Gregory internalizes topics and images from her environment and reintroduces them with a bend of personal narrative. For U·turn’s July exhibition, Gregory has been working on new drawings that make use of memories from her running path through our local Spring Grove Cemetery. The picaresque and only vaguely morbid setting of a graveyard for an exercise regime is infused with humor and whimsy as tombstones and graves are animated as bodily forms and narrative devices.

Hollis Hammonds, a former Cincinnati resident, currently lives and works in Austin, TX. Hammonds received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Cincinnati in 2001. During her years in Cincinnati she taught at the University of Cincinnati, the Art Academy of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky University. She was director of the Artery from 1999-2004, and was gallery director at the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 2005-2007. Currently she is Area Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Art, and the Director of the Fine Arts Exhibit Program at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX. She has exhibited her work throughout the U.S. including shows at Indiana State University, the Arts + Literature Laboratory, Eastern Oregon University, & Atlantic Center for the Arts. Hammonds' work deals with multiples, repetition, collections and documentation through drawing.

Hammonds writes about her Empty Vessels work: These invented drawings of ideal bowls and vases are created with marker on vinyl fabric. In these drawings I am exploring the metaphor of the empty container as a vessel waiting to be filled or having the potential to be filled, or fulfilled. Throughout history and literature the idea of the empty vessel appears as theme based on the human condition, and often refers to the human potential to be filled with knowledge, nourishment, or spirituality. For me, the empty vessel simply signifies the intrinsic framework of possibility, and these stacks and rows of bowls show the vast number of vessels waiting to be filled.

Terence Hammonds (no direct relation to Hollis Hammonds, also presented in the exhibition) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He grew up on Main Street in Over-the-Rhine and attended the School for Creative and Performing Arts. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and received his BFA in association with Tufts University. Hammonds has shown extensively in and around Cincinnati and Boston. His notable local projects include solo exhibitions at the Weston Art Gallery and Clay Street Press, along with a recent two-person exhibition at Aisle Gallery with Mark Patsfall. As a printmaker, Hammonds appropriates imagery from various movements in Civil Rights history and combines them with decorative motifs and patterns that adorn, memorialize and abstract histories of racial identity in America. For the U·turn exhibition, Hammonds has produced a number of new drawings. While his prints are well known for their densely patterned surfaces and combined imagery, Hammonds’ drawings are stark and reduced, using texts from this and previous eras as their subjects. While the artist’s hand is evident in the work, there is a stillness and a contained fury in the way these drawings present themselves.

Moxie is a team love affair who focuses their art in urban spaces. Their playful pieces are meant to make the urban viewer stop, smile and appreciate the juxtaposition of decay and beauty. Most pieces are placed in downtown and areas of decay and desolation in the city. A little more information here.






Avril Thurman is set to enter her senior year at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Earlier this year, Thurman was awarded the opportunity to study in a residency in New York City as part of her undergraduate education. That many of Thurman’s visual art projects relate to text speaks of her dual role as a poet and writer, as well as a practicing studio artist. Thurman has, for a number of years, been the student editor of the Art Academy’s poetry journal, The Incliner. Her poetry and visual objects share a sensitive, heartfelt tone in their texts. Thurman will be exhibiting works that were made during her time in New York City.




For more information, please contact the gallery by e-mail: u.turn.artspace@gmail.com

Palling Around With Socialists- June at U·turn

Palling Around with Socialists: a group exhibition

June 5^th – 26^th, 2010
Opening reception: Saturday, June 5^th, 7:00 – 10:00 pm

Cincinnati, OH—Since its inception, U·turn Art Space has sought to facilitate discourse towards imagining questions about the methods and practices of a functional society. In Palling Around with Socialists, a number of artists and the gallery collective have come together to curate an exhibition that questions the nature of an individual as an autonomous being or as a component to an equitable community. Our nation presently finds itself in a culture war, where language is traversing outside the bounds of denoted definitions: words like socialist, fascism, and terror are volleyed around public debates. While different parties and groups fear a loss of personal freedoms, we may be at greater risk of misarticulating the perceived conflicts with which we are faced. Concerns about the nature of private property, authorship and current intersections between economics, ethics and philosophy will be raised through the work of Shinsuke Aso, Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link, Alton Falcone, David Horvitz, Justin Kemp, Steve Kemple, Julia Schwadron and Steve Lambert. The presented works continue to exercise aesthetic sensitivity, demonstrating a belief in form contributing to the advancement of concepts. Critically playful and directly engaging our community with optimistic, activist strategies, U·turn and these artists seek to contribute to a larger dialogue with art that presents unexpected viewpoints and makes note of abstractions that may expand upon or resituate current discussions about social responsibility, power and control.

“The question of social change and art becomes then a problem of discovering the manner in which a new content modifies the conventional manner of expression: the manner in which purely aesthetic changes, occasioned by social changes, modify content to accord with newer forms. But insofar as the formal change may be socially conditioned, we must distinguish between those social changes that operate on the artist directly and those that operate indirectly.” –Meyer Schapiro in his essay “Art and Social Change”

Artist Bios

Shinsuke Aso was born in Gunma, Japan in 1979. After graduating from Kitakanto School of Fine Arts in Gunma, Japan, he moved to New York and received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2004. He has exhibited nationally and internationally in venues including P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Tobey Fine Arts, Minus Space, The Center for Book Arts in New York, Maebashi Cultural Institute in Gunma, Japan, Markus Winter Gallery in Berlin, Germany and Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. His works have been collected by The Center for Book Arts. Aso lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

From Aso’s artist statement: I am interested in creating artwork that converts or flips over concepts, stereotypes and prejudices and at the same time suggests to the audience several different points of view toward things and phenomena around them. The series of collages and assemblages are created using many different types of found materials including paper, fabric, plastic, tape, thread and hair embellished with doodle-like touches of pencil, pen and paint marks. I cut-up the materials and compose them as shapes and colors that rhythmically resonate with each other. At the same time, I switch meanings of the elements with merging them into a different context.

SAPC is a postcard company that I run as a long-term performance. I make postcards with found papers such as cardboard and packages and sell them for 25 cents each, along with advertising and organizing campaigns. This project derives from the idea of the global market system in which anything can be a source of business, and small economies that depend on trust and honesty among people. The postcard can be simultaneously an artwork and communication device depending on how the audience recognizes it.

Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link each keep individual practices as artists, but over the past year have been working collaboratively to create a body of work entitled Breaking News that distills and translates global news into a series of sculptural assemblages and socially-charged artifacts. In 2009, they presented this body of work in a large exhibition at Philadelphia’s Little Berlin space. Boyce holds a BFA from Louisiana State University and an MFA from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA. He has had a number of solo exhibitions with the Philadelphia space Vox Populi, and been included in group exhibitions throughout the surrounding region as well as in Chicago, IL; Cincinnati, OH (at the now defunct Publico gallery); Washington, D.C.; and Mobile, Alabama. Link is originally from Virginia and holds a BFA in Painting from Pennsylvania State University. Link holds a BFA from Pennsylvania State University. He is the co-founder of STORAGE art space in Philadelphia, PA. Link’s first solo exhibition was at the Patterson Gallery in 2006. He has exhibited in numerous group projects in Connecticut, Virginia, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and a web-based project in 2008 entitled Link Tactical.

Alton Falcone is a sculptor, concentrating on recovered wood, the rusticity of the material reflecting his ten-year sojourn in Italy. He returned to the United States in 2003 to pursue advanced degrees. While in graduate school he continued to perfect his sculptural mediums, developing a unique and personable vocabulary. In 2007, he was awarded the prestigious Best of SUNY Student Art. His numerous collaborations with artists in other fields include Echoes=Sculptor x Poet2 (2000-2003) Musik Im Bausch, 2006, Turner Dance of Long Island (Latent Image) and the Happy Prince project, 2006.

Within this exhibition, Falcone’s practice resists artist-as-consumerist in its use of salvaged and recycled materials. Through worn materials and compositions that suggest sites for a spiritual life, Falcone’s pieces possess the tenor of a monk who has taken a vow of poverty. Ascetic yet elegant, the solutions he sets upon make use of fragments and remainders to cobble together new structures, new visions for art and the society in which it exists.

Falcone’s artist statement: Certain traditional materials such as wood reveal (and preserve) the slow destruction wrought by time upon them, such as adverse weather conditions and human mistreatment. By transforming a ruined object (such as recovered wood) into a harmonious composition, the new artifact (artwork) becomes a symbol of a positive view of time: this is a history on which we reflect, learn and grow. The melancholic feelings associated with the ephemeral nature of artifice become elevated in such artworks as symbols of wisdom.

David Horvitz is an artist whose work adopts a nomadic personality, shifting seamlessly between the Internet and the printed page, the West Coast, East Coast, and beyond, avoiding any particular definition or medium. Born in Los Angeles and currently based in New York—although his location may change at any given moment—Horvitz frequently encourages participation from both his friends and a web-based audience for his projects, channeling the spirit of conceptual artists who reach out to a community greater than their immediate surroundings. He infuses his practice with generosity and free distribution.

Justin Kemp was born in Wisconsin and lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts. He holds a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin- La Crosse, and completed his MFA from University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2009. His work was recently seen in Cincinnati as part of the group exhibition Short Straw, a thematic exhibition at the Clifton Cultural Arts Center that looked at the economic hardships of being an artist in a time of recession and financial uncertainty. Kemp has exhibited extensively in and around the Boston area, but has also participated in exhibitions in San Francisco, CA; Orono, Maine; Brooklyn, NY; and Provo, UT. Kemp’s recent work can be considered part of a burgeoning New Media movement called “internet aware art.” Equipped with a smart wit and a conception of the Internet as a complex, collaborative social space, Kemp’s projects that appear initially playful can be seen as commentary on the socio-political bleed between real-time societal regulation and the meta-space that the Internet affords individuals from all (or most) walks of life.

Steve Kemple graduated with a BFA in 2007 from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. His creative practice is highly conceptual and manifests in text documents, musical performances, essays, drawings and the facilitation of social interactions. Since earning his degree in 2007, Kemple studied philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, which has informed his artmaking in the meantime. In 2009, Kemple joined up with the cooperative that maintains the Over-the-Rhine arts venue CS13. Kemple has exhibited throughout the region in spaces such as semantics gallery, CS13, Artworks Gallery, Leapin Lizard, Cincinnati’s Visual Fringe Festival and the now defunct Focus Gallery. His contributions to Palling Around with Socialists coincides with the presentation of new conceptual artworks in SOS Art 2010 at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, curated by Saad Ghosn, and preparations for two large solo exhibitions in fall 2010 and spring 2011. Many of Kemple’s most recent works are text-based, and in lieu of an attached image of his work, a recent text work is presented below. More information about Kemple’s current work is available at www.stevekemple.com.

4 Text Works :

1) A CONCEPTUAL SPACE WHERIN DIMENSIONS ARE DESIGNATED BY THE ORGANIZATION OF MEANINGFUL EXPRESSIONS SIGNIFIED BY TEXT ARRANGED ON AN OTHERWISE UNMODIFIED PLANAR SURFACE.

2) AN IDEA WHERIN ITS STRUCTURE IS SUCH THAT IT CURVES INWARD & DESIGNATES ITSELF.

3) A SERIES OF EXPRESSIONS WHERIN MEANINGS CORRESPOND TO VECTORS IN A CONCEPTUAL SPACE AND WHO’S RELATIONS ARTICULATE AN OBJECT SITUATED IN THIS SPACE.

4) A WORLD WHERIN THE NOTION OF SUCH A WORLD IS INCONCEIVABLE.

Steve Lambert studied sociology and film before receiving a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 and a MFA at UC Davis in 2006. He dropped out of high school in 1993. His father, a former Franciscan monk, and mother, an ex-Dominican nun, imbued the values of dedication, study, poverty, and service to others – qualities which prepared him for life as an artist. Lambert made international news just after the 2008 US election with the The New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica of the grey lady announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He is the founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, lead developer of Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art) and has collaborated with numerous artists including the Graffiti Research Lab, and the Yes Men. His work has been shown at various galleries, art spaces, and museums both nationally and internationally, and was recently collected by the Library of Congress. He is a Senior Fellow at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York, developed and leads workshops for Creative Capital, and teaches at Parsons/The New School and Hunter College.

Lambert says: For me, art is a bridge that connects uncommon, idealistic, or even radical ideas with everyday life. I carefully craft various conditions where I can discuss these ideas with people and have a mutually meaningful exchange. Often this means working collaboratively with the audience, bringing them into the process or even having them physically complete the work. I want my art to be relevant to those outside the gallery – say, at the nearest bus stop – to reach them in ways that are engaging and fun. I intend what I do to be funny, but at the core of each piece there is also a solemn critique. It’s important to be able to laugh while actively questioning the various power structures at work in our daily lives. I have the unabashedly optimistic belief that art changes the way people look at the world. That belief fuels a pragmatic approach to bring about those changes. Along with presenting several posters designed by Lambert, U.turn will feature a collaborative project with artist Julia Schwadron.

Julia Schwadron has studied in a number of programs, ranging from Illustration to Critical Theory. She holds a BA in Studio Art from the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA, and an MFA from Tyler School of Art in Elkins Park, PA. Since 2006, Lambert and Schwadron have been working collaboratively on an ongoing “sign project”, making signs for public locations around NYC. They spend time making simple paper drawings and then put them out into the world. The statements on the signs tend to be those that artists might say to themselves, most times to reassure against their own doubts. They post signs where people will see them, and where they can make an impact. Together, Lambert and Schwadron have developed a signage project with the U.turn collective that will be presented around Cincinnati, with artifacts from the project on view within the gallery space.

For more information, please contact the gallery by e-mail: u.turn.artspace@gmail.com

**GENERAL INFORMATION**

U·turn Art Space is located at 2159 Central Avenue in Brighton.
Gallery is free and open to the public, with street parking in front of the space and on nearby streets. Regular gallery hours are on Saturdays, 12-4 pm, and by appointment.

Mission Statement: U·turn Art Space is a collective-run alternative arts space that was initiated in fall 2009. The U·turn Art Space collective is comprised of five Cincinnati-based artists: Molly Donnermeyer, Matt Morris, Patricia Murphy, Zach Rawe and Eric Ruschman. Each month U·turn delivers fresh, compelling exhibitions of emerging and established artists. The gallery has a special interest in new developments in sculpture and object making, but is excited to represent the contemporary landscape of art as broadly as possible. Its goal is to bring shows into Cincinnati that are relevant; that provide an opportunity for discourse, ideas, and play to be forced together, awkwardly or elegantly, and offer itself to a viewing audience. Along with art exhibitions, U·turn hosts a range of accompanying readings, performances and events that raise probing questions and plural perspectives. U·turn’s efforts are intended for audiences in the surrounding Brighton district, Cincinnati at large and the whole of the Midwest.