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.