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.