People Who Make Us Smile

People Who Make Us Smile

March 5th—26th, 2011

...U·turn Art Space is pleased to announce People Who Make Us Smile, a group exhibition featuring Meg Duguid, Charley Friedman, Russell Ihrig, Jonathan Juravich, Cary Leibowitz and a collaborative project by Loraine Wible and Chris Reeves. Through sound pieces, sculpture, photography, video, installation, screen printing and a collaborative project designed especially for and executed by U·turn, these artists present works that are quirky, upbeat and dryly self-deprecating. Certainly contemporary uses of humor in Art have its origins in the history of Pop Art, but these artists use punch lines and visual comedic timing in a direct way that critically asks, What is funny? Is that funny? and much more broadly, How can humor be used effectively in an art gallery to touch upon subjects without frivolity? Often, the answers these artists come up with relate to the iconography of celebrities, shared pop cultural knowledge and eager (or else effacing) means of addressing the viewer directly. People Who Make Us Smile is an exercise in admiration, a blame game that reveals why we see the world the way we do. As a gallery, these are the artists who make us smile. But the artists themselves defer to another cast of characters: family relatives, Liza Minnelli, Bart Simpson and Gandhi are but a few of the depicted, with whom we share our glee.

Artist Bios

Meg Duguid was raised in Columbus Ohio. She received her MFA from Bard College in 2005 and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. She has exhibited and performed at the DUMBO arts festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Suburban, Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, Flux Factory in Queens, 667 Shotwell in San Francisco, and the 3rd Ward in

Brooklyn. Duguid also runs Clutch Gallery, a 25 square inch white-cube located in the heart of her purse. She lives with her husband and three cats in Chicago, Illinois. More about Duguid at her website.

Duguid presents a sound work entitled “Laugh Track” that will play in the space. The 2005 piece features the artist forcing herself to laugh for several minutes on end.

Duguid’s artist statement: My work is about relationships—relationships between me and the viewer, a viewer and a video, a photograph of the viewer and the video. I am not a painter, a photographer, a sculptor, or a performance artist; however, any of these handles might serve to describe my practice when necessary. I strive to reinterpret the nature of performative practice and its relationship to more traditional media such as drawing, video, and photography. I have a love for the fleeting, the ephemeral, and the comic. I craft objects and moments that are rooted in my own sense of humor and stylized around what I find funny. My physicality calls for props like high-heeled clown shoes, and my sensibility calls for the use of stylized props such as a cartoon ladder, a fake stove, or a large mustache. Like a joke, my work is meant to live beyond its first telling, and each retelling is different. My work is imbued with the performative and crafted to be documented. The method used to record the work is tailored for the work’s next iteration. Each iteration cannot be treated merely as documentation, but as the next telling of the work.

Charley Friedman is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He holds a BFA from Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, and an MFA from SMFA Boston/Tufts University, Boston, MA. His recent project Gallery Diet has been shown and tailored in multiple venues in Miami, FL and New York, NY. In 2007, Friedman was the subject of a ten-year survey at the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska. His work and performances have appeared in such venues as PS1/MoMA (Long Island City, NY), White Columns (New York, NY), Barbara Mathes Gallery (New York, NY), Parsons Hall Projects (Holyoke, MA), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), and many others. Friedman’s practice is not bound to a single medium; rather, he employs sculpture, installation, photographs, videos, drawings and performances in his cross-disciplinary practice. He will present work in photography and video for this exhibition at U·turn. Charley Friedman’s website.

Russell Ihrig was born in Alexandria, KY and currently resides in Bellevue, KY. He received his BFA in Fine Art from The Art Academy of Cincinnati in 2003, and also took part in the New York Studio Program in 2002. He has has shown locally at various galleries and was a member of the artist-run gallery, Publico. He has also exhibited work in Philadelphia at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Black Floor, and Vox Populi. An inventory of Ihrig’s previous works can be found here.

Ihrig has designed two installation sculptures for the exhibition. One is a non sequitur, a cup embellished with drawings and filled to its brim with orange juice. The other is a sculptural recreation of a scene he discovered in a pawnshop: an absurd juxtaposition of different collections of objects.

Ihrig’s artist statement: I don't set out to make work that is funny. I'm usually just trying to explore some theme or idea, but as I generate possible ways to explore that idea, I always come up with something that makes me laugh. Invariably, this funny option wins. I suppose I trust humor because I know something is working; there's some sort of underlying absurdity or irony that is actually affecting me on a physical level. I'll probably never take your breath away with a work that is beautiful or sublime, so I'm willing to settle for a chuckle.

Jonathan Juravich (Pittsburgh, PA, 1982) lives and works in Columbus, OH. Juravich is an artist teacher at Liberty Tree Elementary School, north of Columbus. His work reflects upon school life with humor, while also exploring the concept of identity. Currently a Masters student at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, he is a graduate of Otterbein College. Visit Juravich’s website for more information.

Juravich presents recent works in screen printing. Using modes of presentation borrowed from his experiences as a school teacher (lunch boxes, track jerseys), he subverts the givens of design and branding as means of communication and direction.

Juravich’s artist statement: As an art educator and coach, my work is all about relationships. I am exploring and illuminating the identities of children and their role as members of our vast visual culture. I have found that with humor I am able to interpret the unpredictable words and ideas of young children.

Screen-printing is traditionally an art form used as a vehicle for mass communication. T-shirts, advertisements, team uniforms, student backpacks, and lunchboxes… are all decorated with purpose, to convey something about the identity of the individual. In my screen-prints I am making a statement about the unseen, unique identities that lie behind uniforms and elementary lunchboxes. Though we as a culture may conform to fit in, there are intriguing differences that define us as individuals.

Cary Leibowitz is a New York-based artist who has been at the center of an art genre dubbed variously as “Loser Art” and “Pathetics Aesthetic.” For more than 20 years, Leibowitz has produced a wide range of artworks that include painting, prints, multiples, unassuming performances and a wide range of stylized one-liners that employ self-deprecating point of view to deal with such topics as the realities of being an artist, questionable taster, queer culture and Jewish humor. Leibowitz has often produced work under the moniker “Candyass.” He has exhibited regularly throughout the U.S., Europe, Japan and Canada. He has work in such prestigious collections as the Jewish Museum (New York, NY), the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC) the Robert. J. Shiffler Foundation (Dayton, OH). He is currently the Director of Contemporary Editions at Phillips de Pury & Company.

For this exhibition, Leibowitz conceived of a project that refers back to a topic he has returned to multiple times in his oeuvre: Liza Minnelli. Per his instructions, the U·turn collective members will be creating a kind of performance at the Cincinnati airport. Documentation of this project will be made into an edition of digital photographs that will be sold to benefit U·turn Art Space. The gallery is very excited to be working with Leibowitz, and grateful for his playful and generous idea.

Chris Reeves,

It was a cloudy Wednesday afternoon, about 341 months ago when Mrs Reeves gave birth to who we now know as Christopher Bunson Reeves. Of course all were glad that the family got extended, however no one in the picturesque town of (Middletown) knew yet how this brand new human being

was about to challenge our world in unexpected ways...

As a child Christopher (or Chris as he is called familiarly) was extremely creative. For Christmas 1991 he received a Lightbrite and for his 8th birthday he asked for a paint by number kit. He couldn't stop making and copying. [Copying is a key element to understanding the creative process of Sir Chris

Reeves]. One of his biggest inspiration was of course everything surrounding him, especially his friends and life on Earth in general (Chris Reeves considers himself a citizen of the World before any other cultural group). Once he reached 13 years of age, he decided he was going to dedicate his life to the sacred activity of Fun-Having. He therefore started rejecting anything and everything that would potentially be boring or too solemn.

As you probably expect it, Christopher had an intense teenagehood. He spent his time trying to make sense of life and figure out what he was supposed to be doing on this planet. He was constantly surrounded by his clique (or his apostles how he sometimes like to call them). Him, and his smala were constantly playing a ultra-powerful game named “Ping-pong joke” which consisted in making jokes about a previous joke which itself was a joke about another joke, which was about a previous joke etc...

It was a never ending dynamic creativity. To this day, nobody has dropped the ball so the “Ping-pong joke” game that started 15 years ago is still being played. The last person standing will be the winner but that's not for any time soon. Unless we are hit by an Asteroid or a Pandemic. Which could happen.

Possibly.

Chris Reeves is part of a generation whose adolescence lasts much longer than previous generations. At 22, he was still a teenager. At 24, he was still a teenager. At 26, he was still a teenager. At 28, he finally started to become a serious adult by joining a highly important and serious organization called Museum Gallery/Gallery Museum. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's get back to Reeves' early college years. Obviously, he decided that he had to get a college education because even though he lives in a free country where everyone is free to go through life dumb as a broom and proud of it, he thought that maybe he could get something out of this experience even if it was only a chance to make fun of some teachers. Since he was a stereotypical rebel wannabe-cool late teenager he joined art school. He was smart enough to know that art school would be by far the most entertaining academic program offered. However after a few years he got hit by some sort of epiphany of rationalization, he changed his major to focus on the history of art (AKA the stories of art) because he knew that in the very judging society that we live in, he would be less considered a “slothful weirdo” which is what the active population thinks of the “artist class”.

After a very well deserved bachelor degree, he decided that 10 years of college wasn't enough so he directly jumped into a MASTER OF ART HISTORY in order to become a master in understanding Manet's mood swings. Or not, depending on what teachers are on sabbatical. But what really made CR an illustrious element of Cincinnati contemporary art mafia, was his enlighten decision to join Cincinnati art based fake museum MGGM. Since his enrollment in the organization, he has gained a great deal of experience in experimenting with artists' patience and creative remodeling...

Chris Reeves's ten-year-long career has been filled with puns, jokes, funny characters, cute mustaches, bird loving robots, irrelevant parodies, repetitive plagiarisms, pataphysical questioning, anachronistic poetry, social network mythology, Pingu study, post-modern revery, gay bar dance parties and illegal internet streaming.

Loraine Wible

Dropped at a great height from a tiny bundle nestled in the mouth of the majestic beak of Toonekurg, the great King Stork, into the chimney of a chateau in the Paris Left Bank, Loraine Wible made her debut, as a fair complexioned, but ultimately inexpugnable bundle of hardihood. Honing her creative and intellectual prowess as a child with the company of her Leonberger, Hervé Jean-Pierre Villechaiz, in the open fields and fresh air of the Latin Quarter, Wible quickly accelerated through enseignement primaire, and enseignement secondaire.  Midway through her schooling, Wible became inspired by the non-retrogradable rhythms of composer Iannis Xenakis’ orchestral piece Metastasis, the theory on Calabi Yau manifolds by theoretical physicist Edward Witten, racewalking, and mullagathanni soup. Drawing on these inspirations, Wible dedicated herself to the domain of new media (sometimes referred to as “new media”), spending the last fifteen years of her life attempting to translate the poetic villanelle into a video art piece entitled Trioxygen: Art Thou Greater than Thy?. Her favorite quote is “As long as you live, keep learning how to live” – Seneca.