Aloha Means Both Hello and Goodbye:

U·turn Art Space’s Final Exhibition

June 4th—25th, 2011Contemporary Arts Center 44 Video Screening: Saturday, June 4th, 2:00 – 4:00 pm

Opening reception: Saturday, June 4th, 7:00 – 10:00 pm
Finale party: Saturday, June 25th, starting at 7:00 pm


Cincinnati, OH—U·turn Art Space will be closing its doors after its final exhibition Aloha Means Both Hello and Goodbye. Like a good TV show, it’s done everything it set out to do in a few short seasons. In nearly two years’ time, U·turn has exhibited more than seventy artists from the Cincinnati region and around the globe, and produced a run of catalogues to record the history of these endeavors. The gallery collective is grateful for the opportunity we’ve had to share our interests and passions with Cincinnati.

The final exhibition reprises the gallery’s first exhibition concept: to use the space to say thank you. Aloha Means Both Hello and Goodbye features the work of Keith Banner, Paul Coors, Micah Freeman, Mark Harris, Rian Hunter, Justine Ludwig and Bill Ross. These individuals were invited to participate in U·turn’s farewell project as an expression of gratitude for their material and emotional support as U·turn has done things we never imagined were possible for an alternative gallery with such limited resources. Through the collected works of these seven artists, we hope to give visual form to the network of friends, neighbors and colleagues that extends beyond U·turn as an organization.

While this exhibition marks the close of a chapter in our lives and in the life of alternative arts spaces in Cincinnati, we believe that the effects of what U·turn has accomplished in the past two years will continue on. New adventures are beginning. The five of us who have curated and operated U·turn want to thank the community for taking an interest in our projects and for being willing to be engaged.

U·turn has been invited to guest curate one of the Contemporary Arts Center’s Saturday 44 events, a series that presents art and performances on the first Saturday afternoon of every month. For the June 44, U·turn has organized a screening of local video artists—drawing from artists we’ve previously exhibited, others we admire and two that appear in our final exhibition. The CAC is located at 44 E. 6th Street in downtown. The video screenings will take place in the Center’s lobby between 2:00 and 4:00 pm.

The gallery exhibition and U·turn Art Space concludes with a finale party on Saturday, June 25th, beginning at 7 pm. Expect gorgeous refreshments, good music and an opportunity to luxuriate through one more evening with the U·Crew.

Artist Bios

Keith Banner is the cofounder of Visionaries & Voices and Thunder-Sky, Inc., two non-profit arts organizations in Cincinnati. He is a social worker for people with developmental disabilities full-time, and teaches creative writing part-time at Miami University. He has published two works of fiction, The Life I Lead, a novel, and The Smallest People Alive, a book of short stories. He has published numerous short stories and essays in magazines and journals, including American Folk Art Messenger, Other Voices, Washington Square, Kenyon Review, and Third Coast. He received an O. Henry prize for his short story, “The Smallest People Alive,” and an Ohio Arts Council individual artist fellowship for fiction. The Smallest People Alive was named one of the best books of the year by Publisher’s Weekly. His visual art has been in exhibits across the region, and he blogs about visual art and other subjects here.

Paul Coors is a Cincinnati native and Art Academy of Cincinnati graduate. He co-founded the now defunct Publico and managed it for 5 years until 2008. An exhibition chronicling the history of Publico and featuring those artists that helped shape the artist-run space was held at the Weston Art Gallery in 2008. Coors has exhibited extensively in group projects in Cincinnati, Philadelphia and the Joshua Liner Gallery in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include semantics gallery, Clay Street Press and Country Club. Last fall, Coors exhibited alongside Tony Luensman at Aisle. Coors currently does occasional design work and bartends in Northside to fund the artwork he creates in his home/studio in Brighton. See more of Coors' work here.


Micah Freeman is a writer who lives and works in Cincinnati. He has operated several alternative music and arts venues in Cincinnati, including Skull Lab and Murmur. During his time at Murmur, Freeman organized an ongoing reading series that featured writers at different stages of their careers. He has presented performances, readings and artwork in such Cincinnati venues as the Contemporary Arts Center, semantics, Museum Gallery/Gallery Museum and CS13, as well as the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center in Covington, KY and the Catherine Hickman Theater in Gulfport, FL. He has released several chapbooks, including Romance Today and No Wonder. Freeman’s recent projects include contributions to U·turn’s Mechanics of Joy catalogue, and to I Was Dreaming When I Wrote This, a book of poems released by Thunder-Sky Inc. that respond to the text-based art of Dale Jackson. His poetry has also been included in recent volumes of WEST WiND REViEW, Abraham Lincoln and Out of Nothing.


Mark Harris currently serves as Director of the School of Art at the University of Cincinnati. Harris holds an MA in Painting from The Royal College of Art, London, an MA in Continental Philosophy from Warwick University, Coventry, and a PhD in Philosophy from Goldsmiths College, London. In 2005 he received an Arts Council England Fellowship with the Long March Project, Beijing. Recent exhibitions of his work include “State Fare” (Wexner Center, Columbus, 2007), “Utopian-Bands,” (2 kolegas, Beijing, 2006, and Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, 2008) and “Morning Star” (Country Club Gallery, Cincinnati, 2010). In 2011 his video work was shown in “High Times” the Wellcome Collection, London, and at the Baltimore Contemporary Museum. In 2009 he received a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Art Writers Grant. Recent published essays include “Pipilotti Rist's Music” for the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, “Chelsea Hotel, March 14, 2008” on Marcia Farquhar's performance work, and “The City Sings,” on Heather Phillipson’s video work. He has contributed an essay to “The Countercultural Experiment: Consciousness and Encounters at the Edge of Art,” to be published in 2011 by University of Minnesota Press. He has curated exhibitions such as “Educating Barbie,” at Trans Hudson Gallery, New York, 1999; “Bad Drawing—malevolent, misbehaving, misunderstood” (2006) and “Once Upon A Time In The Midwest” (2007) at the University of Cincinnati; “Star Maker,” at E:vent gallery, London, 2009.

For this exhibition, Harris has created a new work, I Made A Big Painting, 131 x 79 inches, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas. About it he writes: Thanks to The Times (Ed Ball’s post-punk band that ran parallel to his Television Personalities) I have a title for this oversized printed acrylic-on-paper painting, eleven by seven feet. Wondering at the motives for art-making, Ball sings of painting across the sky, the largest picture of all. It’s a bit hard to tell as the song cheerfully moves along without making a tremendous amount of sense, but perhaps Ball is thinking of IKB, “patented” when Yves Klein found himself staring at the blue sky while lying on a beach–the ultimate indolent but celebratory painting. Singing, “Through the years I’ve made big paintings of lots of things that made us think… You mean so much to me, far more than any gallery…You’re the reason I feel quite good,” Ball’s motive for painting big is his affection for someone and his feeling perfectly at ease with the world. Over the years I’ve made a lot of big paintings. At the time I understood they were about friendship, poetry, nostalgia, painting, or death, but Ball has reminded me that they were also always to do with feeling quite good about things.


Rian Hunter is from Columbus, Ohio and currently resides in Cincinnati. She recently received her BFA in photography from the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

Artist Statement: My work consists of repetitive actions documented with video. These actions are repeated for several minutes with little variation and only rare climatic events. As the performer, I experience the entirety of what is shown in the video, which gives me a chance to contemplate self-awareness that emerges from activity and interaction with the camera. My realizations about myself most often focus on defects of character rather than positive realizations. Because these perceptions of self can be somewhat elusive, I carefully title each video. Through a combination of language and repetitive action, I hope to allude to consciousness of perceived imperfections of character, such as awkwardness and introversion, and suggest that these so-called flaws could possibly be redemptive traits when acknowledged properly rather than hindrances to normal existence.


Justine Ludwig is the Assistant Curator at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OH. Her recently curated exhibitions include Rosson Crow: Myth of the American Motorcycle and Shinji Turner-Yamamoto: Disappearances. In 2008 Ludwig spent three months in Mumbai, India immersed in the local contemporary art community, which resulted in the exhibition Shilpa Gupta: A Bit Closer. She has written for the Indian art magazine Art Ect and contributes to The Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art. She is currently working on a group exhibition that explores the contemporary practice and evolution of miniaturist painting from Pakistan as well as the first US solo exhibition of New Zealand artist Francis Upritchard.  Ludwig attended Colby College in Waterville Maine where she studied art history and sculpture. While she now rarely practices sculpture, she finds creative release in Butoh—a Japanese form of dance she has been practicing since 2003. In addition to writing on art, she writes creatively. Her writing has appeared most recently in U·turn’s Brighton Approach. 

For U·turn, Ludwig will be creating a body of work that combines curated moments in multiple mediums to wish the gallery goodnight. The work offers the embodiment of the gallery an opportunity to dream—no longer limited by physical restraints. Dance, video and sculptural elements will merge to create a lullaby.


Bill Ross is a cofounder of Visionaries & Voices (V&V) and Thunder-Sky, Inc. A graduate of the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, he has exhibited his work in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Columbus, Ohio, as well as locally here in the Cincinnati area at Designsmith Gallery and 1305 Gallery in Over the Rhine and Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center in Covington, Kentucky. He recently was a visiting artist at the Cincinnati Art Museum. He is a social worker for people with developmental disabilities full-time, and oversees a weekend art-making program every Saturday at Thunder-Sky, Inc. in Northside. His paintings and sculptures investigate an otherworldliness that is both innocently garish and garishly innocent: images from storybooks collide with eerie narratives of loss and disjuncture. In 2004, Ross began a series of collaborations with a variety of artists labeled with developmental disabilities (many of whom attend or attended V&V), including Donald Henry, Dale Jackson, Becky Iker, Bill Ross, Michael Weber, and Kevin White. These collaborative works (usually paintings) are about dislocating notions of who is an artist and what art can be and do, and feature Ross’s signature phosphorescent style merged with the signature styles of each of the collaborators. One of the highlights of both his social-work and visual arts career was being able to support and champion Raymond Thunder-Sky, a Cincinnati artist and icon known as “the Construction Clown.”