u·turn art space

2011-05-23T06:45:00.000-07:00

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.”

The Middle of White: Sara Blyth-Stephens + Michelle Grabner

2011-04-15T13:13:00.000-07:00

The Middle of White:
Sarah Blyth-Stephens + Michelle Grabner

May 7^th—28^th, 2011

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

Cincinnati, OH—U·turn Art Space is proud to present new works by Sara Blyth-Stephens and Michelle Grabner in the May exhibition, The Middle of White. Blyth-Stephens’ sculptures are created on site by pouring and splashing Hydro-cal (a plaster like material) across curtains of plastic that are removed after the works have dried, leaving delicate white records of their active production. Grabner’s works on paper are also accumulations of gestures: straight marks are drawn repeatedly in metal point across sheets that have been primed with black gesso. As the delicate metal lines tarnish, each work takes on a unique character of subtle hues and variation across the page’s surfaces. By calling attention to the materials, methods and gestures they employ, both artists create highly formalist artworks that are humanized by evident handiwork. The predominantly white sculptures and black works on paper come together in a high contrast pairing that shares similar conceptual impulses.

Blyth-Stephens’ use of restraint in her manipulation of a material allows it to be itself profoundly. Whether working with tinkling sheets of aluminum foil hung like curtains in a gallery, creating forms from balloons that deflate over the course of an exhibition or working on location with liquid hydro-cal as she is doing in U·turn, the physical properties of the works and how they can change over time is of primary interest. In 2010, she pushed this method of working to greater scale, creating a number of works that stood taller than average human height, and curved through spaces like parenthetical dividers. These works become architectural interventions, oscillating between object and demarcation of space. U·turn has invited Blyth-Stephens to respond to the gallery’s nuanced space as well as the placement of Michelle Grabner’s series of works.

Grabner’s process of metal point (and sometimes graphite) on black-coated paper or panel has been ongoing for a number of years. While sometimes basing the ordering of the marks on grids and textile patterns, the works often consist of repeated marks made either vertically, or radiating from a central point, practically filling the surface area. The silvery quality of the lines can, at times, be optically suggestive of space. The tarnishing process of the metal itself is a subtle record of the space and conditions surrounding each work. The labor, repetition and variation involved in these works instill a complexity into what is initially a minimal visual encounter.

Artist Bios

Sarah Blyth-Stephens holds a BA in Art History from Indiana University, a BFA from Ohio State University and an MFA from University of Cincinnati. She has worked closely with Museum Gallery/Gallery Museum in Cincinnati, exhibiting there frequently. She has also presented work at semantics, Cincinnati, OH; Urban Arts Space and the Wexner Center, Columbus, OH; Heuser Gallery at Bradley University, Peoria, IL; University of Tennessee Downtown Gallery, Knoxville, TN; and Zanesville Museum, Zanesville, OH. In 2008, she was awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center.

Michelle Grabner is a professor and department chair of the Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and along with her husband Brad Killam runs the artist-run exhibition spaces: The Suburban, Oak Park, IL and The Poor Farm, Waupaca County WI. Grabner's work is included in the public collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MUDAM - Musée d’Art Moderne, Luxemburg; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. She has exhibited recently at Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL; Leo Koenig Projekte, New York, NY; Rocket, London, UK; Minus Space, Brooklyn, NY; and Green Gallery East, Milwaukee, WI.

Pared: Works by Matthew Deleget and Ellen Nagel

2011-03-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

Pared: Works by Matthew Deleget and Ellen Nagel

April 2nd—30th, 2011
Opening reception: Saturday, April 2nd, 7:00 – 10:00 pm

Cincinnati, OH—For Pared, U·turn Art Space presents works by Matthew Deleget and Ellen Nagel that consider reduction as a maneuver in painting, sculpture throughout art history. Deleget presents a series of monochrome works on panel, along with a long-term and ongoing conceptual project based in the collection of artist catalogues that have been purchased at deeply discounted prices. Nagel has created a number of brand new sculptural installations for the exhibition. Together, Deleget’s and Nagel’s work continues a line of inquiry into reduction and restraint in which U·turn is persistently invested.

Deleget’s I Love You (2007) is comprised of solidly colored plastic shopping bags that have been mounted onto nine panels. I Love You was inspired by The Beatles song All Together Now (also, a humorous reference to collaboration). In the song, Paul McCartney sings the lines, “black, white, green, red — can I take my friend to bed? — pink, brown, yellow, orange, blue — I love you.” Deleget has quoted McCartney directly, with each of the nine panels corresponding to the mentioned colors and installed in the order found in the song. Deleget uses McCartney’s lyrics to connect his practice of abstraction to unexpected cultural points of reference.

Deleget also presents a collection of books as art objects. All of the books are about living abstract artists—his inspirations—and were purchased at major art museums in New York City at heavily discounted prices. While his works on panel bespeak to Deleget’s own love and commitment to abstract art, this project questions whether the artists and their ideas have been discounted with the prices of these books.

Ellen Nagel’s assemblage sculptures are experiments in elegant restraint. Nagel creates art experiences that occupy the same space as the viewer, at approximately the same scale of the viewer. The avatars she constructs bring together found objects from home life (clothing, shopping bags), the studio (paint, drawing boards) and the cleanly institutional (modular office furniture). While there may be any number of elements in each work, their overall effect is one of absolute subtlety. As freestanding, collaged objects, they call attention to their own physical features: rigidity and slackness, buoyancy and gravity, tension and repose. She balances seemingly incidental elements with formalist choices that are precise and considered. Around their edges, her works evoke myth and metaphor as monuments to the humble and the heroic. Ultimately, they evidence the culture(s) surrounding their making.

Artist Bios

Matthew Deleget is an abstract painter, curator, and writer. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including solo and group exhibitions in Europe, Asia, and Australia. He is a member of American Abstract Artists, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation’s Artist Advisory Committee, and the board of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. Matthew has received awards from the American
Academy of Arts & Letters, Brooklyn Arts Council, and The Golden Rule Foundation, and his work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Flash Art, Artnet Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Basler Zeitung, among others.

In 2003, Deleget founded MINUS SPACE, a platform for reductive art on the international level based in Brooklyn, NY. MINUS SPACE’s web site is used by more than 800 people daily from 150 countries worldwide. Deleget has also organized more than two dozen solo and group exhibitions at both MINUS SPACE’s gallery in the Gowanus, Brooklyn, as well as other collaborating venues on the national and international levels. MINUS SPACE exhibitions have been reviewed in Art in America, Artnet Magazine, ArtNews, The Brooklyn Rail, Houston Public Radio, Huffington Post, The New Criterion, New York Magazine, NYFA Current, New York Sun, Time Out New York, and Village Voice, among others.

Deleget holds an MFA in Painting and an MS in Theory, Criticism and History of Art, Design and Architecture from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. He holds a BA in Art and German from Wabash College,
Crawfordsville, IN. He lives with his wife, artist Rossana Martinez, and son in Brooklyn, NY.

Ellen Nagel is a Cincinnati native, where she continues to live and work. She received a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 2010. Nagel appeared in U·turn Art Space’s first exhibition Brought To You By, and the gallery collective immediately sought a reprisal of Nagel’s work in a more ambitious installation. Nagel has previous participated in multiple exhibitions at the Art Academy’s Chidlaw Gallery. In 2010, she was one of several artists to create a site-specific installation in the Cincinnati Art Museum. Entitled Let Fall, the interactive work invited viewers to look behind heavy black curtains to experience a series of post-minimal painted shapes.

Amateur Night at the Chuckle Hut: An Evening of Stand Up

2011-03-15T14:11:00.000-07:00

Afraid you may have missed your opportunity to see our March exhibition, People Who Make Us Smile? Well, here at U∙turn, we don’t believe in missed opportunities. We believe in MORE opportunities! Please join us this Saturday, March 19th, at U∙turn Art Space for an evening of Stand Up Comedy. Yep, that’s right, Stand Up Comedy!

March weather has been uncompromisingly unpredictable and we certainly don’t blame anybody for staying ...in on the countless rainy days watching reruns of 30 Rock on Netflix; BUT, we are determined to share this exhibition with the community! So stop on by, share some drinks and share some laughs as we bring together some of Cincinnati’s most creative and most humorous people.

Emcee’d by the lovely and talented Russell Ihrig, aspiring and established local comics and artists will test out some new material on your funny bones against the backdrop of the exhibition.

Doors will open at 7:00pm with performances beginning at approximately 7:30pm.

People Who Make Us Smile is 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. We anticipate nothing short of this from the evening’s performances.

Please stop in! We’ll make each other smile! Rain or Shine!

XOXO,

U∙turn Art Space

People Who Make Us Smile

2011-03-09T09:13:00.000-08:00

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.

A Literary Art Crowd

2011-02-19T06:15:00.000-08:00

Tonight is Literati Glitterati, U.turn's version of a fundraiser. We hope you will be joining us, lots of wonderful surprises have been prepared for you. One being the beautiful full color exhibition catalogues we have been working on for quite awhile now. Of the exhibitions U.turn has mounted to date we currently have 14 publications available for purchase through our Lulu storefront. We plan on continuing to produce little volumes to accompany each of our future shows as well.

This is a great boon for us as a collective. At the outset of U.turn the five of us involved envisioned a catalogue project, and it is so rewarding to see one of our goals realized. Each publication was written, designed, and layed out with the original concepts pertaining to the particular show in mind. The resulting books are quite honestly the gems in our gallery crown (if our gallery were to have a crown).

Each catalogue in our Lulu store is available for purchase in two formats. First for the lovers of the printed page, our catalogues come printed paperback in full color glory in a lovely hand held 7.5 x 7.5 size (the catalogue for One Solid Mutiny is available in a larger 8.5 x 8.5 size) with saddle-stitch binding. Additionally, each of the carefully organized books is attainable as a .pdf download one can read on an e Reader.

We will have one copy of each of the catalogues so far produced on hand this evening for the curious, as well as information how you can procure your own copies. Hope you can make it!

Literati Glitterati (Where the Beautiful People Will Be)

2011-02-13T12:41:00.000-08:00

Literati Glitterati: A U·turn Fundraiser

$10 suggested donation at the door

Cincinnati, OH—In little more than a year and a half of consistent monthly programming, U·turn Art Space is proud to have exhibited sixty artists from our region and from around the world. Now we are asking for your help. But don’t worry; we put the ‘fun’ in fundraiser. On the evening of the 19th, there will be books, buffets and beauty. Along with a delic...ious homemade meal, we will be offering beer for sale, live poetry readings and intermissions filled with a playlist designed especially for the event.

The evening will double as a book release night. Here are a few of the exciting releases planned:

-Brighton Approach Gold Edition- A special edition of Brighton Approach, U·turn’s art and literature periodical, will be available for sale. A number of the writers included in the book will be reading their work throughout the evening, including Keith Banner, Jennifer Glaser, Michael Hennessey, Meg Prichard, Nick Story and Dana Ward. These books have been printed full color, with art and writing contributions from Cincinnati and all across the country. As a Gold Edition, the book has been themed around alchemy, the pursuit of transforming the mundane into something precious. As an alternative arts space, we readily identify with such a goal.

-The U·turn Folios- The gallery has created four sets of full color digital prints, featuring work by the collective, as well as over twenty other artists that have exhibited with the space since October 2009. Three small folios have been curated and each will be available for $15. A larger folio that includes all of the prints from the smaller collections will available at a discounted price. All folios will include a certificate of authenticity from the gallery. These will be printed in a limited run for the event.

-Exhibition Catalogues- Since the beginning of 2010, the gallery has been designing print-to-order catalogues for every exhibition. A full run of these books will be unveiled, with information about how to order them from our online store (if you’d like to preview some of these books, visit the our Lulu storefront. This run of catalogues include essays and poems by Christopher Backs, Keith Banner, Shawnee Barton, Craig Damrauer, Micah Freeman, Hollis Hammonds, Isaac Hand, Justine Ludwig, Matt Morris, Patricia Murphy, Zachary Rawe, Eric Ruschman and Dana Ward.

A little about the cost of running the space:
U·turn is comprised of five members, all working artists with day jobs. The gallery takes no commission off of the sale of artwork in the space, wishing instead to pass all profits back to the artists. So far, we have financed the space with our own incomes.
It costs an estimated $585 a month to operate the gallery. This includes rent and energy as well as costs for producing an exhibition, such as wall paint, lights, reception refreshments, postcards and the cost to ship work back to artists. For a professional art gallery, this is amazingly economical. In the winter, our heating bills are much higher. We hope that this fundraiser will help us offset these expenses and make our spring exhibitions easier to produce.

This event coincides with our remarkable current exhibition, Marcia Hafif: Glaze Paintings. The renowned Hafif has designed a spacious installation of 8 small monochrome paintings that activate the entire room.

Steve Rosen reviewed this exhibition recently in CityBeat.

**SIDE NOTE**

Our friends at the alternative arts space CS13 will be presenting a 24-hour long exhibition called The Today Show that begins at 5 pm on Friday, February 18th and culminates in a reception on the evening of Saturday, February 19th, from 5-7 pm. A number of the artists included in their exhibition have shown or will be showing at U·turn in the coming months. The artists will mount an exhibition in which all of the work is conceived, created, installed, documented, written about and presented to the public in a 24 hour period. CS13 is located at 1420 Main Street in Over-the-Rhine. Make it an evening all about alternative spaces in the city: start at CS13 at 5 pm and then join us for dinner and a poem or two at 7 pm.

Marcia Hafif: Glaze Paintings

2011-01-29T11:19:00.000-08:00

Marcia Hafif: Glaze Paintings
February 5th-26th, 2011

Opening reception: Saturday, February 5th, 7:00 – 10:00 pm
Fundraising dinner and book release night: Saturday, February 19th, 7:00 pm

Cincinnati, OH—U·turn Art Space is proud to present a solo exhibition of monochrome paintings by Marcia Hafif. Eight works from Hafif’s Glaze Paintings series will be presented in a spacious installation throughout the gallery. February is also a fundraising month for U·turn, with an evening of dinner, book releases and entertainment on February 19th. More information about U·turn’s fundraising efforts to be announced.

Marcia Hafif is a celebrated pioneer of painting’s revival in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1972, her work shifted into the approach to monochrome painting that she continues to explore today. Of this time, Hafif has written, “We pretended in a certain way that we did not know anything about painting. We studied and rediscovered it for ourselves.” This time in painting history has been called the Radical Painting movement. Hafif was one of many artists that began to treat paintings as objects, and took no element in the making and presentation of paintings for granted. Hafif spent years exploring various painting media: oil, acrylic, egg tempera and fresco. She makes her oil paint by grinding pure pigments by hand into linseed oil. The marks she makes with the brush are regulated to a meditative movement, so that the colored surfaces seem to flicker in our perception of them. She has explored how we experience the hue of a pigment by presenting them alone on a canvas, or in other work glazing one pigment across another. Hafif allows each color to express its own nuances.

The Glaze Paintings that will be presented at U·turn are 12-inch square canvases that have been colored with a single pigment across their surface. Using a medium of Damar varnish, turpentine and oil, the different pigments are glazed over a white ground; differences in transparency between pigments give the feeling that the canvases are glowing radiantly.

Hafif states: “The figure had moved off the ground; now the painting itself was a figure on the ground of the world around it.” The experience of this form of painting differs from the traditional experiences of a representational image or even an abstract painting that has been divided geometrically into a composition. These monochrome paintings include the walls and spaces around them in the experience. On the special potential of experiencing a monochrome painting, Hafif notes: “A surface apparently without incident reveals to the artist the impossibility of eliminating it altogether and gives to the viewer the experience of seeming emptiness and the option of dealing with her/himself in that emptiness. What is there when we have taken everything away?”

While the works that comprise this exhibition are paintings on canvas, the artist and the gallery considers this an installation. Hafif designed the exhibition remotely, planning the placement of the works, the height at which they are hung, and what their relationships to the preexisting space will be. The intervals of blank wall between works, and how the white walls and environment are activated by the paintings are of prime importance. Given the sparseness of the installation, the memory of color comes into play: how the experience of one monochrome painting informs the experience of the next of a different hue is a grand experiment. Even distilled to such a small number of variables, this selection of work is rich with visual information.

Artist Bio
Hafif was born in Pomona, CA, in 1929. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Pomona College, and an MFA from University of California at Irvine. Hafif’s work is in dozens of public collections throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum fur Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt; and many others. She has exhibited extensively throughout the world in group and solo exhibitions. Highlights from her numerous accomplishments include multiple NEA Fellowships, a New York State CAPS Grant and exhibitions at PS1, Long Island City, New York; Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Genève, Switzerland; Modem - Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts, Debrecen, Hungary; Galerie Conrads, Dusseldorf; Kunsthalle Barmen, Wuppertal; FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, France; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Rupert Walser Gallery, Munich, Germany among others. Her work has been reviewed prominently in ARTnews, the Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America. She lived in Rome from 1961-1969 and moved to New York City in 1971, where she has continued to live and work. She now splits her time between New York and Laguna Beach, CA. For more information about Marcia Hafif, please visit her website.

Fundraiser Information
On February 19th, at 7 pm, the gallery will offer a buffet style benefit dinner to offset the costs of operating the space. The cost will be $10 at the door, and there will be beer available for sale as long as supplies last. More fundraiser information to follow here on the blog and on Facebook.

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

2010-12-19T11:13:00.000-08:00

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).

2010-12-19T10:54:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-16T11:31:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-14T13:23:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-14T10:35:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-09-19T11:46:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-26T12:37:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-13T11:40:00.000-07:00

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.

The journey to One Solid Mutiny

2010-05-07T14:31:00.000-07:00

CityBeat photojournalist Cameron Knight has been shadowing our own Zach Rawe as he prepared for his first solo art exhibition, One Solid Mutiny. Take a look at the multimedia project that resulted.

One Solid Mutiny: A Solo Exhibition by Zach Rawe
May 1st—29th, 2010

Regular gallery hours are on Saturdays, 12-4 pm, and by appointment.
For more information, please contact the gallery by e-mail: u.turn.artspace@gmail.com

One Solid Mutiny : A Solo Exhibition by Zachary Rawe

2010-04-23T13:25:00.000-07:00

War then. Now that we've broken your heart sides must be taken.

One Solid Mutiny: A Solo Exhibition by Zach Rawe

May 1^st—29^th, 2010

Opening reception: Saturday, May 1^st, 7:00 – 10:00 pm

Cincinnati, OH—U·turn Art Space is pleased to announce One Solid Mutiny, a solo exhibition of recent sculptures, installations and works on paper by one of the venue’s progenitors, Zach Rawe. A print-to-order monograph will accompany the exhibition, as well as a special multimedia video project with photojournalist Cameron Knight that follows the artist’s creative process, to launch May 5^th on Citybeat.com.

One Solid Mutiny crowds the gallery’s floor space and walls with a ragamuffin circus of human empathy. A rudimentary battlefield has been marked out with a line of duct tape running the length of the space (recalling a default solution to squabbles between siblings or roommates: “You stay on your side and I’ll stay on mine!”). In this exhibition specifically conceived for U·turn, Rawe contrasts (if not directly pits against one another) adjacent aesthetic concerns in his work. To the left will be a presentation of America in its extreme excess: piggy banks, faux gold Santas, crudely designed plastic toy sharks and an inflatable flamingo. In contrast to this project in Maximalism, the other side of the gallery has been conceived as a calmer, more neutralized visual experience. Tending towards industrial, raw materials, the sculpture displayed in the right portion of the gallery make use of the quiet of their surrounding space as much as the cinder blocks, clear plastic and low sitting puddles of confetti from which they are constructed. With evident contrasts in play, the conjoined spaces contextualize one another as an awkward but mutually beneficial environment. Upon entering the divided space, viewers are empowered to attempt reconciliation between the evident differences in the space and to detect personal meanings in their discoveries.

Though two sides are presented neither are preferred. Thoroughly nonjudgmental, the artist’s process mines broad expanses of consumerism, contemporary aesthetics and the trickle down effects of pop culture into unexpected terrain in our everyday lives. While most of the elements that comprise Rawe’s work remain blatantly what they are (soda cans, stickers, novelty decorations, flea market finds), they often accumulate into abstract and even bewildering situations that allow viewers to locate and appreciate the sincerity and sarcasm, irony, pathos, and generosity in the work. Chances for self-reflection, self-indictment, or self-incrimination crop up in installations that are challengingly associative and applicable to the day-to-day activities of the artist and his viewers.

Humble sculptures that Rawe creates stand equipped with sly humor as they consider notions of ambition and failure. Incorporating an endless list of found and unaltered purchased objects, Rawe’s sculptures employ their own making (often simple stacks or quick efforts with glue or clamps) as part of their aesthetics.

Or put another way by art critic Jerry Saltz: “Non-Specific Objects accept that power and passivity often meld and exist simultaneously, and that monolithic modes of thinking aren’t a rich enough way to see the world. They grasp that just because you are not sure doesn’t mean you’re not confident. I would only add that Non-Specific Objects are nearly always sincere and ironic at the same time.”

Artist Bio

Zach Rawe is a graduate of the Art Academy of Cincinnati with a BFA in sculpture. As an emerging artist, Rawe has already received honors including a semester long residency in New York City during his undergraduate studies. He has participated in exhibitions in Cincinnati, OH: New York, NY: Covington, KY and Frankfort, KY. His work has been written about in City Beat and he is excited to be working with Cameron Knight on the imminent web project about Rawe’s art practice. In 2009, Rawe founded the U·turn Art Space with the four other collective members that rallied around his initial vision. Rawe is originally from Northern Kentucky, but now lives and keeps a studio in Over-the-Rhine.

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

Breakups R Tough

2010-03-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Breakups R Tough: a group exhibition

April 3– 24, 2010

Opening reception: Saturday, April 3^rd, 7:00 – 10:00 pm

Regular Gallery Hours: 12-4, Saturdays

Cincinnati, OH—About now, many of those relationships that were flourishing at Valentine’s Day aren’t looking so good. U·turn Art Space is pleased to announce a group exhibition that generates a wry discourse to deflate the melodrama of failed relationships. The exhibition includes Shawnee Barton, Stephanie Brooks, Alex Da Corte, Craig Damrauer, Erica Eyres, Lynne Harlow, Peter Huttinger, Eric Lebofsky, Joetta Maue, Casey Riordan Millard and Michael J. Morris.

Artists using embroidery, drawing, installation, performance, photography, sculpture and video offer different perspectives on crisis points in the human experience. Not strictly focused on just the ‘breakup’ between romantic partners, Breakups R Tough considers how interpersonal interactions cease or mutate into something more chaotic. Grafted into the dialogue are slanted looks at other stages in the quest for love, companionship and sex, such as propositions, courtship and self-pleasure. The assembled artists will address the topic with humor, wit, sexuality, physical comfort, and suggestions for remodeling our culture’s structure for types of relationships and categories of love and conflict.

Artist Bios

Shawnee Barton is a Texas born interdisciplinary artist currently living in San Diego. She received her BFA in Sculpture and graduated with departmental distinction from Southern Methodist University. She participated in the Independent Studio Programme at Slade School of Art in London, and completed her MFA at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Shawnee is also an arts educator, administrator and advocate. Shawnee has taught courses in both the Photography and Printmedia departments at SAIC. She has worked as an arts administrator for The Illinois Arts Council, The Palo Alto Arts Center, and and New Langton Arts in San Francisco. During this past presidential election, Shawnee served on Barack Obama's National Arts Policy Committee. For the exhibition at U.turn, Shawnee will be contributing an installation of books that originated from her 2006 conceptual project The One That Got Away. Through various avenues of research, Barton deconstructed this common phrase and created a number of objects and installations that looked at its plural role in our culture. The element we will be exhibiting is Every Book in Print titled “The One That Got Away” which is pretty much what it sounds like. The repeated title on a set of books resonates this idea of loss across a spectrum of subjects that the books address.

Shawnee Barton's Artist Statement: Many Americans place importance on introspection, self-revelation, and creating a self-image to portray to the world. Our enthusiasm for therapists, talk shows, and emotion-regulating medications are all examples of individuals trying to better understand and live with themselves and others. My work is a manifestation of my own complex relationship with introspection, and the creation of a personal identity. While openly trying to better understand my world, I also use satire to explore sociological concerns such as dislocation, relationship and group dynamics, class issues, and the ways in which we make connections and communicate with each other.

Stephanie Brooks was born in 1970. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL in 1997. She is in the collections of Philip Morris, New York, the MacArthur Foundation, Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Stephanie Brooks lives and works in Chicago. Brook’s contribution to Breakups R Tough is a light box entitled Metaphors for Love that appropriates the template for identifying types of candies in a heart shaped box of chocolates. Rather than the traditional flavors, the text inside the candy shapes inventory a range of romantic, sly and dark metaphors that have been used to discuss love.

Craig Damrauer is a writer and artist living and working in Brooklyn. He graduated with an MFA from the University of Arizona in 1996. His work has been shown at the MCA Denver and has appeared in the New York Times, GOOD Magazine, Mother Jones and Adbusters. Most recently, a version of New Math edited by Ed Ruscha was published by CT Editions in London. Damrauer’s New Math project, as well as many other endeavors, find skewed and humorous approaches to love and the trials and triumphs of life. For Breakups R Tough, Damrauer has conceived of a large screenprinted version of some of his New Math equations, to be accompanied by a tender piece entitled The Love Variations, in which love is mistyped, full of blinding typos and errors. We encourage you to explore his very interactive website.

Alex Da Corte lives and works in Philadelphia, PA and New Haven, CT. Born in 1980. He received his BFA from University of Arts, Philadelphia, PA and is completing his MFA from Yale University this year. Da Corte primarily exhibits meticulously crafted sculptures and sleek photographs. His work has been presented in numerous notable exhibitions, including Black Floor Gallery and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; the Asia Song Society in New York, NY; LaMontagne Gallery in Boston, MA; Golden Age in Chicago, IL; Parisian Laundry in Montreal, QC; and most recently, an ambitious floor installation was presented at PS1 in Long Island City, in conjunction with the thematic exhibition Between Spaces.

Da Corte will present several photographs from his Activity series, in which attractive young men are documented performing various undisclosed activities. Usually stripped to their underwear and sometimes splashed with colored soda or decorated with glitter, these images capture brief interactions between the artist and men he meets in public places.

Each Activity shows its subject speaking very clearly about himself, and the choices he’s facing. They are deciding about narcissism, vanity, submissiveness, deception, guilt—the new variables in their emotional life. How carefully will they define their future, how consciously? These photographs are archetypes of the relationship between the boy and humanity, an essential reduction of everything he’s dealing with. They are basic artistic exercises, this is how they were conceived and how they are executed. …These boys are living in a moment where a relationship with a lens can be just as real as a relationship with a person, and the forum presented by the Activities is totally comfortable, totally natural. This social phenomenon is in a very advanced, sophisticated stage. Alex’s presence is increasingly invisible in these works, because these boys are very adept at relating to a lens, at a screen. The acts that Alex invites the models to participate in allow them to decide, and show off, what they can do, or what they are willing to do. The Activities are a naked, unfiltered record of the complicity question, more essential and more raw than ever before, gritty, and almost frightening, when compared to, say, Warhol’s photographic/ cinematogaphic portraiture of the 1960s and ’70s.

-an excerpt from William Pym’s essay, “Let’s Hear It for the Boys,” about Da Corte’s Activity photographs. Essay courtesy of the artist.

Erica Eyres was born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1980. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Manitoba in 2002 and her MFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2004. In 2003, Eyres attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She appears in Breakups R Tough courtesy of her London gallery ROKEBY. Since 2006, Eyre’s work has appeared in exhibitions in Miami, FL; Los Angeles, CA; Berlin; Glasgow; London; New York; Toronto; Zurich; Thessalonica, Greece and Akureyri, Iceland. Eyres typically works in black and white drawings as well as video. Her 2008 video work Imaginary Girlfriend will be included in the Breakups R Tough exhibition.

Imaginary Girlfriend description from Eyre’s website: Imaginary Girlfriend is based loosely on 1980s family sitcoms, and features a boy named Steven and his imaginary girlfriend Amanda. Steven is constantly tormented by Amanda, being asked to do things that leave him in embarrassing situations. Simultaneously, the video reveals the suffocating and inappropriate relationship between Steven and his mother.

Peter Huttinger is a coworker at Homeadow Song Farm - a center for community-based education. He works with an independent group of gardeners, artists and educators developing programs that center on home-based education and urban agriculture, ethical stewardship of land and contemporary art practices. As an artist Peter has lived and worked in Cincinnati for over 30 years and has been an organic vegetable gardener for over a fifteen years. He is a graduate of the Civic Garden Center’s Community Garden Development Training program, former Project Manager of The Gardens at Village Green (a not-for-profit urban organic/sustainable community garden/greenhouse facility), and a graduate from Sunbridge College’s Administration & Community Development Program. From 2001-1993 he was the Archivist for the Robert J. Shiffler Archive (a collection of post-modern art, artist publications and performance documentation). From 1989 to 2001 he operated Volatile Art, Books and Editions a small press publisher and mail order business with a focus on artists' books, editions and performance art documentation. Peter has also worked as an Adjunct Curator with the Contemporary Arts Center (Multiple Strategies 2004, and Performing Objects 2000); Dileia Contemporary (Waste Not- Want Not: A Time Store 1999); Weston Art Gallery objects.doc (1997) and has been an adjunct instructor at the University of Cincinnati and Art Academy of Cincinnati. Peter is currently the Neighborhood Gardens Coordinator for the Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati.

Because of space necessities, Huttinger recently downsized and destroyed many of his popular sculptures and installations collectively known as the Sex Machines. For this exhibition at U.turn, he will be installing a series of leftover and salvaged elements (such as plaster casts of condoms) as an installation in the space. Keeping with the spirit of the exhibition, Huttinger hopes to put together the pieces of the broken sexually charged sculptures.

Lynne Harlow lives and works in Providence RI and New York, NY. She earned her BA from Framingham State College, Framingham, MA, and her MFA from Hunter College. Though Harlow’s background has a focus on printmaking, she now traverses many disciplines and has widely exhibited her installations that use materials like chiffon, wall paintings, fluorescent Plexiglas and drawings to reduce and refine the viewer’s perception of color and space. Harlow has exhibited in the illustrious PS1 in Long Island City; Bus-dori in Tokyo, Japan; and Free Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland, to name just a few. She is represented by Minus Space in Brooklyn. For Breakups R Tough, Harlow will be presenting a reinterpretation of an installation entitled Limitless and Loneliness that was previously exhibited at White Box, New York. A delicate pink wall painting is accompanied by music by Haber/Randall/Zemelko, which is played from beneath a small bench that viewers may have isolated experiences with the field of color and ambient sound.

From the artist’s personal statement: How little is enough? How much can be taken away before a piece crumbles? My process of reduction is ultimately intended to be an act of generosity. In each piece I’m looking for the point at which reductions give the most. It’s an appealing contradiction because it prompts one to reconsider the concept of abundance and the nature of giving.

Eric Lebofsky is a Chicago-based artist, musician and writer. He holds a BA from Columbia University, New York, NY; and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His visual art is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Sears-Peyton Gallery in New York. Along with several ambitious solo projects with both these galleries, Lebofsky has also exhibited at Miller Block Gallery in Boston, MA; Fecalface Gallery in San Francisco, CA; and Arena 1 Gallery in Los Angeles. His artwork was used in the promotion of the 2006 Lollapalooza music festival and in 2004 he created an edition of t-shirts for the Abercrombie & Fitch Company that retailed at their Ruehl stores across the country. His artist books are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Lebofsky’s contribution to Breakups R Tough is a three-piece sculpture entitled Bizarre Love Triangle. Three vertical (and phallic) forms contrast soft against hard, point against blunt edges. This piece is part of a body of work entirely made in wood, a recent addition to Lebofsky’s studio practice.

From Lebofsky’s personal statement: This is the first time I have worked with wood, and it has been an enjoyable experience with a substantial learning curve. At first, working with wood and learning about the required tools was fully absorbing, and I was happy to let the content follow. Applying [a] method of structured play to the creation of these sculptures was not as hard as I thought it would be. In fact, I took to it quite readily. Improvisational ideas occurred more monolithically than they do with drawing, and more gradually, over a period of months. I tended to think exclusively in terms of psychological impressions.

Joetta Maue lives and works in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, 2 cats and a goldfish. She received her BFA from Ohio State University and her MFA from the University of Massachusetts. Maue’s work has been shown in galleries and museums throughout the country, most recently in a solo exhibition at Elizabeth Beland Gallery in Massachusetts and an exhibit at Yard Dog Gallery in Austin, TX. She recently spoke as a panelist at the craft conference Summit of Awesome in Washington D.C. Maue also authors the popular art and craft blog Little Yellowbird, as well as regularly contributes articles to the online journal Hello Craft and MrXStich. Maue is featured in the forthcoming book Indie Craft edited by Jo Waterhouse published in October 2010 and in the January issue of Needle Magazine. Maue primarily uses photography and fibers in her work. In her most recent series of embroideries, she explores the conflicts and contradictions that exist within intimacy. Her work resides within the realm of the everyday, everyday objects, autobiography, and the female. She is especially interested in the role of personal relationships in our lives, seen in our most intimate moments and spaces. In a piece specifically realized for the upcoming U.turn exhibition, Maue has embroidered the text “This Is Bullshit” across a vintage textile. At different moments, saccharine and then suddenly confrontational, Maue’s work subverts expectations and participates in an almost Punk backlash of attitude in contemporary art and craft.

Casey Riordan Millard is a native of Cincinnati and holds a BFA from Ohio Unitversity in Athens, OH. She is a City of Cincinnati Individual Artist Grant recipient from 2008. After living for much of her professional career in Chicago, she now lives and works in Cincinnati. In 2008, she presented solo exhibitions at the Carnegie Visual + Performing Arts Center in Covington, KY; and Packer-Schopf Gallery in Chicago, IL. In 2009, she presented a large body of work in her solo exhibition at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. Millard’s work includes detailed, meticulous drawings and paintings on paper, as well as small- and large-scale ceramic sculptures. She explains about her own work: I largely make work about seeking solace from mortality. My artwork also serves as a personal distraction from thoughts of my own impermanence. I combine illustrative and traditional techniques in my sculptures and drawings to address the darker issues of the human condition, reflecting my sense of humor and outlook on the bittersweet heartbreak of life. For this exhibition, we are pleased to present a rarity in Millard’s oeuvre. Goblin Shark with Valentine is an enigmatic scene depicted in gouache, watercolor and ink on paper. Beneath a cascade of streetlight, we are introduced to an unlikely couple: a bald drag queen (possibly a prostitute) is being courted (or solicited) by a monstrous shark that bears little resemblance to the delicate “Shark Girl” character for which Millard has come to be known. In an exhibition about the arch of relationships, and the various endings they sometimes meet, Goblin Shark with Valentine offers an unclear and tenuous encounter that is suggestive of affection, but also estrangement and differences.

Michael J. Morris is a dance artist based in Columbus, Ohio. He is currently pursuing graduate studies in the Department of Dance at the Ohio State University, and holds a BFA in Dance with emphases in performance and choreography from Belhaven College. His research interests move about the corporeal and kinesthetic nature of personal identity, and the implications for the construction of identity through the choreographic process. His current choreographic work is investigating the intersection and integration of life and dance practices; the explicit expression of implicit qualities of dance practice, including interpersonal intimacy, violence and sexuality; and the negotiation of power structures, personal agency, determinacy and indeterminacy in algorithmic choreographic structure. In addition to his training in ballet, modern, and contemporary dance techniques, he has studied Butoh in the United States and Japan, including studying at the Kazuo Ohno Studio in Yokohama, Japan. He is certified in Labanotation, and teaches Yoga in the Department of Dance at OSU. He blogs about his creative practice at http://morrimichaelj.wordpress.com.

During the opening reception of Breakups R Tough, Morris will be creating a performance piece in homage to a 2005 artwork by the Love Art Laboratory, which is comprised of the famed sex artist Annie M. Sprinkle and her wife, artist and activist Elizabeth M. Stephens. LAL is a seven-year long undertaking in which the two women facilitate annual performance-based projects and rituals, including wedding ceremonies. In their first year, 2005’s Red year, Sprinkle and Stephens created the work entitled “Cuddle” in the Femina Potens Gallery. Once a week, during the exhibition the artists would put on cuddle outfits and spend several hours cuddling gallery visitors who had made advance appointments. They invited the participants to take off their shoes and socks and cuddle with them for seven minutes. This piece has been recreated by LAL in multiple locations, both nationally and abroad. After receiving a grant to travel to California and interview Sprinkle and Stephens in December 2009, Michael J. Morris will conceive a version of this piece as a performance in the U.turn exhibition. His piece is intended as a subversion of popular cultural perceptions of interpersonal acquaintance and intimacy, physical promiscuity, and socially authorized physical behaviors, while also serving as a celebration of the body as central to identity and expressions of love in non-traditional forms. For more about the Love Art Laboratory, please visit the website here.

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.

Unemployed Title

2010-03-01T15:40:00.000-08:00

U·turn Art Space is very pleased to announce Unemployed Title, a solo exhibition by sculptor Keith Benjamin, to be accompanied by a print-to-order monograph with essay by critic and artist Matt Morris. Keith Benjamin reconfigures recycled materials from his everyday family life into intricate meditations on living optimistically and without pretense. Benjamin’s use of cardboard packaging salvaged from cereal boxes, packaging for soda and beer and other snack foods is uniquely sensitive. Benjamin’s sculptures are a nexus between the formal elements he has cut out of salvaged cardboard (colors, textures, patterns, shapes) and a bank of reference points drawn from his everyday life. Pickup trucks, numerous approaches to breakfast as a pastime, and housework such as chopping wood and taking out the trash are realized alongside meditations on leisure and desire, presented in the form of lawn chairs, headboards, and other metaphors for rest. In a recent series of work, the simplest but most exciting examination of the pieces contrasted small hunks of walnut wood against even smaller structures constructed from cardboard printed to look like wood grain. As part of his U·turn exhibition, Benjamin will be presenting a series of sculptures called #2 made from cardboard elements built onto small pieces of walnut carved into little mounds that resemble droppings and excrement. The unseemliness of the ideas at work is diffused by the artist’s craftsmanship and obvious sense of humor. If his work has dealt with topics from home life, only an adult who has changed diapers and potty trained now teenage children could start to look at the everyday practices of family life as viable and engaging departure points for work. While Benjamin has made reference to many tasks and images from everyday home life, this new scatology seems the most honest and revealing topic to date. And yet, the scale and manufacture of these works are not obvious representations of shit; they are more like prank dog droppings, plastic toys used to poke fun.

Keith Benjamin lives and works in Cincinnati. He holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and an MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago. He has worked as a sculpture professor at the Art Academy of Cincinnati for over ten years. His career has been filled with numerous solo exhibitions at such venues as Chicago’s MWMWM Gallery and Cincinnati’s Linda Schwartz Gallery, Publico, the Weston Art Gallery and the Warsaw Project Space, an alternative gallery venture that Benjamin ran from 1998 to 2005. He has also participated in exhibitions in Chicago’s Arena Gallery and White Walls, as well as Cincinnati’s Country Club, semantics gallery, SS Nova, Artworks Gallery, and University of Cincinnati’s Reed Gallery, to name just a few. In 2001, Benjamin was one of five Ohio artists to participate in the exhibition Working Space at Rathaus Gallerie in Munich, Germany. 2010 is a busy year for Keith Benjamin. Already he has been included in the group exhibition Urban Interventions at University of Cincinnati, a faculty exhibition at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and the group exhibition Shapeshifters, currently on display at Country Club in Oakley. Later this year, Benjamin’s work will also be included in The House in My Head, a group exhibition at the Weston Art Gallery in downtown. Regular gallery hours Saturdays 12:00-4:00 PM.

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

Words, words, words

2010-02-24T16:28:00.000-08:00

One of our goals as a contemporary art space was to create cataloges rich with images and text to accompany our exhibitions as a way to preserve a record of past shows in an elegant format. Our first catalog depicting the exhibition, COLONY, we held in January 2010 is now officially available!

Here is a little sneak preview of our first little publication.

You may have noticed a new little edition to the blog. If you look in the top right hand corner we now have a direct link to our lulu store. If you click the link you are taken directly to the U·turn shop. We also currently have copies of The Brighton Approach vol.II, and Matt Morris' artist monograph from his recent exhibit, Recipes During Wartime available at the gallery.

Around Cincinnati

2010-02-10T06:40:00.000-08:00

Goodness after a full weekend of openings we are nowhere near stopping, or slowing down...

This past Sunday evening our own Matt Morris was heard in an interview with Jane Durrell on the program Around Cincinnati on WVXU. The conversation centers around galleries of the Brighton District. You can listen to the full interview here.

Pay attention to what's behind the curtain

2010-01-28T11:43:00.000-08:00

U·turn Art Space is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by one of its collective members, Matt Morris. Recipes During Wartime is a site specific installation characterized by a transparent veil ensconcing the central portion of the gallery. Within the veil Morris presents a floor installation involving powders, an array of subtle objects, and experiments with lighting and scent. The work developed alongside Morris’ research for his upcoming lecture “After the Party: Artistic Hindsight as Crowns Were Passed at the French Revolution and the Localvore Revolution” at the 6^th Conference on Food Representation in Literature, Film and the Other Arts in San Antonio, TX. Almost as if laying out a picnic feast for gathering ghosts, the installation within the veil becomes the charged focus of the room. The artist asks viewers to project themselves into a space that is right in front of them but cannot be entered. In this brand new installation, Morris is interested in inquiring into and exploring our psychologies as they relate to place, memory and the edges of perception.

My Sugar Is Raw, detail 2008

Morris's work evokes museum period rooms, haunted houses, and the occasional sick room. With the use of pared down materials, edible ruins, and a multitude of tricks of light and scent Morris creates installation experiences that cause one to question what they are seeing, and often, to desire a second look. Recipes During Wartime melds together various elements resulting in a theatrical melancholy likened unto the grief of Miss Havisham's moldering banquet. The wrecked meal is an oft repeated image in the work; using a shopping list's worth of ingredients Morris concocts suppers in various states of disorder strewn across the gallery floor. Spilled champagne, charred crumbled cake, flour, dough bits and other ephemera become circumstantial evidence of recent and past transgressions. One gets the feeling that something happened here. In an era of the neo victory garden (ala Michelle Obama) and the CSI franchise, Morris teases us with glimpses at a suggestive narrative full of multiple truths and intrigue.

Rococo With a Death Wish, installation view 2007

Along with the use of foodstuffs, the curtain as an art object has made appearances in Morris' work in the past, but in this new body of work functions quite differently than in previous manifestations. In his thesis work, Rococo With a Death Wish, Morris included in his senior exhibition a pair of weighty black velvet window treatments with hints of worn fringe and pink poms that were installed in the gallery over the windows. These behaved in much the way one expects curtains to behave, but were on another level working to create a mood to the room at large. The sumptuous fabric and drape of these curtains reminded one more of a pall than of anything else. In contrast in his current work, specifically in Recipes During Wartime, the concept of the curtain is transformed into something more reminiscent of a gauzy force field. The installation appears separated from the viewer behind a foggy veil that both obscures and reveals little glimpses of a scattered tableaux. The artist choreographs a scene rife with spectral presence, an arrangement of objects and dusty minerals. The combined elements become a sort of garden of medicinal and decorative herbs hidden in an inner sanctum. Morris' work is a gathering of nostalgia and fragility that has been kneaded and shaped and is remarkably appropriate to today's social and economic climate. The work rations its visual impact and feeds the viewer an appropriate combination of frivolity and frugality, and leaves an aftertaste that remains long after the party has ended.

Test photo from research work for "Pairs Well With" at Aisle Gallery, 2009,

and "Recipes During Wartime" at U.turn, 2010.

Matt Morris is a transplant from southern Louisiana and a graduate of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He makes art and writes. Art meaning installations of fragile objects, video, sound, painting, and a lot of unquantifiables. Writing meaning poetry, art criticism, journalism, recipes, and other notes. His art criticism appears regularly in regional and international publications, including Art Papers, Sculpture, City Beat, White Hot Magazine, Alice Blue Review and Aeqai. He has presented exhibitions, lectures, and poetry performances in regional art venues, such as Aisle Gallery, semantics gallery, the Carnegie Visual + Performing Arts Center, Artworks, Nicholas Gallery and Murmur Gallery. Morris is a curator with the venerable alternative arts space semantics gallery and a founding member of the gallery U · turn Art Space. He creates works that address, deconstruct, and make peace with forces of abstract thought. They express an interest in the places where concrete ideas fall back into ambiguity and where poetics, aesthetics and nostalgia influence discourse.

Recipes During Wartime: An Installation by Matt Morris

February 6^th – 27^th, 2010
Opening reception: Saturday, February 6^th, 7:00 – 10:00 pm
Evening artist lecture + poetry reading: Saturday, February 20^th, starting at 7:00 pm

In the gallery house with Tenthaus

2010-01-28T11:39:00.000-08:00

TENTHAUS // U TURN ART SPACE from SHIN TOWER MUSIC on Vimeo.

Tenthaus

2009-12-27T18:14:00.000-08:00

Tenthaus is a performance collaborative made up of Abby Cornelius and Wyatt Niehaus. Cornelius is currently a student at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, while Niehaus is studying in the University of Cincinnati’s DAAP program. In their projects, they stage ambient, playful performances that blend music and theatrical shadow play by employing a camping tent as a barrier between the activity and the audience. Working with loop pedals and a mixture of traditional instruments and less clearly defined noises, Tenthaus’ performances are delicate and whispering, like a musical round of ghost stories. Tenthaus has performed around Cincinnati and Columbus, including the Art Damage Lodge in Northside and the historic Arnold’s Bar and Grill in downtown Cincinnati. For this exhibition, Cornelius and Niehaus will perform on the evening of the opening reception. Relics and leftovers from the performance, including the trademark tents designed and built by Cornelius, will remain in the space for the duration of the exhibition. Tenthaus is a pioneering effort, making use of gear that has come to symbolize adventure: a Walden-esque vision of man, the environment and survival. Their live performances fit into a lineage of oral storytelling, a pastime principal in America’s history, especially in periods of development and expansion. Tenthaus has band pages on both myspace and facebook.

Tenthaus will perform at the opening of COLONY at 8:00 PM on Saturday January 2, 2010, and will perform on the evening of January 23, 2010 at 8 PM.

Travis Meinolf

2009-12-27T11:58:00.000-08:00

Travis Meinolf is an artist and self-titled “Action Weaver” currently based in Berlin, Germany. Meinolf works primarily in woven textiles, but builds this traditional practice into interactive social projects that are radical, educational and successful in locating convergence points between community intervention and aesthetics. For COLONY, Meinolf has used his weaving projects as a sounding board to inquire further into his own family’s history with Old World Catholicism. Using a legend about his patron saint, Martin, as a model, Meinolf has designed and woven garments consisting of two layers: one to be kept by the wearer and another to be given away to someone in need.

Meinolf holds a BA in Industrial Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA in Textiles/Social Practice from California College of Arts. He has been widely exhibited and collected in recent years, including exhibitions at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco; Koh-i-noor in Copenhagen, Denmark; and Guertin's Graphics in Chicago, IL. His society-based weaving projects have been featured in Craft Magazine and Handwoven Magazine. Learn more about Meinolf’s projects here.

From Meinolf’s personal statement: “As a weaver my primary methodology is to make connections, to manipulate elements and produce structure and pattern, which embody meaning. In my studio practice this entails gathering yarns and using the loom to organize them into cloth. My social practice involves engaging with groups and individuals and encouraging them to tap into their own productive capacities; the potential that lies within each of us to create objects which function in a real, physical sense, and also semiotically: these things and the processes used to produce them can operate as political and aesthetic statements. The overarching goal of my artistic project is to present productive labor as an engaging, satisfying endeavor, whose products could be shared freely within a community to serve the needs of all of its members.”

Earlier this month, Meinolf’s work was reviewed by the Acquisitions Director of SFMOMA. The museum purchased the resulting work from his first public weaving project.

Additionally, Meinolf’s woven textiles are also currently featured at PS1 in a project by Stephanie Syjuco included in the exhibition 1969 that reflects on that pivotal year by displaying works made in 1969 from the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection. Along with significant works from mid-century artists, PS1 invited a number of contemporary artists to respond to the work of this era through the creation of new works. Stephanie Syjuco’s “Borrowed Beuys” recreates a Joseph Beuys’ installation that MOMA could not risk exposing to the exhibition spaces at PS1 (which are not climate controlled). Syjuco enlisted the help of friends and acquaintances through e-mail, facebook and other networking tool, inviting others to give her specific elements to recreate the Beuys piece. In lieu of Beuys’ famous grey felt blankets, two of Travis Meinolf’s blankets have been used.

Maidens of the Cosmic Body Running

2009-12-27T11:33:00.000-08:00

Maidens of the Cosmic Body Running is a collaboration between Denise Burge and Lisa Siders that explores states of melancholy and ecstasy, referencing archaic and contemporary forms of ritual trance. Although begun by the two artists, Maidens has evolved as a project to include other collaborators for specific artworks, making its identity fluid, capable of expanding and contracting to respond to their undertakings. The work seeks to reflect and personify the constant state of ecstasy (metamorphosis, decay, birth) that is the natural world.

In December 2009, the Maidens are traveling to Germany to use the legendary Black Forest, about which many of our familiar fairy tales have been written, as a setting for video and photographic works. Their presentation at U.turn will include some of these brand new projects.

Denise Burge holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and works as a Professor of Art at University of Cincinnati. She works in a variety of media, including drawing, film, and quiltmaking. Her quilt work has been widely commissioned and collected, and was included in two Quilt National exhibitions. For this work she has been awarded multiple Ohio Arts Council grants, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation award. In 2006 she formed a collaborative animation group called "The Dozens.” Their work premiered at the Fringe Festival in Edinborough, Scotland, and has been in several national and international film festivals. Lisa Siders holds an MFA from University of Cincinnati and teaches at Northern Kentucky University and University of Cincinnati. She has also worked as a freelance artist and designer. She has a wide range of media practices, including fibers, sculpture, and film. Exhibitions include national and international venues; her work has been featured in the Houston International Quilt Festival, and the National Civil Rights Museum (Memphis, TN), as well as various venues in Ohio, and national magazines. As a member of "The Dozens" collaborative animation group, she has exhibited nationally and internationally. For more information about the collaborative visit their website.

Adam Longbonz

2009-12-27T09:52:00.000-08:00

Adam Longbonz is one of the artists whose work will be featured in our upcoming exhibit, COLONY. As a graduate of the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design with a BFA in Photography Longbonz has participated in numerous exhibitions and has been awarded Best of Photography and Best of College Photography in the pages of Photographer’s Forum.

Longbonz will be exhibiting a series of large-scaled digital prints collectively titled “Half Breed.” These stark portraits show distinctly Caucasian young adults costumed in wigs and accessories that hearken more from Wild West interpretations of Native American cultures than from factual archeology/anthropology. The pale skin, fair hair and intensely blue eyes of the subjects are startling as these features are seen beneath their exaggerated garb. Longbonz currently lives and works in Wisconsin. For more information, visit Longbonz’s website.

From Longbonz’s personal statement: “When making images I am constantly trying to survey the places in which I find myself. I create scenes that represent the past, present, and future coalescing into something representative of the world in which we exist; not the physical world—but the feelings and memories collected in the mind."

2009-12-23T07:43:00.000-08:00

The new year is nearly upon us with that in mind we over here at U.turn would like to announce COLONY, our January exhibition.

COLONY to open on January 2nd at U · turn

January 2-30th, 2010
Opening reception: Saturday, January 2nd, 7:00-10:00 pm

U · turn begins the new year with COLONY, a group exhibit featuring the work of Adam Longbonz, Travis Meinolf, and two collaborative groups - Maidens of the Cosmic Body Running and Tenthaus. Maidens is an ongoing collaborative project initiated by Cincinnati base artists Denise Burge and Lisa Siders. Tenthaus is a performance art duo comprised of Abby Cornelius and Wyatt Niehaus.

COLONY looks at how cultural identity is revised, stereotyped and mythologized. Mining their own personal and societal histories, the exhibiting artists construct art practices that exchange summarized accounts of America, western expansion and the dynamics of community for abstractions, conflations and sly fantasies. Along with reaching for a "complete" account of who we are, where we came from and what we should be doing, the exhibition as a whole suggests that multiple fictions can lend a hand to "truly" knowing ourselves as a culture. This project itself and how these different practitioners come together in the space is an exercise in fluid identity.

Stay tuned to the blog for updates including posts about the artists involved in this upcoming show!

Run run as fast as you can....To U.turn...

2009-11-25T06:08:00.000-08:00

Wow! It has been a whirlwind month over here at U·turn. Just a reminder that this Saturday is your last chance to see Jessie Bowie's show, Don't Be Scared Be Prepared. Gallery Hours are Noon to 4:00 PM.

Also, don't forget next Saturday, December 5 (7-10 PM) we will be filling the gallery with tempting, saccharine things to eat and look at. The month of December provides us with an opportunity to do something a little different, the gallery will be having a one night exhibit, It's Been a Rough Year For Ginger. During this evening we will display, discuss, appreciate and in some cases consume art or art-adjacent projects that employ gingerbread as its primary medium. We are excited to receive traditional gingerbread houses, along with contemporary art projects that use foodstuffs in objects and installations.

We would love for you to stop by!

- Molly

U turns into a newsletter

2009-10-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

We’ve not even been open a month and U·turn is already lined up with all kinds of exhibitions, related events, parties and projects that those of us that run the space have going on with our own art. At the risk of running long in our tales regaled, this e-mail will have extensive information about a lot of our news, from our upcoming Halloween party and next exhibition to an opportunity for pretty much anyone to exhibit in our December project. So please read on to the bottom about opportunities YOU HAVE to be a part of upcoming U·turn exhibitions and publications. We would be so pleased if you could meet up with us at any or all of these events. Come, chill, appreciate the view. Thank you thank you thank you for all of your support as we’ve been getting things started. We hope it was a good enough time to come back for more!

Best,

U·turn Art Space

**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.

Brought To You By has a couple more Saturdays left to go. The gallery hours from 12-4 on Saturdays synch up with semantics gallery down the street from us. So for one short trip over to Brighton, you can see our inaugural group exhibition as well as Paul Coors’ solo project Before I Start Singing at semantics (1107 Harrison Avenue). We’ve been genuinely please with the turn out for the past two weekends. Many pleasant conversations about the art, the neighborhood and aesthetics have ensued. Stop on by this weekend!

Eric Ruschman

If Anything Happens You Are My Constant

The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center

1028 Scott Blvd.

Covington, KY 41011

Opening Reception

Friday, October 30, 2009

6:00 - 9:00 pm

Opening Reception Admission: $8.00

Students / Seniors: $5.00

Free for Carnegie members and children under 12

Our own Eric Ruschman will be opening a solo exhibition at the Carnegie in Covington next Friday!

His new body of work entitled If Anything Happens You Are My Constant is constructed from a regimen of exercises in painting, installation and combinations of the two. Delicate renderings in oil paint of animal characters continue to make occasional appearances in a vocabulary of color, shapes and found objects that have broadened considerably since Ruschman’s previous exhibitions. Substitutions have been made, so that stickers, stenciling or the charm of the high-gloss monochrome are interspersed with his painted narratives; the saccharine visual experience that Ruschman masters now has some resistance built in. Rather than resemble the simply summarized life lessons represented in anthropomorphic Fables, a single take around the room involves paintings (hung alone, in groups, or occasionally leaned at the bottom of the wall), objects and cluttered shelves—a game of chutes and ladders through the artist’s recollections and daydreams.

Ruschman has been occupied with issues in the maturation process throughout his young career. What may seem like a logical set of steps from childhood to adulthood to some is called into question, deconstructed and reassembled into abstractions of life plans by Ruschman and his team of black kittens, unicorns, voles and other critters. Throughout the past year, he has been a collector of visceral experiences and unassuming bits of wisdom from his everyday life. Paintings make offhand or straightforward references to a day trip to an alpaca farm, evenings immersed in Cincinnati’s local music scene, tender moments with house pets and careful appropriations from pop culture, such as the empowered “Toonces the Driving Cat” of Saturday Night Live and Youtube fame. Ruschman has gravitated to these scenes because of specific humanizing elements and has drawn connections between disparate source materials in order to populate a situation in which playful, innocent characters find themselves caught in dilemmas of aesthetics, displacement and the challenges of adulthood.

Eric Ruschman earned his Bachelors in Fine Arts from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 2007. He has an established exhibition record in the Cincinnati area, having shown at the Art Academy’s Pearlman and Chidlaw Galleries, ArtWorks Gallery, semantics gallery, Krafthaus, Synthetica Gallery and the Cincinnati Visual Fringe Festival. This is his second solo exhibition. His work recently graced the cover of the first volume of the online zine Sparklezilla.is HIs 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.

-Matt Morris
colleague, artist, freelance curator + art critic

For more about Eric Ruschman’s work, please visit: www.ericruschman.com

U Turns Halloween: Whatever Costumes Go On Must Come Off

Saturday, October 31, 2009, 8—12 p

Our first exhibition will be wrapped up, and things will be coming off the walls. an empty gallery like that needs to be HAUNTED for one evening. think a balloon forest for the sleek creative set of cincinnati to hunt in.

-participate in a 'best costume' contest. the winner will be presented with a ghost trophy made by our own zach rawe.

-spook or snog to a playlist blasting from that dark corner.

-candy for trick or treating.

-potluck it. the more people who bring food and drinks along with them to share, the more there will be at the party.

Rumors on the underground are that Brighton and the surrounding area will have a number of parties going on that night. Add U·turn to your stops as your trick or treat for the evening.

Jessie Bowie

Don’t Be Scared Be Prepared

November 7—28^th, 2009

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

U · turn is proud to present Don’t Be Scared Be Prepared, which features the work of Miami, Florida based artist Jessie Bowie. Bowie received her BFA from Ringling College and has recently participated in a residency in New York City. In her first solo exhibition in the Midwest, Bowie will be presenting a body of work comprised of both pen and ink drawings and site-specific wall paintings. The former are dense with detail and exude an impulsive, paranoid approach to the ideation and creative processes. Painting, in contrast, is a markedly populist activity as Bowie uses it. Her wall paintings call the training of her hand into question, instead celebrating a sloppiness that may be more conventional for hand painted signs than for traditional, high art techniques. Served together, her intricate drawings function as contained hypothetical realities in contrast to the maximalist aesthetics at work in her installations and site-specific wall works.

Bowie draws in absolute liberation. The defined, hatched mark making with which she realizes absurd or nightmarish scenarios are reminiscent of cartoon illustration or film storyboarding. Bowie is like a child who refuses to go into the ocean after seeing Jaws for the first time, and her artmaking reflects that worrisome outlook. Her drawings depict everyday folk located in the midst of critical plot twists and dénouements for narratives that Bowie has constructed only for the duration of the artwork; missing explanations for surrealistic elements in play and uncertain conclusions to these dramas confirm the works as mental flashes in a mind drunk off of pop cultural imagery and concerned about the implications of just about everything.

Jessie Bowie is a jester whose special talent is to look at our world’s past and present without actually looking at it, as if staring at a Gorgon’s reflection in a mirror, so as not to be turned to stone. Rather than confront her stimuli head on, Bowie is an experienced escapist who retreats into realms of astounding intricacy and unexpected, obscure metaphor. To call her work ‘gut wrenching’ is not to over-dramatize the point, but to identify a place of violent extremes that she frequently suggests. Sci-fi monsters, cowboys, and menageries of extinct behemoths, exotic zoo animals and frizzy house pets populate her dreamlike alternative dimensions. Beget by Surrealist Leonora Carrington’s penchant for suspense and ambiguity and Hieronymus Bosch’s fey wit and sense of action, Bowie represents a startlingly contemporary fantasy on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Tales left inchoate frame mysterious problems rather than presenting concrete solutions. When real world events, celebrities and global epidemics do make cameo appearances, they are jarring additions to the scenery. A bounty of associations and appropriations subvert singular readings, and our attempts to formulate such prove daunting. This exhibition is built from flagrant attempts and failures to cope by means both distracted and determined in a world out of control.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Opening the SAME EVENING as Bowie’s exhibition at U·turn is our own Matt Morris’ solo exhibition at Aisle Gallery.

Matt Morris
PAIRS WELL WITH
Objects and Installations

Aisle Gallery

424 Findlay Street 3^rd Floor
Cincinnati, OH 45214

M-F 1-4 p or by appointment 513.241.3403

November 7 – December 20, 2009, 5-8 p
November 7: opening reception, 7-10 p

November 21: artist talk, 1-3 p

Pairs Well With is a solo exhibition by artist and writer Matt Morris, a multimedia exhibition that has been conceived and installed in direct response to the nature and idiosyncrasies of Aisle’s newly expanded gallery space.

And now for the chance for you and everyone you know to be a part of one of the earliest exhibitions to be held at U·turn. Read on!

IT’S BEEN A ROUGH YEAR FOR GINGER:
U·TURN’S OPEN CALL GINGERBREAD EXHIBITION

Deadline for intent to exhibit: November 26, 2009

One night exhibition: Saturday, December 6, 2009, 7-10 p

As part of our mission as a gallery venue, U·turn aims to engage a community around the space through structured art exhibitions and a range of social events. December provides us with an opportunity to do a little of both with a one evening engagements where we will display, discuss, appreciate and in some cases consume art or art-adjacent projects that employ gingerbread as its primary medium. We will be excited to receive traditional gingerbread houses, along with contemporary art projects that use foodstuffs in objects and installations. Also, this gingerbread project allows us to expand the terrain for the creative act and enthusiastically involve individuals that have not before considered themselves artists. Bakers, amateur cooks, students, established artists seeking a momentary outlet for a different form of artwork, ALL ARE WELCOME.

Along with the restriction of gingerbread constituting the majority of the artwork, we request that each piece be no bigger than 2 feet in any direction. With so few limitations, these projects could be playful, totally edible and whimsical, or else downright conceptual.

In order to prepare as best as possible for what could be a wildly tempting, extravagant exhibition, we ask that if you plan to participate, please contact us by e-mail or through facebook before Thanksgiving, November 26, 2009. If possible, send us a description of your planned artwork, or images and sketches as you have them. No work will be for sale that evening. The show is just for our communal enjoyment. Please pass on the word to anyone you think will be interested!

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS TO VOLUME II OF BRIGHTON APPROACH

U·turn Art Space periodically releases a printed publication in conjunction with its monthly exhibitions in the hopes of encouraging a dialogue between literary and aesthetic sensibilities. U·turn collective will be issuing its SECOND zine under the title Brighton Approach Vol. II. Although the first issue had a theme, we've left this one open ended. Entries may be submitted in many forms: poetry, drawings/collages, photographs, snapshots, short stories, thank you letters, recipes/ instructions, quotations, etc.   We are accepting submissions now until Saturday, December 26. Final copies will be printed in black and white on 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper folded once, so please format submissions no greater than 5 inches wide and 8 inches tall.   Please email to u.turn.artspace@gmail.com, pmurphy@artacademy.edu, mail to U-turn Art Space 2159 Central Avenue Cincinnati OH, or drop it off in the mail slot at 2159. Brighton Approach will be distributed on and after January 2.

Okay, if you made it this far, than not only are you a super trooper (circa Abba), you are also one of the most informed participants in Cincinnati’s burgeoning arts community. We hope to see you around sometime soon at one of these many opportunities. We look forward to getting to know you, sharing in rich discussion about art and community. We look forward to everything ahead.

Best,

U·turn Art Space

u turns halloween balloon forest for one night!

2009-10-21T13:50:00.000-07:00

a little more time to see our first show, then Jessie Bowie !!!

2009-10-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

Remember that Brought To You By runs through the end of October. We have gallery hours on Saturdays from noon to 4 pm. So please stop by and THANKS to those folks who have taken advantage of the Saturday hours; it makes our time spent in the gallery worth it!

More on this soon, but mark your calendars- U.turn will host one of several Halloween parties in or near the Brighton district. It will be potluck style and there will be an award for best costume. Other than that, expect candy, good company and a rocking playlist (that, per my current listening, could have a fair amount of Marlene Dietrich in it....). Our featured artist in November will be on site at the beginning of her week of installation, wall painting and preparations for the exhibition's grand opening.

Read on for info about November's show!

November 7—28th, 2009
Opening reception: Saturday, November 7th, 7:00 – 10:00 pm

U · turn is proud to present Don’t Be Scared Be Prepared, which features the work of Miami, Florida based artist Jessie Bowie. Bowie received her BFA from Ringling College and has recently participated in a residency in New York City. In her first solo exhibition in the Midwest, Bowie will be presenting a body of work comprised of both pen and ink drawings and site-specific wall paintings. The former are dense with detail and exude an impulsive, paranoid approach to the ideation and creative processes. Painting, in contrast, is a markedly populist activity as Bowie uses it. Her wall paintings call the training of her hand into question, instead celebrating a sloppiness that may be more conventional for hand painted signs than for traditional, high art techniques. Served together, her intricate drawings function as contained hypothetical realities in contrast to the maximalist aesthetics at work in her installations and site-specific wall works.

Bowie draws in absolute liberation. The defined, hatched mark making with which she realizes absurd or nightmarish scenarios are reminiscent of cartoon illustration or film storyboarding. Bowie is like a child who refuses to go into the ocean after seeing Jaws for the first time, and her artmaking reflects that worrisome outlook. Her drawings depict everyday folk located in the midst of critical plot twists and dénouements for narratives that Bowie has constructed only for the duration of the artwork; missing explanations for surrealistic elements in play and uncertain conclusions to these dramas confirm the works as mental flashes in a mind drunk off of pop cultural imagery and concerned about the implications of just about everything.

These are just some of the drawings Bowie is bringing for the exhibition and the reproductions do not do them justice. This will be a fun and entertaining exhibition with wonderful layers for consideration. Expect future posts from us as we continue to mull on Bowie's brilliance.

And if you want to look into a differen side of Bowie's creative process, visit her Etsy store where she has handsewn characters, accessories and what not available for sale.

the radicality of teaming up.

2009-10-10T09:32:00.000-07:00

"The group's responses are as open-ended as its visual rhetoric is gnomic, confirming legal scholar Lawrence Lessig's suggestion in The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (2001) that 'not knowing how a resource will be used' is a good thing."

-Pamela M. Lee, a Professor at Stanford, writing about Raqs Media Collective in the October issue of ArtForum.

When I was part of the decision to begin U.turn Art Space, I probably hadn't counted on the opportunities to reconsider myself, the plural positions all of us are prone to occupy in the art world, and the radicality of an effort like an alternative gallery. Undoubtedly, working in the gallery for the couple of months it has existed and as i continue to combine my efforts with others, there will be conceptual bleed between my studio practice and the gallery's practice. 'Betcha we note it on this and my personal blog as I attempt to keep up on both.

Of course, I haven't exactly traded my autonomy for a collective-self. My thoughts are sorted through extremes to try and locate some footing for me and my co-conspirators. We find ourselves on a continuum (everyone's here) that includes markers for the invidual and the group. Which is more whole unto itself?

In our first exhibition, Katie Labmeier and Annette Monnier have both kindly built in components to their included works that present the opportunity to gift funding to the gallery. Labmeier has also made a donation from the proceeds of her performance art/raffle to the SPCA in the name of the gallery. For this, we are surprised and thankful. Other artists offer their works for sale or barter at the buyer’s discretion. As an outpost for the network of distinctly alternative (read: noncommercial) galleries in the city, we take interest in the rethinking of commerce and market that can be read in this exhibition. Through different approaches, these artists have removed or resituated themselves in the equation that makes up the exhibition of an artwork. Also of note was our delight as curators to see a consistent emphasis of materials over manipulation in many of the artworks on display.

The artists' solutions for economics and technique speak to, in my mind, a humility on the rise. And it may be just the beginning. The specific characteristics of our venture seems to predispose it to discussions that I hope to see other entities (galleries, institutions, individuals) trying to offer vision, reflection and a mound of brain storming to. There have been movements and aesthetics that, for me, mirror some of the opposing passions that we have seen brought to light in America over 2009's ongoing, heated debate over health care. For whom are we responsible? To whom do we address the dialogues initiated in our exhibitions? What form should care take as we explore and coax our nuances of contemporary aesthetics?

I am not prepared, we are not prepared to be solutionists, although I believe the world needs more solution-oriented thinkers with selfless motivations. Rather, I offer that our first exhibition and the number of exhibitions that are in the works seek to thematize aspects of existence and experience (apologies if that remains too broad, I don't want to give too much away about our upcoming year quite yet). U.turn is an experiment, one that joins a lineage in Cincinnati, most immediately preceded by our sister gallery semantics that is just up the road in Brighton. But others have served to offer us ideas for how the collective and/or the alternative gallery space functions in relationship to the Cincinnati public. Most readily, Publico (the five year gallery space that lived in OTR) and Aisle (that continues to mount exhibitions on the third floor of 424 Findlay) spring to mind as lo-fi institutions to which we owe our gratitude.

I think there is lots of room for growth. I've only jotted the seeds of a few ideas here. I/we are really just saying that we are asking questions about who and what we are, in terms of the gallery. The conversations are luminous and insightful and we sincerely hope to pass those qualities of experience on to you, our supporters.

-matt.

thank you

2009-10-04T13:45:00.000-07:00

even with gratitude as a partial premise to our first exhibition, we really couldn't overdo it on thanking the community for being part of a grand opening reception far beyond our expectations. we hope you enjoyed the art, the new space, the foodstuffs and the neighborhood of art exhibitions on display.

Brought To You By is up through the end of October with gallery hours on saturdays from 12-4.
If you'd like to see it at another time, we'll see what we can do. Just contact us at u (dot) turn (dot) artspace (at) gmail (dot) com.

annette bought the flowers herself.

2009-09-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

Hi, this is Matt.

And this post is about Annette Monnier, one of the artists that I invited to exhibit in our first show. I wanted to thank her for being a role model. After earning a BFA in sculpture, Annette relocated to Philadelphia and dove right into running alternative art spaces, writing art criticism, and staging and participating in performance projects like bands and public events (read: zombies). All this and also making brill sculptures, installations drawings and more.

Annette is incredibly bright and well-read but totally unpretentious. Her newest online project is One Review A Month (dot) Com. Even her disclosure at the start of this project allows for the blurring between earnest aspirations in framing contemporary art with important discussion and the vitality of discussing the community in which one participates. She makes no apology for friends and colleagues appearing in her writing. Like me, her multiple roles in an intimate community probably make it damn near impossible to not be writing about someone she knows. But I feel that that is as it should be sometimes.

There is actually plenty about Annette online. The two part interview with her at ArtBlog is particularly insightful. Her work is socially and pop-culturally aware. Wisely, her materials list don't draw distinction between "traditional" art materials and the everyday stuff of life. IKEA or Martha Stewart bedsheets, glittery stickers, knives, DIY books on tape, and the floral arrangements that she presents in our exhibition are often paired with her popular highly-detailed drawings in pen on paper. Figurative, narrative, illustrative: Monnier resuscitates and reinvestigates some of the problems in this approach to art. One might think of Edward Gorey or some of the panning shots in a Sophia Coppola film when in these drawings' company.

As I said, Annette bought the flowers herself for this exhibition. These are two of the four arrangements made specifically for the exhibition. The artist's generosity abounds, as she indicated that she would rather receive no cut off the sale of these sculptures, offering all the proceeds to the gallery. We are wiped out by her kindness.

These arrangements themselves and their larger precedents are primitive and urban, whimsical and scrappy. Pairing humble recyclables with super-saturated craft store materials, these smaller arrangements are the bud vase equivalent of earlier works that were made in five gallon buckets and other street smart vessels. Like arte povera and like many of the other artists in the exhibition, Monnier's simple, frank, attractive objects utilize "low" materials to delightful effect. But more than just lo-fi, there is a naivete to these objects, a playfulness that is both critical and childlike. Monnier's collision of playforms causes the sculptures to resonate. Monnier is Outreach Program Director at The Clay Studio, which might offer a source for the pinch and coil pots that are built onto or around plastic containers.

I liked how the Unmonumental exhibition at the New Museum characterized more than one of the featured artists as archeologists of our present day. Monnier's sculptures are artifacts more than perhaps any of the other work in our first exhibition. Their distinct humility packs a politics; they are inarguably post-Reagan, post-9/11 and sensitive to our estranged class systems as well as the conceptual and economic collapses that characterize the world in which they have been created. They offer direct manuevers for the creative act. The pinch pot may be my first (and many people's first) interaction with making sculpture. Primeval and then dis/tastefully embellished with glitter glue, google eyes, tatters of floral print fabric, plastic beads and gold paint. Yet somehow anything but excessive.

katie labmeier

2009-09-29T09:42:00.000-07:00

Katie Labmeier has been posting previews of the coveted prizes that will be available in her raffle on saturday at the opening. you can visit her blog Ceramic Animals Wearing Clothes here.

Labmeier was one of the artists invited by Zach Rawe. I think Zach wouldn't mind my paraphrased account of his rationale leading up to Katie's inclusion in the exhibition. First of all, Katie Labmeier was the only artist in the exhibition that we don't actually know personally. As I understand it, Zach's 'thank you letter' invitation to Katie was the first contact between the two of them. I'm fascinated by that, because it bespeaks of the communicative and connective potential of an exhibition. Zach had been living in New York for a semester during his schooling and his return to the midwest was a little difficult; reacclimating to this community and its expectations and biases was a bit daunting. As i have had it explained to me, seeing work by Katie Labmeier gave Zach a little dash of hope in what was possible in Cincinnati's art scene.

For Brought To You By, Katie is presenting "Major Award," which is a project that is as much performance as it is installation, as much detailed manipulated artwork as found object. A raffle will commence at our opening on Saturday night. For a buck a ticket, you can enter for a chance to win one of three prizes, each of which, as is shown on her blog, consists of a beautiful, beautiful cross stitch like the one above and a found figurine that is related to Labmeier's ongoing preoccupation in the personalities and eccentric qualities of these figurines that populate dime stores, thrift shops and flea markets.

proceeds from the raffle will benefit the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and, at the artist's request, U.turn. thank you, Katie! you = awesome.

The conglomeration of all of the components of this piece are clever and interestingly connected. That Katie collects anthropomorphized figurines of animals that are utilized in raffles that will eventually benefit and protect animals is a wholesome and fairly clean synthesis of parts. I'm reminded of a small piece that ran on a New York Times blog earlier this month that asked if Apple and similar companies should put money towards the protection and preservation of the animals that they market their products with (such as leopard, snow leopard, etc.). Read that here.

We're proud to include this project in our first exhibition. The generosity and social conscience demonstrated in Labmeier's efforts are closely aligned to our interests as a gallery to function as a relevant site upon which community can happen. More than just art for art's sake or artistic experimentation for the purposes of pure aesthetic advancement, the projects that we have been planning for the next year of exhibitions search for meaning in visual culture and practical application for visual literacy.