Jennifer Meanley at Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center

The Paintings of Jennifer Meanley have an intuitive clarity that immediately sucks you in, leaving you not immediately sure why.
In the painting And in the End, The Monster Ate Them Both (2009) one sees a ghastly canine carcass laying on a table with a group of humans gathered around it in an exotically urban setting. The grouping of the dead and living in this work blurs the demarcation between life and death. This morbidity is echoed in tree branches that are half-barren and half-lush with vegetation. Stylistically, Meanly leaves some of the compositional elements loose and curious while rendering certain figures very specifically and individually. Despite the stoic nature of the humans’ facial expressions, the rhythm of the relationships between the eyes, nose and lips within the odd angularity of the facial bone structure combine with the color palette and composition to communicate nuanced emotions. As Meanley’s rendering shifts from tight to ghostly her color palette shifts from vibrant to dark, but it is always masterfully improvisational. In the end Meanley’s style and content combine to express a deep emotional reality that becomes finely surreal in such imaginative and proficient painting.
- David Jarred


Jennifer Meanley: 'Past Tense - Marking Time' at the Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center, 2727 Woodburn Ave., Cincinnati, OH 45206. Through January 8, 2010.
In Photo: Meanley, Jennifer. And in the End The Monster Ate Them Both, 2009. Oil on canvas, , 72x108in. Photo Courtesy of Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center.

Radio interview on Around Cincinnati, 91.7 WVXU

A.C. Frabetti was interviewed by Rick Pender for Around Cincinnati on 91.7 WVXU.  The interview was broadcast on Dec. 13 in the morning.  Rick Pender is an excellent radio speaker and interviewer.  If you would like to listen to the online MP3 version, click here.  It lasts ten minutes.

Special thanks to Rick Pender, Lee Hay and Jane Durrell for the opportunity.

Video Journalism: A Visit to Neusole Glass Works

Video by Dania Eliot

Nuesole Glassworks, 656 East McMillan, Cincinnati, Ohio 45206. info@neusoleglassworks.com
513-751-3292.

Belated remarks, perhaps concerning Matt Morris’ opening

 [editor's note: it is generally not appropriate to have a gallerist review their own shows.  We make an exception to this belated posting, since it occurs after the show and also our delight in Renschler's cryptic and enlightening experience of a body of work.  This has been linked retroactively in February to Renschler's review of Morris' show at the Uturn Art Space.]
This is my body pentecostal, five pointed, dismembered, disjunct, re-membered and consumed like imaginary tea because the colors of the occasion are always just two and one is always shining.  The diamonds on the harlequin’s outfit, and scattered to be found transformed and wanting-- the imp(eror)’s serious clothes, and onstage everyone’s voices, undulating, carried like perfume, something one just touches to keep aloft.
   The harlequin, the figure that wears (shows) the new adopted-family structure. The ur-parents have vacated the upstairs halls, dancing.  It’s champagne in thimbles down here, other things sparkling, the perfect(ly) (usable) square is given you to play with: it’s a uniform (with lipstick from childhood.)  The teacher’s gaze is now a yellow threadbare trapezoid: vagabond.
   We begin in costume. Someone dresses us, then we dress ourselves. “Roast potatoes for” as Gertrude would say. Not a thing, a gesture. Non sequiturs that revivify and allow us to hear this just beginning: “they may be born Walter and become Hub, in such a way they are not like a noun. A noun has been the name of something for such a very long time.” *
   The “language” pinned in carefully-spaced waves in the form of smudged and drawn-upon tissues and their accompanying 21st century bric-a-brac is a foreign one, thereby creating what is nearly a purely aesthetic experience.  There seems to be no familiar and predetermined way to assimilate this. It’s a broken heart.
   Everything we may have thought to have left behind is now found here: the moon exacts the price of non-loss, that pale-green feathery light made for growing stems that bend from the weight of their own beauty. “For the place I really have got to get to is a place I must already be at now.”*

- William Renschler

Matt Morris, 'Paris Well With' at the Aisle Gallery, 424 Findlay Street 3rd Floor, Cincinnati, OH. Through Dec. 20.
Please also visit Dania Elliot's video interview of Matt Morris here.
In Photo: exhibition view courtesy of the artist.


* Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America.              

'Form from Form' at the Phillip M. Meyers, Jr. Memorial Gallery

‘Form from Form: Art from Discovery,’  an exhibition about a scientific concept (in this case Darwin and natural selection) could risk artwork that is didactic, not self-sustaining in its own qualities.  Certainly some of the work here veers too much into that category, such as Stephen Geddes’  Darwin in Paradise (though its playfulness rescues it).  But in Darwin-Muybridge Fantasy (2009), Geddes’ stuns with intricately-sculpted avian creatures in pseudo-evolutionary phases, giving the effect of the stills of motion picture reels. January Marx Knoop creates each image from a previous one (Metamorphosis, 2004), a thoughtful use of one form lending itself as a blueprint into the next.  And poignant is Anthony Becker’s Death Toll (2009), in which he documents his beautiful drawings of bird road kill. His artifice records their beauty, reminding us how art, arguably an extension of natural laws, represents nature’s highest culmination even when its subject matter is nature’s own dark side.  And on it goes: there is a unique take on natural form and adaptation throughout the exhibition.  Whether or not the art in each case relates to Darwin quickly becomes secondary to the art itself, a triumph.
-A.C. Frabetti

For Tamera Lenz Muente's review of this show in CityBeat, click here.

'Form from Form: Art from Discovery,' curated by Mary Heider, at the Phillip M. Meyers, Jr. Memorial Gallery, University of Cincinnati College of DAAP.  Through Dec. 11. 
Becker, Anthony.  Death Toll, 2009 (Floating Files). Wire, Steel, legal size hanging folders; wax pastel drawing on paper, several drypoints, 10”x144”x16”.
Geddes, Stephen.  Darwin-Mubridge Fantasy, 2009.  Polychromed wood, wax, metal, glass.  15”x127”x12”.
“. Darwin in Paradise, 2009.  Polychromed wood, metal; 26”x19”x13”.
Knoop, January Marx. Metamorphosis, 2004.  In painting images #52-100 on CD-ROM.
In photo: Merida-Paytes, Lisa.  Quill Installation, 2009. Copper and steel wire, porcelain, paper, clay, fiberglass.

The following is the video recording by the University of the presentation of the exhibition:

Celene Hawkins' 'Idyll' at Prairie

All throughout Celene Hawkins exhibition ‘Idyll’ is her fascination with frenetic lines and rich textures in natural forms: photos of clusters of branches, dense views of buds, iced twigs and more.
Especially noteworthy is Composition IV (2008). It features bronze wire suspended over what appears to be a copper-plated sheet of wood. The bronze wire is twisted and bent haphazardly. The wire floats above this background piece, welded to side supports. The distance allows the shadow cast by the wire to also become part of the composition, making three levels including the background texture. The shadow of the wire depends on the position of the lighting, lending its presence in its ethereality more fragile than the wire. Bronze, a metal of strength, acquires here delicacy, its warm hue balanced by the cool turquoise background patina.
The proportions of the piece, roughly 3’x1.4’, are approximately the Golden Ratio. The Ratio, used by the Greeks in their architecture, is one of the fundamental proportions in the growth of many living organisms (such as a nautilus shell).
Hence in Composition IV there is the paragon of her work here: the full abstraction of natural energies, right to an intuition of the laws of growth.
-A.C. Frabetti

Celene Hawkins.  'Idyll: New Photography and Sculpture by Celene Hawkins' at Prairie, 4035 Hamilton Ave., Cincinnati, OH.  Through Dec. 31.
In Photo: Hawkins, Celene. Composition IV (detail), 2008. Bronze wire, wood, patina. AEQAI staff photo.