The Stories We Tell: Aaron Cowan at Aisle

On January 7, Aaron Cowan wrapped up a respectable exhibition of new paintings at Aisle Gallery. The works on display –some exquisite, some ordinary- were predicated on an elaborate mapping mechanism developed by Cowan. Daily activity was collated, categorized, and compressed into a system of color codes deployed across the surface of his supports in amounts corresponding to said activity; or so I’m told.

Artists have a funny way of tricking themselves. They’re story tellers, and sometimes they need these stories to get to work. But occasionally, these yarns take on a life of their own. Twisting like serpents, they become strange tails that ultimately have nothing to do with the actual work. If we place our faith in these concepts, we put ourselves in danger of committing a grievous error. Devotion to stories over objects transforms art from being a self-defining physical presence in our world to little more than a bland illustration of an equally bland story.

If we believe Cowan’s story then F 3 .1200 / .2400- X is not a beautiful evocation of color and form, with its threads of green permeating a lush red ground, but a dull record of a daily activity. The surface, no longer a sensuous manifestation of the hand of the artist, is devolved into mere artifact, incidental to an elaborate system. E 8- X, streaming as it is with densely interwoven color is just pale testimony to some long completed act; that is, if you believe the story.

Artists might need these stories, but we do not. We need only trust in the object and its ability to articulate its own voice. In J 17 .500 / .700 X, the scorching red streak that cuts through the green surface projects an after image of imaginary green lines that play across the breadth of the picture plane. We don’t need concepts to appreciate the thrill of this perceptual event, we need eyes, and J17 .500 / .700 X can take care of the rest.

This is not to suggest that we approach art as a bunch of know-nothings, but we need to keep in mind that art is a physical manifestation, and should be approached on physical terms. And as physical entities, Aaron Cowan’s Paintings at Aisle delight the senses and establish their own independent existence, regardless of the stories.

- Alan D Pocaro


Aaron Cowan: Paintings. On view December 3 through January 7 at Aisle. Aisle Gallery 424 Findlay St. Third Floor. Cincinnati, Ohio 45214. Hours M-F 1-4pm, or by appointment.

Pictured Top: F 3 .1200 / .2400- X. 2010. House paint on panel. Courtesy of Aisle gallery.
Pictured Middle: E 8- X. 2010. House paint on panel. Courtesy of Aisle gallery.
Pictured Bottom: J17 .500 / .700 X. 2010. House paint on panel. Courtesy of Aisle gallery

Sheida Soleimani at Semantics

Semantics opened Namaz Khaneh (house of prayer in Farsi) on Saturday, January 8; the first solo show by promising young Cincinnati artist Sheida Soleimani. The permanently semi-finished gallery space at Semantics serves as a good venue for this work which consists of a series of images showing the artist's own roughly completed small-scale constructions. The greenish yellow tone of the walls of these small tableaux almost perfectly match the weathered yellow tone of the galley walls, providing a clear path for the visual allegories constructed by the artist to unfold effortlessly before the viewer. The stories which take place in these images are at first glance abstract or fantastic. Arms stretch out from the middle of a wall, chairs are strung to the ceiling and preserved animal specimens including snakes and scorpions are pinned in crude fashion within each space.

Without further clues, these images could be nothing more than the remains of particularly abject child’s play. However, there is just enough further information provided by the title and accompanying artist statement to lead the work in an entirely different direction. These are stories from the childhood of Soleimani’s mother – a political refugee from the Iranian Revolution in which the country became the theocracy it remains today. These stories have been transformed, some more literally than others into crude three dimensional forms and converted again into two dimensions by the camera. The rough edges of these tableaux – marks left with scissors around cut paper, unfinished pencil drawings on floors and back walls – reads like the gap between generations – we are literally made of the stories and experiences of our parents, but can only grasp them crudely, remotely.

These vestiges of a treasured national identity, which exist here in the form of innocent childhood memories and anecdotes of cultural tradition are not just idle recreations in the hands of the artist, but feel like an act of conciliation with a complex family history by the youngest of its generation. How refreshing to see something so concerned with issues other than the immediate self by a young artist. In plumbing the world around her, Soleimani bravely faces a dark past which underlies her national origin and touches on an idea of interest to all Americans: how do we, all of us refugees (or descendants thereof) together, start anew on equal, albeit shaky footing?

While the tools of her craft are wielded a bit unevenly throughout this exhibit (intention and accident seem to cross paths somewhat incidentally in a few of the works), Soleimani’s work refreshes in its neutral and insightful confrontation with human nature in its most brutal form.

-David Rosenthal

Namaz Khaneh, on view through January 29, 2010 at Semantics Gallery. 1107 Harrison Avenue Cincinnati, OH, 45214

Pictured Above: Jadeh. 2011 Digital Print. Courtesy of the Artist.

Pictured Below: Yech Sahl. 2011 Digital Print. Courtesy of the Artist.

Disparate Lives: Dronex Inc. and Waseem Touma at Museum Gallery Gallery Museum

Appropriately titled, UN related: A Giant Cap Gun and White Discs on view at Museum Gallery Gallery Museum features the work of Australia native Waseem Touma and the Lexington, Kentucky based pseudonymous corporate organization Dronex Inc. In addition to being formally and materially dissimilar, the works of Waseem Touma and Dronex Inc. are conceptually miles apart.
 
Dronex Inc.’s contributions provide the viewer a wide array of objects to engage with. The pieces range from the two dimensional to the sculptural, to plain old merchandise (tee shirts for sale). As a send up of a hierarchical corporate entity, the conglomeration of “products” for sale are effective and Dronex Inc.’s selected imagery (bees, chickens, and ‘drones’) all underscore the point. But one can’t help feeling that with his two dimensional work in particular, “the point” is the point. It’s clever, no doubt, but clever only goes so far.

Far superior to Dronex Inc.’s flags with barcode stripes, or pop takes on domesticated fowl are his sculptural endeavors. One is literally (figuratively) blown away (sorry) by the ridiculous scale of Lovegun a giant snub nosed revolver, and Bad Bacon an enormous piggy bank. These bright, absurdist takes on the crassness of American culture are too good to resist. Crafted with precision (out of wood fragments) Lovegun and Bad Bacon succeed where other pieces fail not only because of their arresting formal beauty, but because their meaning comes from within rather than without. The preposterous nature of a man-sized neon green pistol or a huge piggy bank with sunglasses is rivaled only by our equally preposterous cultural fascination with guns and money. These works are the zeitgeist, whereas Dronex Inc.’s wall images sometimes read as products of it.

On the other end of the spectrum, Waseem Touma’s quite embrace of a single object, a porcelain disc, evolves into a multiplicity of free sculpture, installation, and bas-relief. Evocative of the human spine, Touma’s pieces translate as a meditation on a formative event. By keeping color restrained (all of the works are either white, red, black, or a combination thereof) his sculptures emphasize proportion, balance, and symmetry; pacific qualities that invite the viewer to pause and linger.  

Touma’s ability to adapt a single figure repetitively and yet keep each work fresh and vital is a remarkable accomplishment. In a day and age where too many contemporary artists adopt intellectually suspect rationales to justify their creative output, the simplicity of Touma’s exploration of form is a welcome reprieve.  

Singular among the smaller not for profit galleries, Museum Gallery Gallery Museum has no overt curatorial bent. Exhibitions never feel like an ex post facto declaration of the trend de jour or an illustration of whatever flimsy theory is currency among those in the know. While the exhibitions can be and frequently are inconsistent, the shows Museum Gallery Gallery Museum present are allowed to succeed or fail as art on their own terms. And in this respect, 'UN Related' is definitively a success.

-Alan D Pocaro

UN Related: A Giant Cap Gun and White Discs on view through December 10 at Museum Gallery Gallery Museum. 1218 Sycamore St. Cincinnati, Ohio 45202. www.mg-gm.com

Pictured Top: Dronex Inc. Installation view featuring Lovegun. 2010. Wood. Courtesy of Museum Gallery Gallery Museum.
Pictured Bottom: Waseem Touma. Untitled (Spineline). 2009. Porcelain, Wood, plaster, Paint, and Resin. Courtesy of Museum Gallery Gallery Museum.

Binding Connections: Recent Drawings, Prints, and Paintings by Roy Johnston at Weston Art Gallery

Roy Johnston is not schizophrenic, but his solo show at the Weston Art Gallery sometimes seems to be a two-person exhibition. Like a group (two is a very small group) show, the paintings, drawings, and prints on view are related, but in this case it’s just Johnston pursuing simultaneously two strains of aesthetic exploration.

One strain is nonobjective, but the other has “some sense of object relationship to things associated with the phenomenological world,” as Johnston explains. This manifests itself through what appear to be diagrams or charts. Yet for the artist, their “true origin as forms really belongs to the generation of paintings, which has preceded them.” Hence the title of the exhibition—Binding Connections.

Johnston’s Transformation series, a suite of 10 bold black-white-and-gray abstract drawings—lithographic tusche on Mylar—has works from 2007 and 2010 (everything in the exhibition comes from just these two years), and it is impossible to determine which year a particular print was made.


Just like in a two-man show, Johnston’s dual artistic personalities are given equal weight. The gallery visitor is immediately confronted in the entryway with an impressive example of Johnston’s purely nonobjective approach in his 60” x 60” acrylic-on-canvas Evolution II, 2010. It replicates on a larger scale the 20” x 20” Evolution I, from 2007.

Occupying an equally important location—the first work seen as the visitor enters the exhibition proper—is the untitled 100” x 118” composition, painted directly on the wall. A diagram of unsteady turquoise lines is overlaid on a background of burnt orange. The colors positively vibrate, and the effect is mesmerizing.

However, the works that transfix me are the three 41” x 41”, charcoal on Arches paper drawings done in 2010. They combine elements from each body of work, and their title tells the tale: Dark Assimilation. Sooty black blobs look like bleeding ink spots and recall Johnston’s abstractions. Beneath these shapes is a network of sharply drawn lines that energetically crisscross the composition. They bring to mind Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, but unlike Duchamp’s nude proceeding purposefully down the steps, Johnston’s lines ricochet across the field.


For me, a major criterion for judging a work of art is when I’ve moved on, left the gallery, and returned to my daily mundane tasks, it stays with me, haunts me. This series is mysterious and haunting.

-Karen S. Chambers

Binding Connections: Recent Drawings, Prints, and Paintings by Roy Johnston on view through December 5th at Weston Art Gallery, 650 Walnut St., Cincinnati, Ohio 45202. 513-977-4165

Pictured Top: Installation view. Untitled (2010). Latex paint on wall (right side). 110” x 118”. Courtesy of the Weston Art Gallery.
Pictured Below: Transformation Series (2007 and 2010). Lithographic Tusche on Mylar. 16” x 16” each. Courtesy of the Weston Art Gallery.
Pictured Middle: Evolution I (2007). Acrylic on Paper Mounted on Canvas. 20” x 20”. Courtesy of the Weston Art Gallery.
Pictured Bottom: (Left to Right) Dark Assimilation I, I, III (2010). Charcoal on Arches Paper. 41” x 41”. Courtesy of the Weston Art Gallery.

American Elegance: Chintz Appliqué Quilts, 1780-1850 at the Taft Museum of Art

The contemporary art world has embraced quilts: Amish quilts with their color-blocked abstraction and the equally striking quilts from Gee’s Bend, which are perhaps less known. For six generations the women of Gee’s Bend, a rural community founded by freed slaves on an island in the Alabama River, isolated from the mainland by an unreliable ferry and an unpaved road with a roundabout approach, have made quilts with an abstract boldness and lively folk-art aesthetic.

The examples in American Elegance: Chintz Appliqué Quilts, 1780-1850, are nothing like these; these are polite and refined. The women who made them were often unknown society ladies with the means and the time to create these rather extraordinary quilts. they carefully cutout motifs from chintzes, which were imported from India and expensive, and appliquéd flowers, scenes, animals, and other designs onto quilts that were intended for actual use or for commemorative purposes.

The exhibition traces the changes in fashion with the substitution of cheaper calico fabrics manufactured in the U.S., and stylistically to pieced or patched work and block designs.

In an age of cheap imported Chinese quilts that retail for $15, including coordinating fabric tote, at Walmart or what hobby quilters put together from kits with machine-stitched piecing, these quilts are absolute technical tours de force. The unknown maker of a Medallion Quilt, 1820-40, (medallion referring to a motif placed in the center) carefully cutout floral motifs and a woven basket filled with an extravagant bouquet of tulips, lilacs, and passionflowers to use as the medallion. However, she used the less expensive calico for a stepped-pyramid pattern on the edge. Although virtuoso technique is not particularly valued in contemporary art, it’s hard not to be impressed by the miniscule size and machine-like regularity of the stitching. It makes a textured ground of diamond shapes, and also traces graceful grapevines, flowers, and berries, which are emphasized with trapunto, or stuffed work with extra batting, for a bas-relief effect.


The size of these quilts is unexpected. A Tree of Life, 1790-1820, is nearly 11-feet-square—big even for today’s California king (76” x 80”). The informative label, like all in the exhibit organized by the International Quilt Study Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, explains that fashionable four-poster beds were often piled high with feather mattresses and had trundle beds, all needing to be covered. The compositions of all of these quilts are sophisticated, the palettes pleasing, and the execution superb. They certainly deserve to be called masterpieces.


-Karen S. Chambers

American Elegance: Chintz Appliqué Quilts, 1780-1850 on view through November 7 at the Taft Museum of Art, 316 Pike St., Cincinnati, Ohio 45202. 513-241-0343.

Pictured Above: Medallion Quilt, maker unknown, probably U.S., c. 1820-49, 122.5” x 124”. International Quilt Study Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006.003.0004. Courtesy of the Taft Museum of Art.

Pictured Below: Tree of Life, maker unknown, probably U.S., c. 1790-1810, 123” x 132”. International Quilt Study Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2007.034.001. Courtesy of the Taft Museum of Art.