“Getting nowhere”, some thoughts upon seeing Michael Wilson’s photographs at Iris Bookstore

Editor's note: We enjoy Bill Renschler's cryptic approach to criticism and invite you to explore it also as an example of a unique approach to responding to art.

—no thing: situations and flattened pictorial space arising from the triangle like in a Japanese print. Because the artist is totally present in the image, the image contains
him. To define the lyric: you had to be there, that’s all, oh and you couldn’t have any ideas and one must rehearse (prepare for the death (of the idea)) one's craft beforehand.

—harlequin-wise non-perspective space is divided, triangulated and both balanced and spilling: the dark and light found to be interpenetrating thereby becoming a vehicle, a still from a flattened parade, a frieze this frozen wheel now moves us. The narration has been compressed: we are now nowhere. We moved that far.

—through participating in the tension set up at the poles, the opposites (some are actual poles, others the arms of a triangle, some are pairs, things repeated) we’re allowed a secular glimpse of the eternal because again, we’re getting nowhere.

—from the delicate electricity of the bitter-sweet to the standoffish tension of a white part and a black part, just there, balanced and alive, we may see how the world snaps together. These images are relatively small, so their tonal-range springs are wound tight. The images were a gift given to the restless, the solitarily vigilant, the well-prepared.

—in beauty: guilelessness and loss of innocence. Having been moved, having stumbled upon an “image” (a “place” where we’re involved in the reconciliation of the polar world), we can see our limits, we’re free to do that. The pairings within the image are absurd and it’s a brave and humorous act that places them before us: the same one that allows us to see them in ourselves.
- William Renschler

Michael Wilson, 'Photographs From and For...Heads Bowed Eyes Closed, No One Looking Around' at the Iris Book Cafe, 1331 Main St. at Woodward, Cincinnati, OH 45202. Phone: 513.381.2665. Through August 7, 2009.
Photo: Wilson, Michael. Untitled, Newport, KY, 1984.

'Rendered Obsolete' at the Aisle Gallery

'Rendered Obsolete,' the new exhibition running 6.26.09-7.31.09 at Aisle Gallery, features work by Rachel E. Heberling and Katherine Rogers. It is an ambitious exhibition featuring large-scale etchings and lithographs. Both artists are notably conscious of and use excellent restraint in the use of space in their work, allowing for large areas of rich tone or value systems of concentrated dark with open, sparse-bitten areas within the picture plane.

There is a unifying post-industrial aesthetic for the exhibition, and an affinity for the obsolete, outmoded, or neglected, deftly making use of the title's play on words as both artists work with precisely rendered marks to realize their aims.
Katherine Rogers etchings' focus on the beautiful process of detritus and perhaps the solitude afforded by lack of human intervention.
Rachel Heberling's work provides an interesting breadth both in terms of media and in terms of concept. Earlier works having a penchant for WPA era photographic quality documentation and more recent work injecting the human figure to create cryptic narratives.

Altogether, ‘Rendered Obsolete’ is a thoughtfully curated exhibition showcasing fine examples of
contemporary prints at affordable prices.
- Andrew Au

‘Rendered Obsolete’ etchings and lithographs by Rachel E. Heberling & Katherine Rogers at the Aisle Gallery, 424 Findlay St. Third Floor , Cincinnati OH 45214 . 513-241-3403. Through 7.31.09.
In Photo, Heberling, Rachel E. Auto-Graph, 2009. Two-plate etching and aquatint, 18”x24”.

'The Artist as Diarist' at the Sandra Small Gallery

When I Die (2000) by John B. Chewning features a sign with the words ‘WHEN I DIE BURY ME IN THE WOODS SO MY HUSBAND WILL HUNT FOR ME.’ It rests on a peculiar conic wrapping of vines, with a roughly painted American flag in the background. In the exhibition we read some text below the work that explains that the building in the background is a gift shop, since lost to fire, in a city known for hosting not only the first dental college (so the artist claims) but also the Seip Mound, an ancient Hopwell earthwork site. The photo that was at first quirky invites us as per its sign to an investigation of the buried; it is symbolic of the kind of inner response one has to Chewning’s work - both celebratory and wistful for a vanishing world, more particularly a vanishing America - and also to the contributions of the artists Paula Wiggins, Lynda Riddle and Ellie Fabe in the exhibition ‘The Artist as Diarist’ at the Sandra Small Gallery, curated by Daniel Brown.

Notable also are the smallest of the works of Wiggins, Fabe’s watercolors without the invasive collage materials and Riddle’s paintings of exterior scenes.
-A.C. Frabetti

'The Artist as Diarist,' curated by Daniel Brown, featuring the work of John Chewning, Ellie Fabe, Linda Riddle and Paula Wiggins. The Sandra Small Gallery, 124 Pike St., Covington, KY. June 12-July 10. (Full Disclosure: Daniel Brown is a contributor for AEQAI.)
In photo: Chewning, John B. 'When I Die,' 2000. Photograph. Courtesy of the Sandra Small Gallery.

Notes from the 2009 RiverSpan Sculpture Exhibition and Sale

Riverspan exhibited 80 sculptors, nearly filling the Purple People Bridge. The works were excellent quality, tending towards the ornamental and figurative. I chatted informally with many of the sculptors, who were happy with the event and found the staff extremely supportive.

Riverspan is modelled after a similar one in Loveland, CO, called Sculpture in the Park, which boasts over $1,000,000 in sales. The Loveland event benefits from an open park in an exclusive neighborhood. In contrast, Riverspan, for example, has needed to tailor-make all its tents due to the unusual bridge size ($100,000 tent costs, according to Bruce Olson, Executive Director) and wrestles with the peculiar stigmatization of Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky relations.

I questioned Olson about the $15 ticket price. But Olson defended it, arguing that the exhibition is for collectors and serious sculpture enthusiasts; such would be willing to pay the cost similar to a movie ticket (the Loveland event, though, costs $5). Also, he did not want the exhibitors to be bombarded by passerbies or ‘riff-raff’, distracting them from serious clientele. You judge.

But for all counts, should this event reach the Loveland scale, there would be big dividends for the region. There are no other major sculpture-only venues.
-A.C. Frabetti

2009 RiverSpan Sculpture Exhibition and Sale, June 19-21, Purple People Bridge, Newport, KY. Visit their web site at http://www.riverspansculpture.org/index.php. The event also featured a full print catalog of participating artists. We hope to offer a more in-depth analysis and full coverage in the future.

Paige Wideman at AEC, Covington, KY

Found object artists at times fall victim to a lack of consistent language in their work due to the arbitrary nature of their craft. Their works become mediated upon chance discovery, external inspirations and risk lacking a developed style of continuously expounded/explored forms.
Paige Wideman's mature sculptures represent the opposite case of this approach. Her work has a personal language, part formalist/part narrative. The qualities of her recovered materials are conserved, sometimes re-worked and always successfully collaged into her compositions. Graceful curves appear in works such as Kindred, 2009 and Solitude, 2009 while others, such as Op-red, 2007 and Edifice, 2009 jut upwards in monolithic fashion. The works have an atmosphere of antiquity in part due to the weathered materials. The tones are rustic throughout (wood, steel, etc.) and warm the eye with rusted reds and textures.
In Mazda, 2009 and Parlato, 2009, the found nature of the components completely disappear in these intimate compositions. Particularly in the latter, I was reminded of the art of Joseph Cornell.

Also of note is budding artist Elizabeth Laskey (in particular in such works as Numen). Her art constitutes the other half of this exhibition curated by David Knight, gallery director of Northern Kentucky University.
-A.C. Frabetti

'Recycled Finds: Work by Paige Wideman and Elizabeth Laskey', The Covington Artisans Enterprise Center, 25 West 7th Street, Covington. Curated by David Knight. June 5th thru July 10th.
Photo: Wideman, Paige. Past Absolved, date: n.d. Wood, rust, found metal, 4"wx12"hx6"d. AEQAI staff photo.

'Flowers of Romance': Joseph Winterhalter at the Aisle Gallery

Joseph Winterhalter presents several small-scale works on paper and canvas at the Aisle Gallery through June 19. The artist is known to many area residents for his impressive large-scale work shown last year at the Weston Art Gallery (click here to see archive).
For me this was my first encounter of his work. Many of his compositions on canvas and paper (such as F.o.R. #4 , 2009 right) are minimalistic so as not to distract the eye from their central tension: the formal, even austere, repetition of brick-like geometric patterns with paint softened through subtle variation via texture. He experiments; for example, he sometimes uses foreshortening techniques on the ‘brick’ lines. The color hues are ‘contained’ within the ‘brick’ forms, allowing the two elements to occupy their own spaces.
Another body of four works on paper use machine-perfect text upon similar backgrounds, sans the brick form. The text here intrudes formally on the subdued backgrounds, but the meanings of the textual phrases - ambiguous, cryptic, philosophical - are more accordant. Perhaps the impulse to counter the color hues with abstraction, achieved earlier via the geometrical brick forms, is here explored via words.
-A.C. Frabetti

Joseph Winterhalter, 'Flowers of Romance' at the Aisle Gallery, 424 Findlay St. 3rd Floor, Cincinnati, OH 45214. M-F 1-4 or by appointment 513.241.3403
The Aisle Gallery benefits from its location above the Carl Solway Gallery as well as an attentive selection of regional artists.

In photo:

F.o.R. #4 , 2009. Latex, acrylic, graphite, oil, wax on Arches paper, 30" x 22".
c. 2009 Joseph Winterhalter. Photo: Krista Gregory, Aisle Gallery.