Down to Earth

U-Turn Art Space is about to come to an end.  It feels sort of like the last episode of Friends , that weird nostalgic ache, that sense that a group of people who made something both approachable and unique, culturally aware but also down to earth, is over.  And there's nothing that can take its place, not even reruns. 

I first stumbled onto the space last July and got mesmerized by the glamour and chutzpah of a show called "The Place You Made to Find One Another," featuring the works of Eric Ruschman and Patricia Murphy (two artists who also helped run the space).  The exhibit had a ghostly cast of misfit sculptures and intricately conceived paintings, but also a sense of finish and what I call "there-ness," meaning it just seemed like a show that came fully intact from somebody's brilliant brain, like Athena busting out of Zeus's skull, or a crazy chandelier dropping out of the sky and landing without breaking right in front of you.  There was an easy-going pretentiousness that I loved in that show, and every other show I saw there also had that knack to be both sophisticated and unfussy, brave without showing off.  Each show examined the limits of what art can be, while expanding the way you can appreciate those limits, like Duchamp without fustiness.  Each exhibit, it seemed, offered a new brand of readymades, a new centerstage urinal.

But something else:  an enthusiasm and naivete tempered with glittery wisdom.  Nothing heavy-handed, but a sort of gravity through the curatorial choices made, the careful consideration of how art got installed and lit and talked about.

So thank you Matt Morris, Molly Donnermeyer, Zachary Rawe, Patricia Murphy and Eric Ruschman.  What an incredible sitcom you created.
 
Here are the shows I wrote about:

"The Mechanics of Joy"
"moon in the wall, hope it don't dissolve"
"The Place You Made to Find One Another"

The final show at U-Turn, "Aloha Means Both Hello and Goodbye" opens this Saturday, June 4, 2011, witha a reception at 7 pm to 10 pm.  (Bill and I were asked to be a part of it, and we're so happy to be.)  U·turn Art Space 2159 Central Ave.  Cincinnati, Ohio Please come and show the U-Turners how much they meant to Cincinnati art, and just plain old art in general.

Nightmare Window-Dressing

"I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it."  Gertrude Stein

Joey Versoza's "moon in the wall, hope it don’t dissolve" at U-Turn Art Space is a nightmare reinvention of window-dressing, cold and brutal with lamps precariously positioned on the floor with paper-towel rolls and other apparatus.  There's a black-eye brewing in the shadows of the space, a flicker of violence that turns to bruise and then thought and then just absolute nothingness.  Each of the works free-floats, like items from a shipwreck surfacing through black water.  I loved the feeling of the whole thing, like spelunking through subconsciousness itself.  It's a rabbit-hole reinvented by Raymond Carver, minimal and mean and yet also starkly lyrical.  "Dear Summer" captures it all:  curtain and opened window.  Period.  That's it.  All that cold air blowing through the space, giving the sight of those prostrated living room lamps the chill they need to turn into Martians.  And then the apotheosis:  a Faulker tribute way off in a corner.  One rose in a glass vase spotlit by one of those lamps, a brittle little poem extracted from a big dark world.

Joey Versoza's "moon in the wall, hope it don't dissolve" closes this Saturday, January 28, 2011.  U-Turn 2159 Central Avenue, Cincinnati, OH. 

The Art of the Finger on a Cold Window

Tracy Featherstone + Krista Connerly

Judith Brotman 

Dale Jackson

 

Last night I went to the U-Turn Art Space's opening reception for "The Mechanics of Joy," a show featuring the works of five artists:  Tracy Featherstone + Krista Connerly, Judith Brotman, Dale Jackson, and William Howe.  The show is a dreamy collapse of mechanics into poetics or maybe the other way around, and the whole experience of seeing it is like witnessing someone trying to write a villanelle on the inside of his/her skull, and instead of using actual villanelle language he/she uses whatever is around his/her subconsciousness:  fragments of cardboard and plastic, transmission fluid stains, sleeping bags, lost shapes and sympathies from childhood, vague but intense moments written down on wrinkled pieces of newsprint.  Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...

Each work teaches you how to worship what you think has been sent to the figurative and literal landfill.  In this phantom zone provided by U-Turn you learn how to reconfigure what "ephemeral" and "fever" mean when laced together.  Claes Oldenburg kind of gets at this in his Pop-Art manifesto from 1961, "I Am for an Art."  In the piece he goes through a litany of meanings of the kind of art he "is for," including "an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary," and "an art that is smoked like cigarettes," and "an art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper."  Oldenburg is on a verbal safari for art that leaves itself behind and finds its truths and pleasures beyond what art is supposed to be, even though it still is in a gallery looking and acting like art.   

All of this art-hating-itself-but-really-loving-itself, however, gets at something serious and maybe even a little divine in "The Mechanics of Joy."  The precision of placement, the way objects and language both mock and harmonize with one another give the show a sharp simplicity that foregrounds the mystery of engineering without the safety net of practicality:  Judith Brotman's intricate and angelic sculptural fragments and figments hold court beside Dale Jackson's non sequiturs about (among many other issues) "what could cause Speed Racer to go off the road."  The beautifully utilitarian puppet-show featured in Tracy Featherstone and Krista Connerly's collaboration leans up against a telephone-pole beside the ghostly print pollutions by William Howe. 

This exhibit is a machine that travels unique distances without ever leaving the lot.  There's a celebration of absurdity without any explanation or political rant:  just what it is, here, in the gallery, a moment of mechanical thought idling into a weirdly innocent vision of joy.  

One more Oldenburg's "I Am for an Art" quote, and I'm out of here: 

"I am for the art of things lost or thrown away....  I am for the art of crayons and weak grey pencil-lead...and the art of windshield wipers and the art of the finger on a cold window, on dusty steel or in the bubbles on the sides of a bathtub."

2 + 2 = "Pretty"

"The Place You Made to Find One Another" opened last night at U-turn Art Space (2159 Central Avenue, Brighton neighborhood in Cincinnati), and runs through August 28, 2010. It's one of those shows that casts a magic spell over you. "Pretty" is a stupid word, but that's what came into my head as soon as I walked into the space. But "pretty" in a more broken and specific way -- like the "pretty" Joseph Cornell finds and worships in vacant hotel rooms, or the delicate gritty "pretty" Carson McCullers discovers in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Each piece sings a little off-key, but when you see the exhibit all in one walk-through you have the sense that "off-key" is exactly where beauty and absurdity meet, where sadness finds a place to laugh.

Eric Ruschman's work has a polished, precise tenderness to it, channeling pure feeling through a minimalist aesthetic that doesn't come off as minimal as much as carefully self-contained. This carefulness carries a lot of weight in pieces like "And Since You Can't Be a Fox in a Foxhole" and "This Is a Different Kind of Love Song," and allows you to luxuriate in what's there and what's not there. The colors evoke childhood simplcity, but the pieces themselves have a sophistication and mystery, with imagery that provides clues while also allowing you the benefit of the doubt. My favorite work by Ruschman is called "I Know, I'm Worried Too," a round wood shiny-surfaced table with cute animal knick-knacks arranged on it. What might have been a Jeff-Koons pastiche somehow becomes more of a Cornell ice-dance, a nostalgic little trip into what unnecessary objects can do to you if you look at them long enough, if you truly try to understand them.

Patricia Murphy has a more broken sense of "pretty." Her sculptures and paintings in the show feel as if they have been washed ashore, while Ruschman's pieces reached dry land via cruise-ship. In "Knot" and "Partly Because It's Easier on You," she uses abandoned boards and objects in arrangements that defy meaning while creating it. The pink knot seems to be an afterthought but also somehow predetermined, and the blank board with a yellow rectangle almost complete the puzzle, but then again it's not a puzzle we're looking at: it's more like a William Carlos Williams poem, all perfect and slight and weird. "Partly..." has that same cooked-down murmur to it, a poetry that climbs a ladder into itself. "Rush Beyond Silver Silence" seems like Murphy's answer to Ruschman's "I Know, I'm Worried Too." (It's also my favorite work by Murphy.) A left-behind nightstand with a small pillow with a ceramic bear on it, some dreamy wrinkled photos stuck to the sides of the nightstand with silver tape, "I Know" is lifted off the floor by an arrangement of naked wooden boards. As a whole, this piece has the fever of an intense memory you feel before you remember.

I kept thinking about Joseph Cornell the whole time I was at the show. Cornell said once that the shadowboxes he made, filled with nostalgic arrangements of trinkets, were poetic theaters, settings he created to transform childhood pastimes into moments that can't be lost anymore. Both Ruschman and Murphy create art in that vein; they seem to be searching for places and sensations that have somehow been lost. They are slowly recovering these scenes and feelings piece by piece.

Pictured above, top to bottom: Patricia Murphy, "Partly Because It Is Easier on You," aluminum dust, boards, broken ceramic horse. latex and spray paint. Patricia Murphy, "Knot," acrylic paint, found board, non-adhesive flagging tape. Eric Ruschman, "And Since You Can't Be a Fox in a Foxhole?" oil and enamel on MDF panel. Eric Ruschman, "This Is a Different Kind of Love Song," enamel on MDF panels.