Local art links
Image: TMI by Benjamin Duke, now showing at ROY G BIV
I’ve got a couple weeks’ worth of visual arts stories I’ve yet to link up here. For you, the good thing to come out of my laziness is a handy list of shows to make your own non-Hop day of viewing. I’d recommend taking a look at them all while you can.
Latest links
From the Anchor series by Erin Holscher Almazan, at Ohio Art League
About time for some links to my coverage of March shows in The Dispatch and Alive:
Spring exhibitions at the Wexner Center
So much bloggin’ to catch up on - this week I owe y'all some tips on thrifty art collecting and I’ve got movie reviews of Trust, Arthur and Hanna coming up. But first, a link to my piece in Sunday’s Dispatch on the new spring exhibitions at the Wexner Center: Nathalie Djurberg’s Human Behavior; Louise Bourgeois and Hans Bellmer: Double Sexus; and Pipilotti Rist’s The Tender Room.
Image: The Experiment (Greed) by Natalie Djurberg, courtesy Wexner Center/Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Gio Marconi, Milan
Ever since getting a look at these shows, I’ve been griping openly about the near impossibility of encapsulating them in a word count of around 550 (an upshot of the declining fortunes of print media, but at least the Dispatch is consistent in providing space to the visual arts). Still, it does give you a general sense of what to expect. And here are a few random thoughts I didn’t have room for:
• As much as sexuality is a central theme in the exhibitions, power is also an essential element, exerted by each of the artists in his or her own remarkable way. Djurberg gives a forum to the victimized, and calls out excess through miniature. The way Rist captures her female subject, she seems conscious of the sexual gaze that a pretty girl attracts, but also to be thumbing her nose at it through active ignorance. Bourgeois took control of the female form in art making like no woman before her. Bellmer showed the Aryan nation for the ugly thing it was and blazed a trail for creating explicit work without moral or prurient charge (at least in the usual sense - some may disagree with this last bit).
• Even with the sumptuous, revolutionary bumps and curves of Bourgeois’ work, Djurberg’s section is probably my favorite. I just love that overripe sculptural work and the aggressively handmade quality to everything she does. (Aside from the contrasting music created by her partner, Hans Berg, for the video pieces, Djurberg makes everything on her own, without studio assistants.)
• I have Rist to thank for my single favorite moment walking through the exhibitions. After taking in the images in the preceding galleries, which can be shocking, disturbing and outright pornographic, you have to love Rist’s installation of a chandelier covered in underwear of both genders and bathed in a swirling flow of colored lights. Her beautiful, literal airing of unmentionables is a great tension diffuser.
• Though I haven’t seen the new piece that’s replaced it yet, I wish the Wex had kept Jennifer Reeder’s tears cannot restore her: therefore i weep in The Box for another month. I saw it on one of its last days, and its looping tale of an ASL interpreter who decides to tell her own story of failed love during a class on electromagnetism had a nice affinity with the new gallery shows.
Big thanks to Wexner Center chief exhibitions curator Christopher Bedford for taking me through the galleries. Anyone else who’s had a chance to see these shows, please feel free to chime in.
Latest art links
Image: Pass Summer Nights Above the Brown Mythless Constellations of Your Skin by Bethany Jozwiak-Butler, now hanging at MadLab Gallery
Need some food for your soul on this lovely Sunday? Then I’ve got some shows for you to check out - just follow the links. Personally, I’m hoping to finally make it to the Shared Intelligence show today.
- Rundown of several Short North gallery shows in April
- Mellow Yellow at MadLab Gallery
- Todd DeVriese memorial shows at OSU Hopkins Hall Gallery and the Kuhn Fine Arts Gallery at OSU’s Marion campus
Big bucket o’ links
Image: Untitled work by Irish-born New Englander Karl Mullen
Man, I’ve got a bunch of local art coverage for Alive & the Dispatch under my belt that I haven’t yet linked to here. Since some of the shows listed below are no longer open, in those cases, I’ve included a link to where you can see more of participating artists’ work online (plus Lindsay Gallery usually has at least a few Karl Mullen pieces on hand in the back room).
- Karl Mullen at Lindsay Gallery (Karl’s site)
- Nick Fancher at Wild Goose Creative (Nick’s Tumblr blog)
- Face 2 Face: Studios on High 25th Anniversary Show at the Cultural Arts Center (Studios on High site)
- April Showers at Rivet Gallery (sites for Jeannie Lynn Paske & Cory Benhatzel)
- Confluence(s): OSU MFA Exhibition at OSU Urban Arts Space
- Greater Columbus Arts Council Visual Arts Exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art