The first time I saw Rebekah Wilhelm’s work I was seriously frustrated. The piece was a large installation of tiny scraps of paper strung together like a chain mail screen (above). On each piece of paper was a word, just barely legible in the dim light of the gallery. As I found myself struggling to read the words and piece together […]
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“Women don’t usually have muses” explains Lissa Rivera, gesturing at her genderqueer partner, artistic collaborator, and muse BJ Lillis during her recent artist talk at the Cleveland Print Room. And of course it’s true – women most frequently are the object of the male artist’s inspiration, the bottom player of a power structure so ubiquitous that it has become ingrained in the very fabric of art […]
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The Dead Boys were probably never your thing. That–based on Billboard charts–is a statistical fact, even in Cleveland, and more specifically even in Lakewood, their home town. Most people certainly knew the band’s name and rowdy fame more than their music. Even “Sonic Reducer,” covered by Guns N Roses and Pearl Jam, and now on occasion by twelve year-olds–their one […]
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How much is too much when everything is not enough? Welcome to the new Gilded Age, to climb onto a trope made famous by economist Thomas Picketty in his 2013 book “Capitalism in the 21st Century.” The original “Gilded Age” (so-dubbed by Mark Twain to describe the last quarter of the 19th century), was shiny and fundamentally rotten, just like […]
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Nothing speaks of mystery with more sibilance than an ancient tomb, where half-seen shapes whisper to the unconscious mind. Ohio University professor Tom Bartel’s most recent ceramic works, glazed with metallic oxides and high kiln temperatures to a cindery brownish-black, mean to evoke just that response. Installed in a small room to one side of a large gallery at […]
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“I don’t see myself as a landscape artist,” admits Eileen Dorsey… I can’t help but chuckle as I look around her space in 78th Street Studios, the walls covered with colorful landscapes. She corrects herself – “I know I paint landscapes, but I see them as something more.” I agree. Dorsey is known for her oil landscapes – usually she depicts deep, lush forests, […]
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“Weaving represents the inherent geometry of life and by stressing, cutting and manipulating this geometry, I constantly challenge and question this reality.” – Jessica Pinsky As I looked at Jessica Pinsky’s stunning weavings in the Sullivan Family gallery at BAYArts, I kept thinking about Greek mythology. Several stories from antiquity include weaving as a motif, but today I’m thinking about Philomela […]
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“Abstract” is not a genre, nor is it a style. If anything ties together the various modes of painting called “abstract,” it is the fact that they do not aim to depict things as they look to the naked eye. Abstraction thus encompasses diverse, sometimes oppositional tendencies. It can be as strict as geometry, or as intuitive and formless as […]
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“I am so happy that I stepped out of my comfort zone. In the evolution of artists and painters I admire, change is part of their career dialogue.” I can see that Jenniffer Omaitz isn’t afraid to try new things, as she shows me around her Kent home I spy examples of her early work – works that look very different […]
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I went down to Kent on a humid Thursday afternoon to check out the Kent State School of Art Recent Alumni Show, now in its final days (through August 4). Personally, I love visiting college campuses in the summertime – the sidewalks empty, the quad quiet, it’s tranquil and you can easily get a parking spot. The Galleries at Kent State University […]
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