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Joel Otterson’s “Thaw” distorts views into and out of
the Aronoff Center’s Weston Gallery.
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Anyone who thinks that a landscape is a representation of a rural vista or that painting is the simple act of using a brush to apply pigment to a surface will think again after seeing two exhibitions currently on view at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery at the Aronoff Center for the Arts.
In the vast upstairs space with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on two sides, Joel Otterson has installed his Three Landscapes. This site-specific installation is the second of three commissions funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the first being the extravagantly clever Nuts Society T-shirt shop and the third, yet to come, a sound-based installation featuring musical instruments and performances by Anthony Luensman.
Otterson, a native Californian who has lived in Cincinnati since 1993, is widely acclaimed as a sculptor. For the Weston, he taught himself to blow glass to create three separate elements infused with whimsy yet sophisticated in their intent. He not only challenges the idea of what comprises a landscape but also subverts the viewers' expectations about view, materials and orientation.
"Thaw," a curtain of glass icicles suspended in the windows, sets up a dichotomy between the transparency of the windows and the vistas they normally reveal and the translucency of the clear or pastel-colored icicles that distort and obscure the expected view into or out of the gallery.
On the floor, "Shooting Star" is a large cement mosaic of neatly cut ceramic plates, arranged as the traditional quilt pattern of an eight-pointed star. The unexpected use of materials and placement on the floor of the domestic quilt again encourages the viewer to reconsider typical expectations, although one might note that numerous feminist artists explored this idea more originally as much as 30 years ago.
Suspended from the ceiling, "Skypond" is literally an upside-down lotus pond of glass flowers and leaves. With a nod to the numerous waterlily paintings of Claude Monet (1840-1926), the best known of the Impressionist landscapists, Otterson wittily completes his postmodern landscape.
Whether Otterson succeeded in his original stated intent of addressing concerns about the melting icecaps, he has succeeded in upending the idea of landscape through his startling distortions and juxtapositions.
Downstairs, the four artists of Surface-Active similarly overturn preconceptions about what constitutes the act of painting with canvases or panels that are brushed, scraped, scratched, collaged, layered, augmented and otherwise manipulated to celebrate the very act of applying color and texture to a surface. With the exception of Ryan Woods, the artists work in a nonobjective or abstract style so that the facts of color and texture become the subjects of their compelling works.
Mark Fox, recently acclaimed as the "best working artist" in a CityBeat cover story, is represented by three huge works that almost pulsate with reflected light and color. Both the green-and-gold "Untitled (congregation)" and the chartreuse-and-purple "Untitled" are marked with gently curving vertical lines that suggest a theater curtain, hinting at Fox's well-known work with Saw Theater. Along with the immense three-panel "Untitled (leviathan)," a yellow-green expanse that resonates with the peacefulness of trees reflected in water, they seem to glow from within as a result of the translucency of the built-up thin layers and washes of oil paint and wax. Fox's paintings alone are worth the $1 admission fee suggested for the gallery.
Andrea Sparks' smaller canvases are similar in their simplicity, generally one or two colors marked with minimalist, cryptic lines or shapes. While her titles suggest narrative content -- "Song for Swans" with its graceful curving lines, "Karaoke Chair" with a chairlike character at center, or the ominous fog and obelisk of "What She Saw" -- the works are ultimately the product of her thickly layered and intensely colored acrylic paint surfaces gouged or scraped to create runelike lines and figures. As with the scratch art drawings of elementary school in which an upper layer of black crayon is scratched away to reveal a multicolored ground underneath, Sparks drags a thick brush or other implement through her top paint layer to expose a layer of another color, as though revealing a secret thought or earlier idea.
Represented by large untitled canvases that appear to be mostly white or gray at first glance, Joseph Winterhalter also creates a calligraphic vocabulary of curves and lines by adding and subtracting layers of paint as well as other media including collaged paper, latex, graphite, oil pencil, caulk, resin, fiberglass roofing tape, steel dust, magic marker, duct tape and spray paint. With a nod to the abstract expressionists, his works take on an archaeological intensity as the eye seeks to dissect and interpret the layers and materials, discovering subtle colors, forms and textures under and over the white grounds.
Ryan Woods likewise applies a variety of media, including dirt, to his panels to create rough surfaces and textures to complement his odd often multipaneled narratives. At the entrance to the exhibition, for example, in "Mechanically Separated Chicken," fragments of the chicken -- the letters "mech," a disjointed skeleton, a realistically rendered bird, a single feather -- are spread across four panels to be read like a cryptic comic strip. In other works his style varies from abstract, to childlike, to meticulously rendered, showing the remarkable range of this young artist who only recently completed his studies at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
As Dennis Harrington, director of the Weston Art Gallery and curator of this exhibition, explains, "Painting seems to get lost in all the technological things that artists are doing now. But this exhibition shows that painting is still a valid means of expression -- a physical, raw, direct exploration of the surface."
SURFACE-ACTIVE is on view at the Aronoff Center's Weston Art Gallery, Downtown, through Jan. 19. JOEL OTTERSON: THREE LANDSCAPES remains on display at the Weston through March 10.
