On the last Saturday in August, PAC Gallery in East Walnut Hills opened a new exhibition with an inventive strategy for including performance art in a commercial gallery exhibition.
The gallery’s E-invite explained that Kris Ebeling’s solo exhibition The Pleasure of Your Companionship would open with an exclusive performance event for no more than 30 attendees, at $200 a head. Each guest would receive “an original work to remember the evening.” (It turned out to be a drawing by the artist. Attending as a member of the press, I did not receive one.)
Performance art has been a fundamental medium for artists to explore for decades and while such work functions nicely in alternative and nonprofit spaces, the move for a young commercial space like PAC to take a risk on something less obviously salable gave me pause. Surely such genres in art can only be marketable to a small group of collectors. And how many of them reside in Cincinnati?
The Pleasure of Your Companionship continues through Sept. 18.
Go here to read Matt Morris’ full review.
This article appears in Sep 1-7, 2010.