(The following interview took place Sunday, June 14, 2011 in U-turn’s gallery in Brighton. Attending were the five organizers of U-turn, in alphabetical order: Molly Donnermeyer, Matt Morris, Patricia Murphy, Zach Rawe and Eric Ruschman. All are graduates of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. For the sake of brevity, this article offers excerpts from the conversation. )

“All things resist being written down,” Franz Kafka writes in an October 13, 1913 diary entry. Joey Versoza’s 2011artworks survey that resistance – objects refusing to go along with meaning, and meaning finding its way out of the experience of seeing. It’s hermeneutics in reverse: what’s in the gallery space is a visual language divorced from imagery, and imagery trying very...

Carl Fudge is a sly fellow. Just as you think you’ve caught the drift for one of his series works, either paintings or prints – ah yes, you think, look how this cluster balances that – he changes the color scheme for another version and all relationships shift gear. New game entirely.
Carl Solway Gallery is showing a selection of the work of British-born Fudge, who now lives...

Jeff Casto’s shadowboxes and assemblages in “Future Tense,” his current exhibit at 1305 Gallery ending July 15, 2011, conjure Joseph Cornell’s Utopia Parkway workshop, as well as Pee Wee Herman’s Playhouse, extracting wistfulness from detritus, seriousness from folly. The toys, junk and other materials used in Casto’s art have the allure of Saturday...

In Garfield Place, the two bronze statues by Charles Henry Nihaus of former Ohio-born US presidents James A. Garfield and William Henry Harrison have been yarn bombed.
Yarn bombing, for the uninitiated, is a form of street art that uses knit/crochet objects illegally placed in prominent public space. The term “bombing” arises from graffiti tagging lingo. Unlike graffiti spray paint, yarn bombing does not deface...

Steve Kemple’s exhibition at Semantics, The World is Everything That it Isn’t, accomplishes what many exhibitions strive to do: approach difficult ideas, both in the arts, and in general, in a digestible and playful way. Kemple touches on subjects of organizational systems, simulation, function, etc. with art objects such as a houseplant, an old map, and a telescope among...

In this Art Scene interview, Brad McCombs discusses his interest in creating experiences around the ways people encounter artwork. Speaking from the context of Northern Kentucky University’s visual arts program, he describes new media as a field that brings video, performance, film, interactivity and digital technologies into conversation with contemporary artistic practice...

Thornton Dial, Courttney Cooper, and other “Hard Truths”. In an essay in the catalog for “Hard Truths,” Thornton Dial’s brilliant retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (up until September 15, 2011), Greg Tate takes on the “hard truths” involved in trying to figure out how to locate Dial on an art-world map: “For far too much time, Dial’s work has been tethered...

“Maidens of the Cosmic Body Running: Majr Gazr” is a collective exhibition featuring the work of area artists Denise Burge, Lisa Siders, and Jenny Ustick at the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art. The installation is an intensely immersive experience in which the group employs color, video, geometric abstraction, wall-drawings, fiber art, and various other media to create a kind of psychological space...