On a Wednesday evening, in a room above the raucous crowd assembled for Mayday Bar in Northside’s Bingo night, five artists of various ilk (visual artists Britni Bicknaver & Paul Coors, photographer-designer-street artist Floyd Johnson, designer-entrepreneur Rosie Kovacs, and poet Dana Ward) gathered to discuss an issue that has effected them each, directly or indirectly: the issue of...

Creative, Multi-tasking “It’s been one of those days when everything went opposite to what I expected,” says David Knight, Director of Exhibitions and Collections at Northern Kentucky University, as he sits down at his desk in the office adjacent to the gallery. He has been presiding over NKU art, in its differing incarnations, for about twenty years. “On second thought,” he contradicts himself, “actually, it’s been an on...

Artist, Writer, Curator. At 26 years of age, artist, writer, & curator Matt Morris is quite accomplished. With several years worth of published writings in regional and international publications (including this journal,) participation in five group shows and two curatorial projects this past year alone, as well as being a founding member of the U-turn Art Space collective since 2009, he can certainly be described as...

A Theory of Context and the Failure of the Ready-made. The ready-made is so entrenched in contemporary practice that its status is canonical. So much of today’s -and yesterday’s- conceptually driven work would be unimaginable without it, and yet by redefining art making for the past half-century or more, the ready-made has become emblematic of society’s disconnect with art and art’s disconnect with itself. How is it that an...

Ted Borman's astonishing new paintings, Ghost Clouds, are his most evolved work to date. They manage to combine rich references to art history and to contemporary popular culture wittily, intelligently, and seamlessly. Selecting a deliberately faux-naif painting style, Borman's work is reminiscent of other artists prone to radical reductionism and simplification, from Piero della Franscesca to John Marin and...

Higher Level Art…you hear chatter about this artist collaborative echo through social media, you see their work all over the city, you’ve read about them. Higher Level Art founders Danny Babcock and Matthew Dayler are busy guys, and they work really hard. They seem to have infinite amounts of creative energy, coupled with good business sense, which is a pretty rare combination. Their projects have included the 2008, 2009 and 2010 Fringe Festival murals.

Semantics opened Namaz Khaneh (house of prayer in Farsi) on Saturday, January 8; the first solo show by promising young Cincinnati artist Sheida Soleimani. The permanently semi-finished gallery space at Semantics serves as a good venue for this work which consists of a series of images showing the artist's own roughly completed small-scale constructions. The greenish yellow tone of the walls of these small tableaux almost...

On January 7, Aaron Cowan wrapped up a respectable exhibition of new paintings at Aisle Gallery. The works on display –some exquisite, some ordinary- were predicated on an elaborate mapping mechanism developed by Cowan. Daily activity was collated, categorized, and compressed into a system of color codes deployed across the surface of his supports in amounts corresponding to said activity; or so I’m told. Artists have a funny...

Ivan Fortushniak returns to Manifest Gallery this month with a solo exhibition of 15 modest sized works that range from the prosaic to the superb. A god in his own way, Fortushniak fashions painted worlds that resonate with ambiguity and unease. In his universe figures from the past stare obliquely into contemporary landscapes, are compelled skyward by invisible forces, and take part in tense, sometimes dangerous,...