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...

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...

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...

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...