Galleries One & Two
Western Exhibitions is privileged to present a curated selection of paintings, drawings, ceramics, artist books and sculptures from artists who make work at Visionaries + Voices (V+V), a progressive art studio in Cincinnati, Ohio. The show begins on Saturday, June 6 and will run through the summer. The gallery will be open BY APPOINTMENT ONLY until further notice, Tuesday-Saturday, 11am to 5pm. Please email scott@westernexhibitions.com, call (312) 480-8390 or visit Tock to schedule a viewing.
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Visit the show on Artsy: https://www.artsy.net/show/western-exhibitions-visionaries-plus-voices-at-western-exhibitions
Download the checklist
Videos from the show are on our Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/showcase/7358520
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Matt Distel, V+V’s director at the time, introduced Western Exhibitions’ founder Scott Speh to Courttney Cooper in 2011. Shortly after this visit to his hometown, Speh included Cooper in the three-person show Indirect Observation at the gallery. Cooper joined the gallery roster and his most recent solo show in 2016 was lauded as a must-see by Disparate Minds. Western Exhibitions has mounted a solo show with V+V artist Andrew Hostick, reviewed in Disparate Minds and New City and the gallery has presented V+V artists at art fairs: Hostick at EXPO Chicago in 2015 and Cooper with fellow V+V artist Jenny Crowe at the 2017 Outsider Art Fair in New York City.
Established in 2003, Visionaries + Voices is a non-profit organization that provides exhibition opportunities, studio space, supplies and support to more than 125 visual artists with disabilities. V+V artists actively contribute to the greater Cincinnati arts community through creative, educational, and strategic partnerships with local and regional artists, schools and business leaders. To learn more about Visionaries and Voices, visit: www.visionariesandvoices.com
Courttney Cooper draws large elaborate and exuberant maps of Cincinnati by hand and from memory. Gluing together pieces of found paper from his grocery store job, Cooper’s obsessive drawings, rendered with ballpoint pens, map out neighborhoods in his hometown with remarkable detail. He often walks the streets of the city, committing all the places he visits to memory, a process he has been using since he was a child. His maps depict more than just streets and monuments, often addressing seasonal events occurring within the time frame when each drawing is made, such as the WEBN fireworks, Oktoberfest or the Taste of Cincinnati. Cooper will even go back into his drawings to update them when buildings are newly constructed or torn down. Textual thoughts and phrases can be identified throughout Cooper’s sprawling maps, hidden beneath the landscape and revealed within the open white space of the paper, as noted in Matt Morris’ review on artforum.com: “But the party above belies the social tensions below: Gradually, one notices scrawled writing layered underneath Cooper’s landscapes, the text erupting in the blank passages of the streets.”
Jenny Crowe has loved to fill journals for as long as she or anyone who knows her can remember. Her fragments of text combine poetry and the mundane in a struggle to find a whole within her experiences. Crowe’s words are layered to the point that they visually flatten themselves into powerful and immovable forms. Her process is methodical, as she works from left to right and top to bottom, filling the page’s void of empty space until the viewer is trapped somewhere between the impulse to decode text and the desire to enjoy a purely visual experience.
Curtis Davis dismisses unnecessary embellishments by abstracting subjects to the simplest of shapes in his sculptures. The resulting composition locks shapes into an architecture of form, glued together with layer upon layer of paint. His daily impulse to make art results in an abundance of new paintings and drawings. Because of this, it is not uncommon that a new batch of work requires that he paint over the previous day’s finished work. This process results in stunning pieces that are immediate and visceral: thick layers of paint conceal the history of painting underneath. By reworking each piece, Davis builds up an impasto whose edges reveal the collective history of the piece. Davis had his first New York solo show at White Columns last year.
Elmer works from a sketchbook. Starting with a flat white page, he divides the composition into balanced ratios of space using geometric shapes and color. He overlaps geometric shapes with pencil in very simple and calculated movements. Colour is then applied as Elmer fills some areas then stops, reacting to how they will overlap. He approaches portraiture in a similar reductionist manner: faces become circles and bodies are condensed into squares. He frequently draws the same images, and his dedication to this form of production has produced a large body of work. Seeing an isolated composition from Elmer has a certain meaning, while seeing the entirety of them grouped together creates a different landscape for understanding them as daily meditations, as Elmer finds balance and control in his world.
Andrew Hostick is self-taught, and takes as his subjects advertisements and reproductions found in various art magazines–including Art in America and Artforum. Hostick inscribes and scores mat board with heavy-handed marks, slowly building up a velvety sheen of colored pencil in each drawing. The resulting works constitute a beautiful collapse of both primitive and contemporary sensibilities, and comment directly on the voyeuristic access to an art world which is largely inaccessible to the artist as outsider practitioner.
Trip Huggins comments and memorializes past and current news events of importance. His work is narrative and direct, focusing on moments like the death of President Kennedy, WWII, The Cold War, and stories from the Book of Exodus. He draws with pencil and wax crayon because it looks realistic. Huggins will pause between the creation of pieces for several days to think about his next one, filtering out ideas before settling on the most pressing issue.
Dale Jackson creates unlikely associations and complex poetry with everyday materials. Using a sharpie marker and colored poster board, he writes in a stream of consciousness style which becomes very direct visual poetry. Common motifs in his work are Motown, classic cars, the Beatles, and excerpts from his daily life. The combination of specifics from these varying elements creates something humorous, timely, and humble. Jackson has exhibited at the Rob Truitt Gallery in London and received the Spirit of Independence Award from the local L.A.D.D. organization in Cincinnati. His work has also been exhibited at White Columns in New York, the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati, Semantics Gallery, and Thunder-Sky Gallery.
Working primarily on paper, Linda Kunick creates bright, colorful abstractions with crayon and colored pencil, often combining themes of nature and religion. Most notably, her consistent use of the butterfly is used as a symbol of freedom, change and growth. Kunick creates drawings in the belief that the act of viewing art can be transformative and that her ideas and joy can be communicated and shared with the world.
Kenneth Moore searches online archives of images with a wide variety of interests. This visual research influences his drawings, and paintings. In one prominent body of work, he focuses on celebrities and pop icons like Taylor Swift, Leah Turner, and Vince Gill, celebrating their music and writing their names into different forms. In another body of work, Moore depicts everyday objects like vans.
Before creating her ceramic cats, Melissa Preston worked primarily in portrait painting, pen and ink drawing, and paper-maché sculptures. A few years ago during a difficult time in her life, Preston could not create in these particular art mediums so she began working with clay, making cat sculptures at V+V. She has tried making ceramic pigs and ceramic aliens, but always returns to sculpting cats. Creating cats is a form of meditation and an essential part of Preston’s well-being.
Mark Smith’s drawings and paintings reveal a world of masks and monsters that draw from our collective cultural memory. Images accumulated from movies and magazines are a part of Smith’s visual vocabulary. He intended his masks to portray a variety of faces including the superhero Deadpool and the fictional killer Michael Myers. He produced work with layer upon layer of continuously scribbled lines, usually without lifting the mark-making device from the surface. He worked with pencil, marker, oil pastel, and paint. Smith passed in 2018, leaving behind a tremendously rich body of work.
There are no accidents in the highly ordered environments that are constructed by Kevin White. Approaching his site-specific tidal wave of non-traditional materials and unconventional building methods initially offer viewers a sense of chaos. But upon closer investigation, the seemingly variegated collection gives way to a structure that embodies purpose. Historically, installation art calls attention to its situation, highlighting the staging of objects. White’s work is not situational; it’s an organized system, a structure that embodies purpose reflective of personal experiences. White creates a system of small parts that work together to create something larger. It’s intimate, and this intimacy helps to create an illusionistic environment.
Cathrine Whited writes lists as the first step in her art making process. She then draws each item on the list, rendered in her unique way of framing and labeling the item before cataloging the list’s drawings together as a unit. For instance, with a list entitled, “What’s in my fridge?” every possible item that is in the fridge is labeled. She starts a drawing with a ruler, making guide lines in pencil, to then render the imagery and text. Colored pencil is then applied for the right amount of color before moving to the next item on the list. Her renderings are a vehicle for viewers to isolate, experience and analyze our collective everyday interaction with the objects and culture that surrounds us.