Aeqai

Thank you, Movers and Makers Cincinnati, for featuring our Annual Fundraiser in your April Issue and thank you to all the wonderful patrons, artists, and friends of Aeqai. We are truly honored and grateful to Kay Hurley and Jens G. Rosenkrantz Jr. for putting this perfect exhibition together. Your vision and passion for uplifting the art community were exhibited in so many ways. Congratulations, and Thank You so much!!!

Read All About It In The January Issue of Aeqai
https://aeqai.org/articles/clifton-cultural-arts-center-plans-10-5-million-new-building/

Clifton Cultural Arts Center is constructing a $10.5 million new building which will serve Uptown neighborhoods with a wide variety of exhibitions and classes.

Leslie Mooney, second executive director of the center in the organization’s history beginning in 2013, is undertaking one of her largest projects now – a brand new 18,000-square-foot building located at 3412 Clifton Avenue near the corner of Clifton and Ludlow Avenues. Created by the architecture firm Emersion Design, it will have three stories, two gallery spaces, a community room, several classrooms, a makeshop, a 100-seat auditorium, office space and a green rooftop.

The December Issue of AEQAI Is Here! Read this article and much more.
The “Golden Ticket “ Exhibition offers the public a survey of the Greater Cincinnati art community output. This year’s show is heavily carried by photography, but with quality pieces in painting, sculpture and multiple mediums in the mix.
Photograph by Tina Gutierrez
https://aeqai.org/articles/golden-ticket-at-the-clifton-cultural-arts-center/

SAVE THE DATE
ARTIST CALL
New work on 8x8 birch panels. Contact the Gallery to pick up your panels and bid sheets. Submissions due January 28th.

Aeqai READ ABOUT THE ART

Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle
January 2nd, 2022 | Published in *, December 2021

Abstractionism—think Kandinsky—denied representation altogether, but assumed all the conventions of pictorial space, hence the nonrepresentational use of color, line, form, and so on.

J.M. Bernstein, “Freedom From Nature” in Hegel and the Arts, ed. Stephen Houlgate (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 220.
Approaching it in one way I see no essential difference between a line one calls “abstract” and a fish. But an essential likeness. This isolated line and the isolated fish alike are living beings with forces peculiar to them, though latent. They are forces of expression for these beings and of impression on human beings. Because each being has an impressive “look” which manifests itself by its expression. But the voice of these latent forces is faint and limited. It is the environment of the line and the fish that brings about a miracle: the latent forces awaken, the expression becomes radiant, the impression profound […]The fish can swim, eat and be eaten. It has then capacities of which the line is deprived. These capacities of the fish are necessary extras for the fish itself and for the kitchen, but not for painting. And so not being necessary, they are superfluous. That is why I like the line better than the fish—at least in my painting.

Wassily Kandinsky, “Line and Fish” (1935) in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Nebraska-Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 273.

Moderation, 1940

The Guggenheim exhibition of Kandinsky’s oeuvre is expansive and quite impressive, covering the entirety of Kandinsky’s career. One of the most curious and illuminating facets of such an exhibition, which treks all the periods that make up an artist’s cannon, is that the viewer becomes aware of certain continuities and points of breakage. In turn, such an exhibition proffers a visual genealogy which helps the viewer understanding a given artistic phenomena and its associated concepts but, more importantly, also exposes how those phenomena/associated concepts unspool and transform over time. Genealogy as a visual technique thus renders what we take to be an artist’s mode of meaning-making—e.g., abstraction, geometric experimentation, etc.—as historically mutable, as something that is contingent, produced and open to transformation, revision, abandonment and challenge over time.

This is particularly clear in the Kandinsky exhibition, if one begins at the top of the rotundra spiral ramp and walks downwards, tracing Kandinsky’s works chronologically. Admittedly, this is contra the curatorial design, as Kandinsky’s works are displayed in the rotunda’s spiral ramp in reverse order. However, my partner and I found this somewhat problematic, particularly given that few of Kandinsky’s late works are available for display in the exhibition. We had trekked across Central Park to the Guggenheim on a brisk New York winter day with a very specific idea of Kandinsky in mind—Kandinsky the pioneer of abstraction. This is, indeed, the Kandinsky whom we think of most readily. Yet, as Kandinsky’s early paintings demonstrate, the young Kandinsky—a student of Franz von Stuck at Munich Academy who was simultaneously swept under the awe of Wagner’s lyricism and Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical teachings—held great command of impressionism and pointillism. This is evident in works that span Munich (1901-2), Amsterdam—View from the Window (1904), Fishing Boats, Sestri (1905), Pond in the Park (1906), Blue Mountain (1908), Group in Crinolines (1909), and Landscape near Murnau with Locomotive (1909). When presented with the Blue Rider Period (1911–14), the Return to Russia Period (1914-21), the Bauhaus Period (1922-33), and the Great Synthesis Period (1934-44), the viewer is able to appreciate that the motifs implored by the early Kandinsky did not simply dissipate like some youthful smolder, unripe and juvenile, fit for abandoning. Instead, this period marks out Kandinsky’s sustained interest in color separated from form—i.e., in discerning form from content.

And is this not precisely what impressionism does—separating form from content? Is that which characterizes Monet’s water lilies or the pointillism of Seurat’s Eiffel tower not the verdant greens or warm copper-metal hues that bleed past their borders? That the mode of viewing–i.e., the broken, bleak, sun-bleached, and sometimes wary-cum-dreamy way that we manifestly perceive the world–take precedent over the putative accurate, measured realism of the scientific image of man? The separation of form from content is certainly what the history of modernism, from Manet’s Olympia (1865) thus forwards sought to engage and what Kandinsky remained interested in, both in his more figurative early period and his geometrically-poised later works.

Kandinsky, as a spiritualist, had an interest in synesthesia. For with synesthesia, one’s senses do not process and translate modes of information by streamlining their content but vis-à-vis a transmogrification. That is, synesthesia is an act in which one’s sense express, in their own form, the quality of a disparately given perception. Indeed, yellow may resound like the call of a trumpet, or the olfactory perception of mint may “sound” like wind howling through chilled glass panes. The deracination of form—i.e., that which gives order and shape to perceived data—from content—i.e., that which is taken up pre-categorically—presents us with a different visual worldview. This is particularly clear in a painting like Extended (1926); on the one hand, this is a work that has clear grounds in architecture, which is rather sensible since Kandinsky was, at this time, at the Bauhaus (note: Kandinsky worked at the Bauhaus from 1922 until 1933, when the N***s closed it). However, this is not the architecture of familiar metropolis cityscapes as we are accustomed to taking them up via our everyday visual mode. Rather, this is an alien architecture—an architecture of foreign forms, incongruous peaks, and estranged plains. A mossy-olive background sky is populated by, on the top-left corner, a dark pine fingernail moon sliver. This moon is one of the few directly representational indices in the painting. Below it is a small crimson circle with a fiery yellow ring ensnaring it, perhaps a sun. To the right is yet another circle, this one much larger and filled in with Stygian black and lemon-yellow flecks, framed by a coral ring; this, too, could be a moon, albeit one in full bloom. Several identical ink black circles can be found to the left of what appears to be a tower; this is a triangular tower, protruding upwards to the height of the sun and moon. Geometric designs–reminiscent of De Stijl blocks, albeit in more muted greens, yellows, pinks, and orange–bisect the top and the center of this pyramidal tower. Several floating figures might indicate further buildings in the distance, but the flattened negative space evades any direct interpretation. Then, there is the stirring, curious field below the tower. This field below this triangular tower sees further triangular shapes, almost arrow-like, breaking into one another, a mixed array where one set of concentric circles finds itself settling into an eggshell yellow. This could well be a lone streetlight or a cackling lamp, but one estranged not only from our familiar sidewalks of gaslamps and mailboxes but also from any possible world that we might be able to picture in our mind’s eyes. For there is nothing familiar or of our world to even balance or settle into in Kandinsky’s painting. This is lyricism run amuck, slipping and seeping beyond its standard forms, which are razed and forgotten.

But why even tether Kandinsky’s painting to a representational framework at all? I would perhaps resist any such temptation, if such a temptation even were to come to mind, had Kandinsky not made it blatantly obvious in both his personal statements and in his career-wide interest in representationalism. But this representationalism is not the kind we are familiar with from figurative painting; rather it is the representationalism of the synesthetic, whose crossed and crazed translation manual does translate some sense-data x (viz., some representing) into some object (viz., some represented), yet the senses find themselves negotiated and prattling with new maps of meaning. Hence, we who are unfamiliar with the synesthetic mode of being and sensing must rescind ourselves to something alien in Kandinsky’s work and retire from any one-to-one graphic translation.

Extended, 1926

In turn, Extended is devoid of our quotidian objects—there are no men, women, or children that dash across cracked sidewalk or twist flower stems in between dirt-caked fingernails. Yet, we do have shapes arrayed together in three-dimensional space, distributed and arranged in a mode that suggest a logic. What this logic is, exactly, or how it operates seems impenetrable; like hearing a foreign melody in an alien key with unfamiliar exotic instruments but recognizing that what one hears is music. Kandinsky himself often noted that to veridically understand his practice of transmogrification one must familiarize themselves with the Theosophy from which he drew. Without entertaining the diversion that would be a proper study of Rudolf Steiner’s theosophical journal, Luzifer-Gnosis, and its occultist-cum-esoteric teachings, one useful tenet to keep in mind is the notion of an “internal truth.” This concept is also something that Kandinsky expressed in his manifesto, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), which proffers a teaching that, broadly speaking, Theosophy affirms. The idea is that spiritual practitioners—a category which includes the artist—ought confer solely internal truths, and in doing so renounce considerations of “external form.” Thus, music was the medium par excellence for Kandinsky, as in continuity with Theosophy’s critique of materialism, Kandinsky found in music an internal truth distinct from its materiality—neither music theory, nor the weight of a wood violin, nor the scientific study of reverberations and vibrations could capture this logic, and hence the internal truth to art lay outside of its material. Specifically, this materialism is that which contemporary philosophers might call physicalism, a philosophical position which, broadly speaking, stakes that some future fundamental physics will be ultimately able to provide us with the final, comprehensive story of causation, consciousness, emotion, and all else which makes up our world and all other worlds.

Yellow Painting, 1938

It is here helpful to recall Kandinsky’s widespread interest in lyricism. For in works like Yellow Painting (1938) and Moderation (1940) we see internal truths run rampant. In Yellow Painting, the De Stijl-esque box pattern of black, white, purple, yellow, green and orange comprises strips that are reminiscent of legs; yet these legs do not bolster a human figure, but a boxy shape, disparate from the realm of man. In Moderation, a number of purple, coral, and cerulean-azure figures that appear to be instruments (perhaps even string instruments) are set into a haphazard dance, and more unfamiliar figures lay below. The following remark by philosopher of art Susan Langer, one of the great thinkers to dovetail both art and mind, is particularly prescient:

There are, in the main, two methods of “ translating” works of art into another medium: one is to ply the materials of the second art while enjoying the piece to be translated—painting without preconceived plan while listening to music, dancing under the same conditions, or improvising music while watching a dance, etc. The “translations” made by this method of personal exposure are usually amorphous products, because the structural virtues of the piece used as a stimulus object are not preserved in the emotional response that records itself directly in the expressive reaction. What the reaction expresses is not the nature of the presented piece but of the mood it induces, which at that point is unformulated, so there is no structure to reflect—let alone rendering that of the original work. The other method is the one adopted by Dr. Pratt in regard to poetry and by several people similarly in regard to music: namely, to find elements in the given work which may be represented by comparable elements of another sensory order. That means, of course, that a parallelism of elements must either be found to exist, or must be conventionally established [….] they serve to abstract one structural factor—the syllabic pattern […] showing the verbal skeleton, […] no pretense of being anything but a projection of the word pattern of the sonnets [….] But most of the translators are more ambitious; their hope is to reproduce the work itself in another medium. This hope has never been realized, even in serious efforts to take many structural elements into consideration, as for instance Kandinsky’s proposals for a graphic translation of musical works in terms of dots to express rhythmic groupings, lines for melodic direction, their varying thicknesses for differences of timbre, their sharpness or “brilliance” for degrees of loudness.

What this extended passage brings to bear is that Kandinsky’s translation manual is one whose engine is inertia—that is, when it comes to works like Extended, any representationalism that a viewer may find is identifiable because of how the work prods itself along via grouping. A lone triangular tower may recollect a pyramid or even a skyscraper, but not by itself a cityscape.

Houses in Munich, 1908

For this, we need concentric circles spliced together by strips of multi-colored patchwork. Such is the case, despite no such patchwork populates our familiar metropolises. But what this exhibition at the Guggenheim makes abundantly clear is that Kandinsky did began with cityscapes, but began seeking out an internal logic to them throughout his career. For the palettes of Houses in Munich (1908) and Murnau – Houses in the Obermarkt (1908), two rather representational works that clearly pick our city squares, are not altogether disparate from Extended, Yellow Painting, and Moderation. What is distinct in the later paintings is an interest in abstracting from the specifics of visual phenomena, plucking our familiar forms and discarding them, designating them as “external.” What then remains is a riverbed of color schemas that are grouped together. Genealogically set, we see that Kandinsky’s “internal logic” is one of separating content from form, and letting content find a new form internal and separate from our familiar, everyday modes of perceiving. Regardless of whether Kandinsky ever was successful in this pursuit—and, clearly, those like Langer think he was not (I, for one, think Kandinsky was more successful than Langer lets on)—that these works fascinate and can even haunt us to this day indicates that the logic that Kandinsky prodded forth is one that we can identify with, even if we do not know why.

–Ekin Erkan

A true champion in the Arts Community in Cincinnati and beyond, Daniel Brown, passed away August 10th, 2021. Daniel was a friend and mentor to all. As the Board President of Aeqai, I had the honor of working with Daniel and built a friendship that lasted over a decade. Daniel Brown was an innovative, independent art advisor, widely published art critic, and freelance curator. He had a Bachelor of Arts from Middlebury College, a Master of Arts from the University of Michigan, and completed postgraduate work at Princeton University. He maintained a successful career in the creative arts field for more than four decades. Throughout his career, he garnered leadership skills in a variety of roles from being the director of cultural events and serving as a special assistant to the President at the University of Cincinnati to serving as the vice president, corporate secretary, and secretary/treasurer of Brockton Shoe Trimmings, Inc. which is a multi-generational family business. He served on 11 boards of trustees. He has been a lecturer at the University of Cincinnati, teaching several full-time classes, and guest lectured regularly at the Art Academy of Cincinnati for 20 years.

Mr. Brown has utilized his passion and creative prowess to earn many curatorial positions with commercial galleries and non-profit arts institutions in Columbus, Cincinnati, and Kansas City, Missouri, including the inner-city based Arts Consortium, the Children’s Wellness Center, the Christ Hospital, Maple Knoll Retirement Community, Katz and Dawgs Gallery in Columbus, and the Women’s Exchange in Kansas City, among many others. He built private and corporate art collections for over 10 years all over America as an independent art advisor. He has written dozens of catalogues and essays for museums, commercial galleries, and individual artists. His own collection of contemporary art has traveled widely. His criticism and essays have been published in mainstream newspapers and specialized art magazines in Cincinnati and other parts of the Midwest since 1976. He also served as an art critic for the local affiliate television stations, CBS and ABC, from 1986 through 1989, and as editor-in-chief of Antenna Arts Magazine and AEQAI, which is an international online journal of the visual arts since 2009. Daniel has been a member of the International Society of Arts Critics in Paris and New York.

Daniel, your impact on the Arts World has been vast, and your presence will be missed.

Sincerely,

Cedric Michael Cox

President of Cincinnati’s International Arts Journal, Aeqai

READ ALL ABOUT THE ART!
Aeqai Reviews Ceramic Exhibition At The Cincinati Art Museum

Two Of A Kind: Future Retrieval’s “Close Parallel” at the Cincinnati Art Museum
March 27th, 2021 | Published in *, March 2021

In mid-March, the 2021 National Council on Education of the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) annual conference was to be held in Cincinnati. Due to the pandemic, this highly anticipated event was changed to a virtual conference. However, in preparation for the conference, many exhibitions of ceramics were planned well in advance. The Cincinnati Art Museum, the Weston Gallery, Manifest, and the galleries at Northern Kentucky University, just to name a few, are currently showing impressive ceramic exhibitions, providing an opportunity for viewers to witness a survey of some of the best work in ceramics by outstanding artists from our region and beyond.

Entrance to “Close Parallel” exhibition. Photograph courtesy of Rob Deslongchamps, Cincinnati Art Museum.

For this occasion, the Cincinnati Art Museum has mounted “Future Retrieval: Close Parallel” by artist duo Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis, known as the collaborative Future Retrieval. Until recently the pair lived and worked in Cincinnati but relocated to Arizona just last year. Future Retrieval is known for mining museum and industrial archives to create installations that explore the technological and conceptual evolution of materials, forms and craft processes. For this exhibition, the pair selected pieces from CAM’s decorative arts and design department as inspiration for new works.

Traditionally the decorative arts are concerned with the aesthetics of functional objects such as furniture, vessels, and textiles, which are often designed to be reproduced. “Close Parallel” initiates a bold and daring conversation about perceptions of form and function through domestic vignettes that feature unusual juxtapositions and mutating motifs. As in literature, where a parallel grammatical structure is used to present the notion of antithesis, (i.e. “to err is human, to forgive, divine”), for this show, a visual parallel, an apparent sameness or similarity in objects such as a copy, replica, or reproduction, is a device employed to underscore differences between historic and contemporary works, urging comparison and contrast of the forms as well the contexts of their making.

Vase, circa 1830, Marc Schoelcher Manufactory (1794–1834), France (Paris), porcelain, Cincinnati Art Museum; Bequest of Reuben R. Springer, 1884.428. Photograph courtesy of Cincinnati Art Museum.



Tureen with Lid, 1745–1747, Meissen Porcelain Manufactory (est. 1710), Gottlob Birckner (circa 1712–1771), decorator, German (Dresden), porcelain, Cincinnati Art Museum; Centennial Gift of the Cincinnati Institute of Fine Arts from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Joseph, 1981.80. Photograph courtesy of Cincinnati Art Museum.



The Bagpiper from The Monkey Band (Affenkapelle) post 1850, Meissen Porcelain Manufactory (est. 1710) after Johann Joachim Kandler (1706-1775), modeler, and Peter Reinicke (1715-1768), modeler, Germany, porcelain with enamels, glaze and gilding, Cincinnati Art Museum, Gift of Rev. Alfred Duane Pell, 1908.60. Photograph by Susan Byrnes.

I highly recommend viewers first see the companion show, “For Now or Future Retrieval” that sets the stage for “Close Parallel”. In this display are historic works from the CAM collection that particularly excited the artists and preface some details in their new creations. Each piece is accompanied by a brief label text with the artists’ thoughts and observations about the piece, the tone of which conveys their delight and fascination as well as their material sensibilities. Viewers will see, among several other things, a Neoclassical French vase, three soup tureens, and a tiny monkey figurine. The vase is one of a pair in the museum collection created circa 1830 by the Marc Schoelcher Manufactory in France. The tureens occupy their own case, with one centrally located on a riser, “Tureen with Lid, 1745–1747, Meissen Porcelain Manufactory”, flanked by two others of different manufacture positioned below it. In the label, the artists comment on the superior quality of the Meissen tureen, whereas the other two, although charming in their folkiness, “miss the mark”. The monkey figurine is “The Bagpiper from the Meissen Monkey Band, post-1850,” part of a series of monkey figures dressed as humans playing instruments that became popular table decorations. Each of these objects reappear transformed in the Future Retrieval exhibit in ways that illuminate significant themes in the show.

Installation view of Negotiating Space, 2020, with Reproduction Quality, 2020, Future Retrieval (est. 2008), United States (Cincinnati). Photograph courtesy of Rob Deslongchamps, Cincinnati Art Museum.



Navy Poppy from Negotiating Space, 2020, Future Retrieval (est. 2008), United States (Cincinnati), aluminum and porcelain, © Future Retrieval.

Upon entering the first of two rooms that contain the “Close Parallel” exhibit, the partner of the Schoelcher Neoclassical French Vase appears as part of the installation “Negotiating Space”. In the piece, an open-concept Art Deco inspired shelving unit displays the Neoclassical vase plus a constellation of Future Retrieval’s objects, including three porcelain vases and five digitally cut aluminum silhouettes of floral arrangements. The flat floral forms resemble outlines of the delicate linear 2-D designs on the surface of the Future Retrieval vases. This assemblage make a visual game of contrasting positive and negative space, along with volumetric dimensionality versus flatness. The Neoclassical vase is completely gilded except for a realistic painting of a pastoral scene on its sculptural form, made using painterly techniques of the period. The landscape scene presented in this way is a visual paradox in that it creates an illusion of depth on the surface of an object that has actual dimension.

Reproduction Quality, 2020, Future Retrieval (est. 2008), United States (Cincinnati), hand cut paper, © Future Retrieval.

An adjacent wall mounted piece, “Reproduction Quality”, flattens the Neoclassical vase completely. Composed of hand-cut paper, colored layers approximate a sense of volume and depth in images of three similarly styled vases, one of which is decorated with a landscape image like its 3-D counterpart. The work references how the image of the vase would have been reproduced in historical printed paper catalogues. Such catalogues would have made the exclusive objects available for broader visual consumption, if not actual acquisition. Future Retrieval’s labor-intensive renderings create a counterpoint to the mechanized technology of print as revolutionary mode of reproduction, instead reverting to the specialized work of the hand. The piece’s title also alludes to other junctures of analogue and digital reproduction technologies in play throughout the exhibition.

High Rise Farrago, 2020, Future Retrieval (est. 2008), United States (Cincinnati). Photograph courtesy of Rob Deslongchamps, Cincinnati Art Museum.



Disk with Tureen from High Rise Farrago, 2020, Future Retrieval (est. 2008), United States (Cincinnati), porcelain and aluminum, © Future Retrieval.

In the installation “High Rise Farrago”, a large gold painted disk mounted on the wall presides over a visually disparate assemblage of two austere black Art Deco-inspired straight-backed chairs, and a wool s**g rug with images of colored vases, all made by Future Retrieval, and an elaborately ornate marble and gilded French eighteenth-century “Console Table” from the art museum archives. The tureen that sits on the table is a familiar form; it’s an intentionally inexact replica of the Meissen “Tureen with Lid, 1745–1747” from the companion exhibit. The thick, honey-colored glaze that coats it is a decidedly more fluid, organic surface design than the gilt and fine painting on the surface of its predecessor. Further, its scale is larger, the handles have been replaced with goat skulls, and its decorative textures are soft and muted.

Although its final form is composed of slip cast porcelain like the historic tureen, this piece was made by a process of photogrammetry, whereby photographic scans of the Meissen tureen were stitched together to create a digital file for output to a 3-D printer. From the 3-D printed tureen, a plaster mold was made so that yet another version of the tureen could be cast in porcelain slip. Because the initial scans were low-quality, the digital flaws became exaggerated in the 3-D version, resulting in a lack of definition in the sculptural details of the final tureen. In this way the artists exploit and elevate unexpected or otherwise undesirable results produced by the tools as they explore their creative potentials.

This tureen is important in the context of the others; its manner of production reflects a paradigm shift in the world of reproduction. Considerations of the perceived quality of each tureen provide insight into what we value in these objects and why, in terms of culture, craft, taste, economics, and function. Future Retrieval’s tureen exists in a continuum of technology that includes porcelain, a more than 2000 year old material, and digital photogrammetry and

3-D printing, both of which have revolutionized contemporary manufacturing.

Us, 2020, Future Retrieval (est. 2008), United States (Cincinnati), maple and aluminum leaf, © Future Retrieval, and Mirror, circa 1927, Paul Theodore Frankl (1886–1958), United States, wood, aluminum leaf and mirrored glass, Cincinnati Art Museum; Gift of the Estate of Mrs. James M. Hutton II, 1969.411. Photograph courtesy of Rob Deslongchamps, Cincinnati Art Museum.

Another new digital tool for reproduction is used to create “Us”. In the piece, a large rhesus monkey made of computer numerical controlled (CNC) milled wood covered in aluminum leaf, sits opposite its reflection in a large, round Art Deco mirror from the CAM collection, also made of wood covered with aluminum leaf. Hovering over its head is a brilliant white neon halo. With this work, the small anthropomorphized Meissen Bagpiper Monkey figure has evolved from amusing figurine to sculpture. The choice to make a rhesus monkey is no accident. The species is a distant ancestor to humans. They are known to be highly intelligent, self-aware and can recognize their own image in a mirror. They are bred and used for scientific experimentation, and are also the first primate to be cloned, making reference to yet another technology of reproduction, this time biological. In “Us”, while the mirror image of the monkey creates a visual parallel, the title alludes to a familial parallel, a kinship with the viewer. That allusion establishes a space for contemplation of human evolution in tandem with that of craft and art forms. We are seeing eons by looking at an object that could only be made through the technological advances of the present.

This show is at times visually jarring, uncomfortable, bulky, weirdly lit, and absurdly mismatched. And that is why it’s so good. In museums we are often accustomed to seeing things presented in a harmonious, standardized way so that we might cease to really look at them. In “Close Parallel” the lumps, bumps, and awkward pairings are so unexpected as to be almost shocking, and very humorous. The effect is that our sense of the unfamiliar is restored and we are able to observe with fresh eyes. I have only followed the trajectory of three parallel objects that populate this exhibition; there are more to be discovered. Not only is there much to explore here, the work of Future Retrieval shows that there is much to explore in all the functional forms we might ordinarily look past or take for granted. How many ways can you see a vase? When is a tureen revolutionary? What is the future of a monkey?

–Susan Byrnes

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