The Art Academy of Cincinnati’s Chidlaw Gallery presents “Reality Show,” Curated by Matthew Morris

August 25 – September 15, 2006

Artist’s Reception: Final Friday, August 25, 2006, 5:30 – 9:00 pm

The first show of the Art Academy of Cincinnati's Chidlaw Gallery will feature six artist representatives from every level of the BFA program. Work themed around subjective reality, altered states and specific perspectives on the world that surrounds the maker will be included. In 2-D, 3-D, and video media, these artists present charged, unexpected, and ironically observed moments in the world we live in.

Laura Alich, Joe Civitello, Jon Flannery, Katie Koga, Jon Perz and Meghann Sommers will present a variety of media. Alich, a sculptor entering her senior year, employs plaster, plastic and other media to create Surreal works such as a ghost piano player with coattails stretching for yards behind him. Civitello is a photographer who uses collage and sculpture to compose environments depicting different levels of intimacy. Flannery, who is entering his second year at the Art Academy, is fascinated with using recurring patterns.

Koga is from Rochester, Minnesota and is entering her junior year. An avid fan of foreign cuisine and cinema, Koga creates visual rooms and interior spaces utilizing two-dimensional media in order to express the complex relationships that exist between her thoughts of external reality and the internal realm. In addition to gouache and graphite paintings, Koga will exhibit “Playing Midwest Landscape,” a video depicting the Upper Midwestern rural landscape through the lens of her romanticized memory of this fragile “reality.” Perz is a senior photography major whose current body of work consists of slanted takes on the traditional portrait. He will show disconcerting, yet alluring, faces that stare flatly at the viewer with eyes in startling contrast to their environments. These portraits expound upon Perz’ previous work on icons and symbols. Sommers will exhibit an installation of two-dimensional works that relate to gathering and filtering images and objects from bygone eras and translating their original purpose of didacticism and clarity into contradicting, Surrealist representations.

About the Curator:

Matthew Morris is a senior at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and has been heavily involved with the Academy's various gallery spaces for the past three years. He makes it a point to visit other studios during breaks from making paintings, videos and installations. This curatorial project has allowed Morris to organize artwork that makes up the "art world" within the Academy's student body and has given students with less exposure an opportunity to display their profound concepts and strong potential. Of late, Matt has been researching the development of different cultures’ relationship to loss and has welcomed the chance to work in a more societal fashion with a group of artists.