An Ideal for Living

The Cincinnati Arts Association's Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts announces An Ideal for Living: Installations by Richard Wearn, a suite of thought-provoking installations that examine the lived experience of memory through the common global experience of contemporary life. 

In a relatively short period of time prior to his departure in 2004, Richard Wearn impacted the Cincinnati arts community with his conceptually sophisticated and meticulously crafted installations at the former Linda Schwartz Gallery on West Fourth Street. Adopting the idiom of minimal art, Wearn's work reflects upon the status and social place of art. Working within an array of unconventional materials including inflated and refrigerated sculptures, he aims to examine and restructure the visual forces and behavioral norms associated with the sculptural forms he creates.

For his return engagement to Cincinnati, Wearn will present An Ideal for Living, a new series of installations on both levels of the Weston Art Gallery that incorporates autobiographical and art historical references within large-scale photographs, architectural house models, an index of still images taken from popular films, and a refrigerated sculpture. The installation will be comprised of the following four components: Sunsets, seven large-scale color photographs of sunsets shot from the identical vantage point over a period of seven consecutive days at the precise moment of the official published time of the sunset and the end of daylight hours; The Ideal Memory, three architectural scale models representing homes designed by three New Zealand architects who interpreted and practiced certain forms of modernist architecture by way of the printed image; The Ideal Copy, an index of still images taken directly from films that have in some way impacted the artist, presented as a continuous strip across the east gallery to suggest a loose narrative; and Spiral Jetty ,a remaking of the iconic Robert Smithson earthwork, using photographic documentation as the source to render a small scale version consisting of a refrigeration system and a spiral of copper tubing that freezes with a surface of white frost.

Richard Wearn was born in Christchurch, New Zealand where he earned a bachelor of fine arts at the Elam School of Fine Art at the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 1993. In 1994, he traveled to the United States to attend the University of Southern California where he earned a master of fine arts in 1996. From 1999-2000, he served as a visiting professor of sculpture at Ohio University in Athens, OH. In 2000, he accepted a position as an adjunct assistant professor in the School of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. In 2001, he received an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship and later participated in a residency sponsored by the Ohio Arts Council at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA in 2003. Wearn currently serves as assistant professor of art and area head in sculpture at California State University in Los Angeles, CA.
 

Download:

Artist's Statement - Jetty  

Artist's Statement - Film Stills

Artist's Statement - Houses

Artist's Statement - Sunsets 
 

Gallery Talk Series: Sat., July 1, 2 p.m.

Families Create! Education Workshop: Sat., July 8, 10 a.m. - noon