Monumental / Miniature

The Cincinnati Arts Association's Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts debuts its 2003-04 season with the premier of three new exhibitions: Prepositional, a site-specific installation by Cincinnati sculptor Voss Finn that dynamically engages the vertical expanse of the gallery's street-level exhibition space; Monumental/Miniature, a new series of exquisitely-executed oil paintings merging historical and contemporary painting approaches with extreme variations in scale by renowned Cincinnati painter Cole Carothers; and True Lies, a masterful display of illusion and technical virtuosity by Ron Isaacs of Richmond, Ky.

Cole Carothers, a renowned Cincinnati painter with superlative and inventive technical skills, imaginatively constructs paintings that strive to connect the past and the present. Inspired by travels throughout Europe, India and Mexico and his study of Renaissance masters, Carothers has for nearly thirty years produced elegant and enigmatic paintings on wood panels that evoke the flux of time and skillfully challenge viewers' perception of reality and illusion.

Incorporating landscape, still life, and interior settings, he introduces visual tension into his work through the distortion of perspective, insertion of window vistas, the combination of multiple painted wood panels to form a single image (effectively "breaking" the picture plane), and the occasional inclusion of actual objects to jar their adjoining illusionist representations.

Monumental/Miniature offers another avenue of illusion and reality for Carothers to explore as he contrasts extreme variations in scale. By including paintings of monumental scale with miniature works in the same exhibition, he further distorts the viewer's perception, and in a larger sense exposes truths about the shifting realities of contemporary life.

Cole Carothers received a bachelor of arts from Colorado College in 1971 and a master of fine arts from American University in Washington D.C. in 1978. His paintings have been exhibited extensively in local, regional and national venues and are included in numerous private and public collections, including: Cincinnati Art Museum, University of Kentucky Art Museum, Cincinnati Bell and Fidelity Investments. He has been the recipient of individual artist grants from the Ohio Arts Council in 1985 and 1988 and SummerFair, Inc. in 1983 and 1987. In addition, he received an Arts Midwest/ NEA Regional Fellowship in 1986. Since 1998 he has served as program director at Baker Hunt Foundation in Covington, Ky.

also visit: www.colecarothers.com