Working Groups

The Cincinnati Arts Association’s Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts announces three new exhibitions to welcome the New Year: Renovated Flightless Devices, a new series of inventive reconstructed wood sculptures by Travis Townsend that subverts military “toys”; Please Tie Me Down, an imaginative suite of sculptures by Tracy Featherstone that examines personal habitats; and Working Groups, a new series of heavily worked paintings by Chuck Webster that transforms simple objects into richly saturated forms.

Chuck Webster’s ( Binghamton, NY) drawings and paintings follow a daily journey of reaction and experimentation. Produced in a continuous stream, Webster’s small abstracted works on paper are the result of a spontaneous yet laborious reworking process where one piece informs the next. On larger panels with multiple layers of oil paint, Webster polishes his brightly inflected surfaces to a glass-like brilliance. In Working Groups, Webster will draw upon this imaginative inventory to create an installation in the east gallery culled from this ongoing sequence of regeneration and metamorphosis. 

Chuck Webster earned a bachelor of arts from Oberlin College ( Oberlin, OH) in 1992. From 1993-95 he participated in the summer study program at Chautauqua School of Art ( Chautauqua, NY). In 1996 he earned a master of fine arts from American University ( Washington, D.C.). His work has been featured in solo exhibitions presented at ZieherSmith Gallery ( New York, NY) in 2004, 2005 and 2006. He has participated in group exhibitions at P.S. 1 Contemporary ( New York, NY) in 2005; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art ( Winston-Salem, NC) in 2004; H & M Gallery ( New York, NY) in 2003; The Contemporary Artist Center ( North Adams, MA) in 2002; and Cordell Taylor Fine Arts ( Salt Lake City, UT) in 2001. He has participated in artist residencies at the Jentel Artist Residency (Banner, NY) in 2005 and The Contemporary Artist Center ( North Adams, MA) in 2002. In 2000, he was the recipient of a Milton and Sally Michel Avery Visual Arts Fellowship. Webster currently lives in New York City where he is one of fourteen artists participating in an artist residency at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program.

Gallery Talk Series: Sat., Jan. 20, 2 p.m.