The Weston Gallery admission box is just where it's supposed to be. It sits near the Seventh Street entrance to the Aronoff Center for the Arts, tucked alongside the staircase to the Weston's basement galleries.
The plastic box displays little money on a recent Friday afternoon. Still, there's magic to be discovered with every "solid" donation. Drop a quarter. Maybe a nickel is enough.
You'll immediately experience the comical spirit behind curator Matt Distel's Weston exhibition, Stacked, the first show in the gallery's impressive 2000-2001 season. The coin hits a metal plate, which triggers a switch. The switch sends a signal across a cable, which triggers an industrial thud from a metal sculpture installation by Cincinnati artist Tony Leunsman, rigged high above the Seventh Street doors.
From the gallery floor, it's hard to fully appreciate the beauty of Leunsman's sculpture, titled "admission box." His installation is one you experience with your ears as much as your eyes. Basically, that's part of the fun behind Stacked itself.
It's a keen sense of humor that unites all the Stacked artists and their artwork. For a downtown arts center building a reputation for banal programming and unwelcoming attitude, Stacked blows a gust of much-needed humor through the Aronoff Center. Actually, when you think about the center's lackluster state right now, it's hard to imagine what the place would be like without the Weston to boost its artistic credentials.
Stacked is curated by Distel, co-founder of the former Camp Washington exhibition space DiLeia Contemporary as well as the Cultural Machine Complex, the ongoing programming arm of DiLeia. Fans of contemporary art are already familiar with his handiwork. DiLeia, in its time, was one of the more imaginative of Cincinnati's exhibition spaces. Basically, the gallery was proof that young Cincinnati artists could reach appreciative audiences with their work.
Dileia came to an end with a July 4, 1999, closing awards ceremony. A postcard exclaiming "I Told You It Wouldn't Work" announced the closing event. The news stung. Especially since none of Cincinnati's major arts institutions has since supported local avant-garde artists with equal enthusiasm.
That is, until the Weston offered Distel his first opportunity to curate an exhibition in the downtown spotlight. He took the the opportunity and ran with it.
Stacked, on display through Nov. 11, is an impressive gathering of local and regional artists as well as national artists with local ties. The result of Distel's handiwork is an exhibition that thrives on imagination.
There are some recognized names in the show: Charles Woodman's video installation "Under the Bridge" forms a stark pyramid of modern video monitors displaying a constant blur of black-and-white images. The result is strangely soothing.
At the bottom of the gallery steps, Sarah Colby has created a pile of hand-made potholders along a slim, metal pole. They're fashioned from a loom Colby used as a child. The goal is for the tower of potholders to eventually reach her own height, 5-foot-4, which is what she's titled the work.
In the gallery's preparation space, Mark Fox and Andrea Sparks have collaborated with an impressive installation piece called "Carousel Spaces." The work includes film, articles of dry-cleaning and a preserved moth. Inside the darkened room, beneath the whirl of a large platter of film, the impact is appropriately eerie.
Walk away from Stacked, and you'll soon be surrounded by the Aronoff Center's own sense of mediocrity. Of course, the ongoing irony is that the Weston was a last-minute addition to the center project yet is currently the most exciting space in the building.
After seeing an exhibition like Stacked, you want to spend more time speaking about the art and the artists involved. You want to solely talk about the art, but it's impossible not to see the Weston Gallery as something more.
The Weston never set out to be the savior of the Aronoff Center. Exhibits like Stacked just make it look that way.
