Blair Thurman‘s first solo exhibition opened last week at Galerie Frank Elbaz on rue St.-Claude in Paris’s Marais neighborhood. The show, entitled Krumms Along the Mohawk is named after an ice-cream flavor at Thurman’s local gas station in New York. The exhibition is in concept a mini-survey of Thurman’s work over the past decade and a half – although most of the pieces are new, completed in 2008.

Press releases can be daunting and artist statements can often be even more conceptual than artist’s work. However, Thurman’s statement in the press release trumps any words that could be said by the gallery about the show, and worth noting, simply asserts that, “It’s been said of some of my favorite painters that they are always repeating the same painting. Sam Grosse told me painters always do the same show throughout their career – which I took as a compliment. Maybe it is something about painting. The point of Krumms Along the Mohawk is to show the trail of my work has changed and hasn’t changed over 15 years.” The works exhibited, acrylic paintings on unconventionally shaped canvases, often in three-dimensional form, are more architecturally aesthetic than what we tend to expect of paintings. Bringing neon sculptures into the mix continues the sense of dimension and tangibility not often seen in a show of predominantly paintings.

Blair Thurman lives and works in New York. She received her MFA at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has exhibited at Triple V in Dijon, France, Hard Hat in Geneva, Switzerland and Galerie Hubert Bachler in Zurich, Switzerland, among others.

Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, both artists and former research fellows at the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, are integral participants in SymbioticA, an art and science collaborative research laboratory at the University of Western Australia. They founded the Tissue Culture and Art Project in 1996 and have exhibited numerous projects that create opportunities for public reflection on concepts brought to light by interaction with tissue culture.

Their projects have included Victimless Leather, where a cultured living tissue layer was grown on a biodegradable polymer scaffolding in the shape of a tiny seamless coat, Disembodied Cuisine, where tissue taken from a living frog was grown into a steak-like creature and consumed during their exhibition at L’art Biotech in Nantes, France, and DIY De-victimizer Kit Mark One, which gave the layperson the tools to experiment with the culturing of dead animals for the relief of their own guilt brought about by killing.

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In an exhibition titled Objects of Wonder, the Columbus Museum of Art has teamed up with Ohio State University to present an assortment of unusual cultural artifacts from the University’s archives. Viewing objects from the collections of a university that opened its doors in 1870s may sound mundane, but the curiosities that Ohio State has acquired and horded for over a century are surprisingly dynamic and mind-bending. In the above video, archivist Tamar Chute shows off a 1980s egg catapult that was used to demonstrate the importance of seat belts. The exhibition also includes a pump organ that was taken aboard the Nautilus submarine‘s 1931 Arctic Expedition, the fossil collection of amateur paleontologist Robert Guenther, unpublished photographs of Marilyn Monroe reading, and a taxidermied Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. And this is just a glimpse of the exhibition’s span.

All together, the objects give a nuanced portrait of cultural niches and under-explored moments in history. Displayed in the context of an art museum, these objects act as sculptural commentaries, fragmented yet expansive portrait of the way people live and the ideas or phenomenons that fascinate them.

In an effort to expand the scope of the exhibition, the museum is soliciting participation from anyone who has a noteworthy collection of their own strange objects. Images can be sent to education@cmaohio.org. Objects of Wonder opened September 29th and will continue through January 11th.

Kruisdijk and Kuilboer are two artists from the Netherlands who began their artistic collaboration in 2007. In their independent practices, Kruisdijk works with systems of visual language and Kuilboer’s interest lies in concepts on the perception of time. Kuilboer often uses images and objects from her childhood and redefines their meaning, such as the blanket, which holds contradictory connotations of oppression and comfort. Together, they try to investigate what it means to be an artist today, which often includes traveling with a lot of stuff to exhibit. Seen above is a life-size donkey named Atlas who carries their books, work, and materials needed for that particular exhibition. Other previous work includes Graduation from the Blackhole, the artists’ “graduation” from their post art academy depression, commenting on the artistic isolation felt when one is not living in a large metropolis.

Kruisdijk and Kuilboer have an upcoming exhibition at De Creatieve Fabriek in Hengelo, Netherlands opening on October 17th and they are currently represented by Actionfields Temporary Art Gallery in Belgium.

Tim Roda’s exhibition, Family Album, opened on October 2nd, 2008 at the fresh San Francisco gallery, Baer Ridgway Exhibitions. Roda and his family could be called a collaborative, since the creative process involves the whole family’s participation. Roda creates intricate sets (often on-the-spot) including–just to name a few–found objects, costumes and carpentry materials. Roda then invites his family into his newly fashioned space where the scenes are created–which he documents closely with a 35mm camera. Roda captures out of the ordinary moments that draw influence from his past family life. His photo development process is also unique in that he pays little attention to the exacting tasks of typical photo development–he burns, dodges, and cuts down at his own accord evoking a blurry, pixilated, and “unfinished” feel to his photographs.

Educated in ceramics, Roda earned his MFA from the University of Washington and his BFA from Pennsylvania State University. Roda has exhibited widely throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. He and his family are currently living and working in Italy on a Fulbright scholarship. DailyServing’s Arden Sherman, had a chance to speak with him about his current exhibition, his working process, and what’s next to come.

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Opening this Friday, October 17th, at Thierry Goldberg Projects on Rivington St., on the lower east side of New York, is the first solo exhibition of paintings by Logan Grider. The exhibition will include Grider’s latest work – paintings depicting colorful blocks and abstract shapes of the bold-colored and moody-shadowed variety. Grider’s oeuvre conjures up Cubist kings like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, within a history-obsessed and history-rejecting, postmodern era. In Grider’s pieces, everyday objects in abstract form sit stacked atop one another in front of vague, textured backdrops.

Grider was mentioned along with Rosson Crow and Dash Snow in an article by Kelly Crow of the Wall Street Journal in 2006, about the rise of young artists to galleries and collections of notoriety. He has exhibited in group shows at Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York, Jack Tilton Gallery in New York, Baumgartner Gallery in New York and Allston Skirt Gallery in Boston.

Logan Grider was born in Salem, Oregon and currently lives and works in Connecticut. He holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, having completed programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and The International School of Art, Italy.

Now on view through November 15, 2008 at Thomas Robertello Gallery is STATE OF THE UNION, an exhibition comprised of works by John Delk, Noelle Mason, and Conor McGrady. The featured artists’ work critically mirrors the current status of the United States as an ideological gun-toting machine whose devotion to global domination and hegemony manifests as thinly disguised totalitarianism.

Among the works featured in the exhibition are Noelle Mason’s window installation of Mag-lites spelling the word SILENCE in Braille, and an illuminated stained glass that projects a surveillance image of 9/11/2001 hijackers passing through security at the Portland airport. Another work by Mason consists of 10 stitcheries that depict x-rays and infrared images of undocumented immigrants crossing the US/Mexico border illegally. Mason collected the images from the US Border Patrol and Minutemen websites, and then sent the images to Brazil where they we embroidered by Bilu Alcantara in exchange for the amount it would cost her to illegally immigrate to the United States. John Delk contributes a candy-coated American flag, and a drain installed in the gallery floor spewing George Bush’s past five State of the Union speeches, which he has edited to consist solely of fear-inducing buzzwords and phrases. For his part, Conor McGrady offers up four new vignettes that are de-contextualized portraits depicting roles played by those at various levels within the political power machine.

John Delk is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work has been exhibited nationally in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington. He received an MFA in 2001 from the School of the Art Institute.

Noelle Mason graduated the School of the Art Institute’s MFA program in 2005. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she is a member of the faculty in the University of Houston’s sculpture department.

Conor McGrady has recently exhibited his work in the one-person exhibitions, New Arcadia at M.Y. Art Prospects, New York and Green and Pleasant Land, Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta. In 2002 he was selected to participate in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.