Jonathan Kamholtz reviews Building Sight(s), an exhibition of paintings by Cole Carothers, at the 5th Street Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio, on view through December 8, 2012.

Kamholtz writes: " 'Ingmar' is a painting of the interior of a Michigan vacation cottage with a white wicker chair in the foreground, a bed in the middle ground (it seems made but the pillow seems mussed), and a door in the background opening onto further mysteries of interior space and domestic life. Where Carothers’s earlier work reminded us that painters are workers who have the responsibility of taming some of the mess they leave behind them, 'Ingmar' flirts with a sense of leisure time and privilege, a little like William Merritt Chase might. The light comes from a rich combination of indoor and outdoor illumination, part warm and part cool, and the room is dappled with patches of sun. The wicker chair is turned away from the window, through which we cannot see. Though many of Carothers’s earlier works used the window to suggest that we can be both outdoors and indoors at the same time, “Ingmar” suggests that we can only be one or the other, though light doesn’t have the same limitation."