from the editor
Much has been written about our dwindling attention spans in the face of the digital deluge. Our brains are apparently in a permanent state of jet lag—caffeine addled and unable to focus for more than thirty-seconds at a time. Pop music’s catchy hooks, the internet smorgasbord, a landslide of TV news pundits, politics, and reality television amount to a jittery information glut of monumental proportions. When combined with the pressure to maintain a constant state of ‘productivity’ is it any wonder we feel a constant and steady tug at every one of our synapses? There’s a tendency to romanticize our analogue past—the smell of a book, the feel of a newspaper, the power of a muscle car, the warm crackle of a vinyl L.P.—and the slower pace it seems to offer. While nostalgia may indeed be king (see Clint Eastwood’s bit of propaganda that debuted during last Sundays Super Bowl) it doesn’t do us any good to wax-nostalgic about our material past. Arguments on both sides of the divide are often overblown anyway. However, our ability to devote time to looking at art is an important consideration that’s directly effected by the widespread profusion of media and the distraction that results.
All art requires some measure of time to produce and see. How does art compete for our attention? Should art more directly adopt pop music’s strategies, hooking us in the first ten-seconds and then, unlike pop music, lead us somewhere more rich and complex? Or, perhaps risking a smaller audience, should art maintain autonomy from popular forms of media and distribution, embracing the role of counter-point provocateur? While there’s certainly no hard and fast answers or strategy, the fact remains that it’s difficult for artists to get time out of a viewer. There’s a minority of art-interested viewers who’ll sit and watch every video in an exhibition, or spend an hour contemplating a group of paintings. This doesn’t strike me as anything new, nor does it diminish the importance, communicative ability, and power of an art object. When it comes to art, unlike where popular media and culture is concerned, quantity isn’t the gold standard of quality.
There’s the hook. Rather than a question of diminishing attention and competition with other media, perhaps it's simply a matter of reevaluating the characteristics, our expectations, and the terms by which we gauge our experiences of art objects. Art offers a distinct experience that we can’t apply the same rubric to every time (if we could even arrive at a definition of what it was); and why attempts to do so, as in let's say Bravo’s Work of Art, are bound to fail. It’s all too easy to generalize and make assumptions about the aforementioned items, when in reality each art viewing experience demands something different from us. This is one of arts real strengths—it doesn’t reproduce the same sugary-sweet experience over and over ad nauseam, and instead epitomizes variation, potential, and as a result, inclusivity. These attributes move us beyond the typical questions of materiality, measures of quality and time bound up with our ingestion of popular culture and into something more specific to visual art. If our attention spans have indeed hit the skids, amidst the avalanche of contemporary stimulants, than seen in this light (and with these terms) than art needn't worry very much. It’s place is solid and it’s position nimble.
...might be good has received my attention for ten issues now, each with its own set of challenges and rewards. #183 is no different. Much of this letter's topic was inspired by a brief but fruitful conversation with UK-based artist Andrew Kerton, whose video for the Project Space, based on an obsolete model of perception, raises engaging questions about how our brains grapple with objects, time and thought. Questions of objecthood, curatorial reductionism and tangentially, the time we spend with objects, pervades writer and curator Rachel Cook’s considerate examination of Sherrie Levine’s recent exhibition, Mayhem, at The Whitney Museum of American Art. Personal history and identity is a thread running through Houston-based artist Michael Bise’s work currently on view at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts. U.T. Arlington Assistant Professor Benjamin Lima addresses these issues and more in his thoughtful review of Bise’s exhibition. From San Antonio, writer Wendy Atwell thinks through “pharming”—the pharmaceutical industries manipulation of chromosomes—in her review of Jessica Halonen’s exhibition currently on view at David Shelton Gallery. Finally from Austin, writer Kate Green looks at Jill Magid’s Failed States currently on view at AMOA + Arthouse, and finds an artist thoughtfully engaged with laying bare the dehumanizing mechanizations of bureaucracy and politics in a poetic and non-exploitative fashion.
As always we welcome your comments and feedback. If you have a moment, please contact us at askus@fluentcollab.org.
Eric Zimmerman is an artist and Editor of ...might be good.
long read
How Do You “Come After” Levine?
By Rachel Cook
Installation view of SHERRIE LEVINE: MAYHEM (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, November 10, 2011–January 29, 2012). Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins. Courtesy of the artist and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Sherrie Levine’s Mayhem, a monographic installation at The Whitney Museum of American Art, is a feat to “come after.” By “come after” I mean both how Levine herself “pursues the object and images,” through titles of works, After Walker Evans: 1-22, and how critics and art historians have titled publications about Levine, Art History, After Sherrie Levine.1 I am “coming after” Levine through examining Mayhem as a monographic exhibition, a curatorial gesture and a series of staging operations—but with a small detour through a hugely problematic curatorial presentation of Levine. In the 2010 Gwangju Biennial, 10,000 Lives, curator and director Massimiliano Gioni presented what is most likely Levine’s most recognizable work, After Walker Evans: 1-22 alongside Walker Evans’ WPA photographs printed from the Library of Congress. This reductive curatorial approach didn’t do the images justice and colored any viewer’s experience and reading of not only the work itself, but also of Levine’s overall strategies for the rest of her work. Mayhem puts all that reductionism to rest with its concern for objects, images and the spaces they are each carefully organized in.
Mayhem is not constructed as a chronology, but as Levine says a series of “pairs” and “gangs.” Mayhem challenges our understanding (and maybe even wedges itself neatly in-between) of what a historical monographic exhibition and site-specific installation can be. Each room feels like a vessel, or the unfolding of an elusive film. Moreover the sight lines between the various rooms are simply magical. Levine posits a series of paintings entitled, Broad Stripe, as touchstones for the viewer throughout the exhibition. Reminiscent of Hitchcock’s strategy of inserting himself into each of his films, they follow you, haunting your view at every turn.
There are five enclosed rooms in the exhibition—four pockets and one long rectangular room that connects them. The walls have been painted light grey, a reprieve from the stark white cube. In the long room, one of the Whitney’s Breuer windows has been exposed, a device for looking in and out that proves spatially and curatorially effective for the “gang” of La Fortune (After Man Ray), numbered 1 through 4, located directly in front of the window. Sourced from a 1938 Man Ray painting with the same title, La Fourtune… is a series of four exquisite mahogany pool tables with three colored billiard balls placed on them. Their oddly shaped legs resemble a weaving device or some kind of enlarged spinning top, but also appear sensual with their curves. All four tables are placed next to each other, one after the next with just enough space in-between them for viewers to pass. While they are similar to a billiard table they are not such objects as they don’t have the functional capacities and tools that are required to play the game.
On one side of the room you look out of Breuer’s trapezoidal shaped window, and turning in the opposite direction, you are faced with Levine’s After Courbet: 1-18 (2009), which is made out of a repeated postcard of Courbet’s L’Origine Du Monde (1866). The window functions as not only a spatial device that allows you to see out and consider our notions of reality, imagined or representative, but by placing the Courbet opposite it also causes you to think about the origins of our world whether they’re artificially constructed or naturally occurring. Levine draws a direct line between these objects, which points to our understanding of notions of the original and authorship, the architectural and symbolic structure of the museum housing these objects, strategies of repetition, what happens to a two dimensional representation when it gets realized three dimensionally, and how objects contain gender. In the same room are five paintings Red and Grey Check (2000) and one of the Broad Stripe paintings; this cluster of works takes center stage in Mayhem. Furthermore it speaks to Levine’s overall project of shuttling between objects, images and the spaces (be it architectural, conceptual, historical) that surround them.
The left and right rooms—which present you two possible entryways into the exhibition—display Levine’s pairs and gangs of objects beautifully. On one side are Levine’s Crystal and Black Newborn (1993 and 1994), after Brancusi placed on a pair of inverted grand Steinway pianos, an arrangement that comes from a photograph of the interior of a collector’s home where the Brancusi was displayed in the same manner. Thus Levine inverts (black and white, forwards and backwards) and reinserts the arrangement of the Brancusi sculpture in the collector’s home back into the museum, reminding us how art travels in and out of these social and economic contexts.
On the other side is a gang of Crystal Skull(s): 1-12 (2010), which are placed in elegant mahogany display cases. Materially these rooms are linked, and conceptually they contribute to the arch of Levine’s work, but the rooms can also be seen as linked conceptually in human terms of—birth and death, newborn and skull. The Crystal Skull(s), laid out in two rows of six, are morbidly gorgeous objects. They create a single unit, each identical “individuals” placed together in a group. Here is where Levine’s strategy of grappling with repetition and difference as points of contention is something to consider; can a room filled with a series of the same objects actually remind us of our differences?
In both rooms a similar operation occurs. The centerpiece becomes a device to draw the viewer into the room, while the two-dimensional works—Knot paintings, Broad Stripe, Gottsch-Schleisner Orchids: 1-10, Equivalents (After Stieglitz): 1 -18—appear as abstractions or organic shapes in the background. But these two-dimensional works are deceptively complex; anchored to the organic shapes and abstract forms they contain. Take the five Knot paintings for instance, literally a series of puns—made from various pieces of plywood where the “knots” in the wood are covered with metallic or oil paint obscuring the shape of the knot entirely (a practice sometimes used to help the wood from splitting), and the title when spoken out loud sounds like “not painting.” This negating of the object while simultaneously consuming it is what makes Levine’s work so rich and troubling.
If each Knot painting reminds us of the history of painting while throwing into question what constitutes our definition of a painting than Levine’s work skillfully inhabits this space of contradiction, while allowing it to manifest itself within a material form. Just reading the wall label shows that the works are made of the same materials as a typical painting, however they also could appear as a makeshift wall or the side of a shipping create used to transport a painting. By placing the wood panels side by side, the Knot paintings appear as a portion of reconstruction project the way wood panels are placed over shop windows for protection or remodeling. Levine’s layers of meaning and double meanings within titles (Broad Stripe could mean both the adjective wide or a noun female, or both), allows viewers to consider how their own perception is constructed, and how we construct meaning around an object and history.
Levine speaks about wanting to create a “different relationship to identity” and that she is interested “in the tension between the original and (her) work,” as well as being “interested in as many layers of meaning as possible.”2 In Mayhem the installation of each room has a shuttling back and forth effect, between Levine’s own history of works and art history at large. Rather than reducing her operations to a “copying” strategy, consider what a “copy” or “original” actually is. Does a work of art become original because it formally appears to represent something that you have not seen before? If something formally “looks like” something else does that necessarily mean it is a copy? Just for a moment consider literature, film, or theatre and how the text is treated as original, copy, and representation. Next think of the Post-Modern/Structuralist notions of plurality, the idea of de-centering authorities of thought, rubbing up against monolithic binaries, or reactions to the singular formalist approach of Modernism. It is out of this heritage and history of thought that Levine’s work gains traction and comes into clear view.
All of these twist and turns of thought are what make Levine’s decisively simple objects lush and rich conceptual works. This deceptive operation is one that manifests in Mayhem —‘coming after’ two-dimensional object and realizing them in three-dimensions, distilling images we have of a history objects into repeated gestures, reminding us how artists not only borrow or are influenced by culture at large, but by their own practice and lines of inquiry. And yet Mayhem as a curatorial gesture allows you to glide through Levine’s practice in a single motion, each room is carefully constructed as a series of frames and windows. The exhibition re-performs operations that exist in the works themselves, creating difference among the rooms while pointing to a similar line of questioning of the creation of meaning within objects and images. The ability to stand in one corner of the room and gaze into the next to see one of the Broad Stripe paintings along with a set of images or objects perfectly placed within the doorway creates anticipation and desire for engaging with the objects more closely. In Mayhem, a further consideration is how artistic practice’s that poke at the idea of a closed system or narrative can be curatorially realized. The exhibition demonstrates how these practices can be challenged for the viewer in time and space without dismantling the operations embedded in the individual works themselves. Through Mayhem, our understanding of Levine and what a historical monographic exhibition and a solo site-specific installation can be is broadened curatorially, and hopefully historically.
A native of Houston, Texas, Rachel Cook is currently a Master's candidate at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
______________________________________________
1. I am taking this idea from Johanna Burton’s essay in the catalogue from the exhibition, “Sherrie Levine, Beside Herself,” and from Howard Singerman’s new book “Art History, After Sherrie Levine,” (Berkeley: University of California Press) 2012.
2. Constance Lewallen, “Sherrie Levine,” Journal of Contemporary Art 6 (Winter 1993), 81-82.
reviews
Jill Magid
AMOA-Arthouse, Austin
Through March 4
By Kate Green
Jill Magid, Failed States (detail), 2011, 1993 Mercedes 300TE station wagon armored at B4 level, resistant to 9MM thru .44 Magnum gun fire. Collection of Lindsey and Patrick Collins. Photo credit: Erica Nix.
Since at least the 1960s when painting lost its grip on the western art world and conceptual practices gained currency, the field of visual art has opened its borders to those who engage with various disciplines. Jill Magid (born 1973, lives in New York and Amsterdam) is one of the more compelling artists capitalizing upon this flexibility today. Magid is perhaps best known for a project commissioned by and about the Dutch secret service (AIVD), which ultimately censored her results. While the artist’s first US solo museum show (A Reasonable Man In A Box, 2010, Whitney Museum of American Art) left some feeling that the work (a video of a scorpion, redacted text) did not successfully muster the government torture memo upon which it was based, Magid’s new project at Arthouse demonstrates her aptitude for using art to probe conventions of institutional power, literature, theater and more.
Many of the works on view in Failed States—two videos, wall texts, three works on paper, and two sculptural pieces— summon the performative efforts behind them. The project began with Magid’s interest in the case of Fausto Cardenas, whom she witnessed firing shots into the air near the Texas State Capitol in January 2010. In the aftermath, the twenty-four-year-old Cardenas, who never explained his actions, was charged with terrorism and the state used the incident to justify increased security. Like works by Sophie Calle, with whom Magid shares a first-person approach and an interest in language, Failed States effectively dramatizes the artist’s relationship to her subject.
For Magid, Cardenas calls to mind the title character in Goethe’s tragedy Faust, a play that lays bare the potential conflict between knowledge and experience. Using the tenuous connections between Fausto and Faust as a point of departure, Magid has woven bits of both into an installation that at its most satisfying reveals the artist as the dramaturgical glue. For example, one of the more arresting elements in the project is a series of wall texts that function like stage directions—[Shots fired skyward], Exit FAUSTO, Enter MAGID—locating Magid’s role in the elliptical narrative she has generated (Stage Directions series, 2011-2012). Nearby, a slide show of the Texas sky and a handful of spent bullets poetically gesture toward the artist’s experience of the event (Six Shots from the Capitol Steps, 2012). Elsewhere in the gallery is a silkscreened print of a passage from Faust; because Magid has layered several translations on top of one another, traces of a reader’s relationship to the text—underlines, an asterisk, circles—are what become most legible (The Deed, 2011).
Two off-site projects bridge disparate elements in a more straightforward and perhaps less compelling manner. Both are titled Failed States and weave the current project together with the artist’s initial reason for coming to Texas: she was training to embed with troops in Afghanistan. As part of one of the works, Magid has armored her car, which happens to be same kind of Mercedes station wagon often found in the war zone. The fortified vehicle is occasionally being parked in the spot that Cardenas used before he approached the capitol. The other work is a book in which Magid chronicles her experiences and concerns about the case and embedding (excerpts have recently been printed in the Texas Observer). For me, these pieces illuminate rather than complicate Magid’s relationship to the material and issues of institutional power.
More provocative are two absorbing works that bookend the show in the gallery. Playing on a monitor near the gallery’s entrance is The Capitol Shooter: Breaking News (2011), a looped video of local television news coverage of the Cardenas incident and case. In the edited clips, which feature interviews with Magid, the artist comes off as a concerned and curious citizen. Seen in the context of the gallery, she also appears to be performing. This kind of irresolvable tension is evident in a work at the other end of the gallery. Here, a vitrine holds a copy of a letter Magid penned to Cardenas in which she asks if she can record him reading parts of Faust (Letter to Fausto, 2011). Based on the letter, Magid’s motives are difficult to discern: she introduces herself as an artist and a writer, mentions the incident and Cardenas’ situation (he cannot leave the state), offers to pay for the recordings, but never refers to her developing art project. The ambiguous letter, which is signed “your witness,” seems to be a fitting conclusion to Failed States. Through such intimate, performative work, Magid manages to use art to explore systems, circumstances and people without seeming to exploit them.
Kate Green is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin, with a dissertation focusing on Vito Acconci’s performative work from the early 1970s. She has written art criticism for publications such as Artforum.com, ArtPapers and Modern Painters.
Jessica Halonen
David Shelton Gallery, San Antonio
Through February 11
By Wendy Atwell
Jessica Halonen, Target 11, 2012, Gouache and graphite on paper, 15 1/4 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Jessica Halonen’s series of nine paintings at David Shelton Gallery read like elegant, reductive charts, hinting at a vaguely familiar landscape. The paintings, each named Target, are differentiated by numbers in their titles and muted colors, graphite lines and impressive trompe l’oeil details. Two sculptures, made from twigs arranged into spheres, elaborate on the paintings’ subject and colors. The targets evoke the spinning color wheel on a Mac computer, or pairs of chopsticks arrayed in a circle, their tips pointing towards the bull’s eye. Yet the pairing and subtle indentations in, for example, the delicate, ampoule shapes of Target 12 (2012) reveal them to be far more complex and relevant than computer programming or chopsticks. The landscape is the microscopic world of chromosomes—actual maps of life itself—containing DNA, protein and genes.
As the title suggests, Halonen’s Propagating Uncertainty visually responds to “pharming,” the pharmaceutical industry’s manipulation of chromosomes to grow proteins with medicinal properties. Halonen’s work prompts a dialogue about organisms like the “spider goat” in Quebec, where Nexia Technologies is making silk milk, which, once created in commercial quantities, will be used to create a product called BioSteel, to be used in the medical field and nanotechnology.
Halonen literally represents the etymological origin of the word chromosome, which is composed of the Greek words chroma (color) and some (body). The color’s relevance is due to the association with strong dyes that render chromosomes visible. Most of the chromosomes’ perimeters, drawn in graphite, remain visible beneath precise painting that evokes the fill-in-the-blanks of a standardized test or sample on a slide. Halonen reinforces this implied manipulation by harvesting colors from pharmaceutical advertising. Safe, inoffensive, subtle tones stolen from the natural world, suggest the fur of a fawn, the spot of a moth’s wing or color of human flesh. The targets quietly remind the viewer that all creatures great and small are up for grabs, altering the natural into a sci-fi world of monsters.
Target 13 (2012) depicts graphite tracings of the target structure, yet some of the painted bodies appear to have fallen into a pile beneath the target structure. Target 11 (2012) portrays a trompe l’oeil needle stitching the chromosomes together, the delicate tracing of graphite moving through them like thread. In Target 5 (2011), the chromosome is tagged, suggesting possession, control and ownership.
The two sculptures on pedestals, Rx Garden: Sticky Ends (4) (2010) and (6) (2012), are made from maple, sycamore, cottonwood, birch, oak, cedar and pecan twigs. These spheres’ careful and delicate construction makes them appear as if graphite drawings of molecules have been rendered into three dimensions. Pastel colors, painted over the twigs’ joints, suggest a seamless accuracy. Halonen’s use of organic materials reinforces the appropriation of the natural world into the scientific marketplace. Her careful slickness recalls the bland anonymity of pharmaceutical ads and echoes the way profit-making motives of private enterprise gloss over ethical issues–rendering the appearance of the drugs as innocuous and benign.
What happens when god-like powers are harnessed for profitable endeavors? Halonen’s subject matter calls to mind Leigh Anne Lester’s elaborate drawings of mutant plants. Lester often layers together her elaborate botanical drawings, made from graphite on vellum, so that they combine into complex yet random single plants. Lester’s blending of different species questions the repercussion of genetically modified plant species entering the natural world. In the dystopian world of The Hunger Games, a book trilogy, the totalitarian Capitol engineers genetically modified creatures, called mutts, to use for weapons and intelligence. While this may be a worst-case scenario, it is the ever-observant and watchful eye of the artist, working in the shadow of Big Brother that prompts difficult conversations about the future of this industry. Halonen accomplishes a maneuver as equally polished as “pharming,” marrying controversial issues with a restrained, subtle formality, that, despite its quiet quality, provokes profound ethical questions.
Wendy Atwell received her M.A. in Art History and Criticism from The University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the author of The River Spectacular: Light, Color, Sound and Craft on the San Antonio River.
Michael Bise
Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Fort Worth
Through February 25
By Benjamin Lima
Michael Bise, Mom and Dad, 2011, Graphite on paper, 42 x 42 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Michael Bise’s exhibition at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts opened under the shadow of first grim, then hopeful news about the artist’s health, communicated to the public via the Glasstire website, e-mails from the Moody Gallery, and otherwise. In November, an open letter broke the news that Bise had been told he needed a new heart to live. In December, a benefit concert was held in Houston. Then in January, news came of a successful transplant. Next to events like those, art criticism is trivial. But the matter-of-factness with which Bise faced down death, as related in Life on the List, Chapter 1 (2011), decisively proving Epilogues to be a prematurely bestowed title, will encourage many visitors to eagerly await the next chapters of the Life, after the list and beyond.
The works here are all autobiographical drawings in a distinctive, observationally precise yet casual style; nevertheless, the show comprises two quite different formats. The first is represented by the eight easel-sized graphite drawings depicting wordless memory-images of pivotal moments from childhood and afterward; the second is a narrative series in ink on letter-size sheets, Life On the List, Part 1, which was published on Glasstire in October. Each type of work gives us a different perspective on the artist’s life story, centered on the congenital heart disease that he inherited, and the family Pentecostalism that he rejected.
The graphite works are big enough to get absorbed in; they allow a viewer to be a connoisseur, enjoying the textures of different kinds of upholstery, linens and clothing as they are rendered by Bise’s careful pencil. They are also ambiguous; much of their significance will be mysterious to the casual viewer. The sinister primal scene in The Puppy Song (2011) is deeply chilling even if the precise subject (a puppy-killing) isn’t perfectly clear at first, as it wasn’t to me. The Spirit-filled female congregants worshiping in the tent in Revival (2009) are multiple versions of different women (mother, grandmother, girlfriends) important in Bise’s life. They are frozen in poses of ecstatic abandon–evenly lit and outlined so that we can see every single one of them clearly. Uncle Corky (2011) refers to the senseless death of the artist’s grandmother’s brother at the hands of Los Angeles police. It looks like a 1970s suicide tableau, but the anachronistic reflection, in the station wagon’s fender, of a Model T Ford and two Bonnie-and-Clyde-era lawmen suggest a dream overlaid on a memory. In Mom and Dad (2011), Mom’s carefully arranged up-do and the folds of Dad’s shirt over his belly are crystal-clear, but the thoughts behind Mom’s bemused and Dad’s attentive facial expressions are much less so.
By contrast, the sequential presentation of Life On The List gives us a protagonist, dialogue, a storyline and blunt candor. Thought bubbles tell the story of the first hours after his diagnosis as we follow the unlucky patient (looking somewhat more scruffy and rough-hewn than he does in published photographs) through bad-smelling hospital rooms filled with overweight nurses and medical assistants. Drawn at a smaller scale than the graphite works, each frame has a crowded energy and a comix-style irreverence that gives the sentimentality an edge. Among the first consequences to flash through his mind is the fate of his devoted basset hound: “What would Oliver do without me?” When passed post-diagnosis at a traffic light by a slack-jawed doofus in a Firebird: “I bet he lives to be a hundred.” What is his response to learning that the five-year male survival rate for a transplant is 73.1%? “C-. Fuck.”
As a near-contemporary of the artist’s, I felt an uncanny familiarity with many of the period details: the cut of the pleated cheerleading skirt in Holly’s Backdrop (2011), the bowl haircuts and Velcro shoes of Mrs. Lehmberg’s 1984-1985 third-grade class at the Sechrist School in Children (2011), and the Hillary Rodham-style eyeglasses and turtlenecks in Revival (2009) can all be found in my own family albums, I’m sure, as in those of others who had less wrenching formative years than Bise did. Of course, the harshness of the subject matter undercuts any sense of nostalgia.
The well-lit, glass-front storefront space at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts shows the careful selection of works to good advantage. Each drawing gets plenty of space, with just one on each wall in both the front and back rooms. Epilogues fulfills the fundamental precept of cultural presentation on many levels: it leaves us looking forward to more, a lot more.
Benjamin Lima is assistant professor of art history at the University of Texas at Arlington.
project space
Andrew Kerton
subheaded The Deadly Inner War, notoriously difficult. Some said preposterously insurmountable. Now, retardedly gay. I wonder. The music. At the end. Sounds good? Push the thought through the body push the body through the thought.
Read………………,…………,……,,,………,,…………,,…eye music
sighs It was almost an aphorism
What Is Said ≤ How What Is Said Is Said
contemporary and hysterical influences
The Egalitarian Mind. Game. Test.
Image lineage attempt to move forward “To move forward at all!”
or
Assimilate the Object of your Thought
A long shot. The medium shot. The close up and the extreme close up.
The ‘Holotropic’ EP. Track 1
The ‘Pathology of Attention’ LP. Track 1.
The video, based upon an obsolete model of perception, was shot using a top of the range Panasonic TM900 Camcorder
Input/Stimuli/Subject -> Selective Filter/Lens -> Limited Capacity Decision Channel/Focus -> Responses - or
Limited Capacity Decision Channel/Focus -> Long Term Memory Store/Hard Drive ->* Edit -> Selective filter/Lens - repeat
Long Term Memory Store/Hard Drive ->* Isolated Capacity Decision Channel/Focus -> Responses/Output
17:13:18 February 1st 2012
Andrew Kerton is an artist from the U.K. working in video and performance.
...mbg recommends
Max Marshall & Andrea Nguyen, Capillary Action #1-3 (triptych), 2012, Inkjet print, 13 x 19 inches (each). Courtesy of the artists.
Sarah Sze: Infinite Line
Asia Society Museum, New York City
December 13, 2011 - March 25, 2012
Sarah Sze’s complex installations of everyday materials—notepads, ladders, plastic utensils, etc.—received the attention of the art world’s trend-seeking eye a few years ago, but are no less deserving now. Attention spans aside, Sze’s effort at the Asia Society Museum is a look into the role of line—literal and figurative—within her work. Exemplified by careful placement and an interest in gravity and weightlessness, Sze’s sculptural work creates a lyrical physical experience that choreographs how we move through a space and think about light, perspective and scale. Its two-dimensional counterpart, a selection of works from 1996 to the present, utilize line and collage strategies to create images that blur perspectival fields (macro vs. micro) and the distinctions between the flat and sculptural. In some sense, Sze’s work has always addressed these connections and contrast. Her installation photographs are beautifully considered images that not only document the sculptural object, but also examine light and space in two-dimensions. Here the sculpture becomes a prop for a photograph or drawing, and the often overly-emphasized line between media dissolves further. This bending of the distinction between spaces, objects and formal elements is the core of Sze’s work and her skillful manipulation of these elements provides for a beautiful and rich viewing experience that is not to be missed.
Eric Zimmerman is an artist and Editor of ...might be good.
Max Marshall & Andrea Nguyen: Disambiguation
Red Space Gallery, Austin
January 28 – February 12, 2012
The scientific method is fully glamorized in Max Marshall and Andrea Nguyen’s collaborative exhibition, Disambiguation. Using Wikipedia as a source of inspiration, the artists recreated images that accompany entries about different scientific concepts. Each color photograph is approached with high aesthetic flair, yet is constructed in a straightforward way that maintains the integrity of the scientific principle it represents. At times the bright colors and shiny surfaces may seem indulgent, but it only adds to the irony of the work which debunks the idea of scientific theory as a bland, purely technical field of study, but one of curiosity and fascination. The visual approach used in the picture plane to flatten objects into two-dimensionality, or the application of colors and patterns to complicate the surface of the images, adds a playful sense of ambiguity. In Caramelization (Sugar Cube) (2012), four sugar cubes balance impossibly on top of each other on a pitch-black background. The white cubes seem to resist their dimensionality, failing to recede into the background, and an amber drip of caramelized sugar runs down their sides looking as if it were floating on top of the surface of the image itself. Though the photographs are strong enough to stand alone, the most intriguing component of the exhibition is its relationship within the public sphere. After completing the series, the artists submitted the photographs to Wikipedia to use in place or in addition to the images that originally influenced their own. Several of them have been accepted and can be viewed by searching for the appropriate scientific term. The idea of changing the context in which the work is viewed adds another layer of complexity to the body of work, challenging artist intent and who the audience is. Whether you are interested in contemporary photography, scientific phenomena or the curatorial process of Wikipedia, Disambiguation demonstrates that within the frame of a photograph, they can cohabitate quite nicely.
Emily Ng is an artist and Production Associate at Fluent~Collaborative.
Announcements: exhibitions
Austin Openings
Noriko Ambe
Lora Reynolds Gallery
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 11
White Scape, an exhibition in the project room of recent monochromatic works by Japanese artist Noriko Ambe. Each piece in the show is made up of many layers of meticulously-cut paper. Ambe cuts each sheet in a way that, when stacked, creates an object resembling a three-dimensional topographic map that charts a space between physical and emotional geography.
Tom Molloy
Lora Reynolds Gallery
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 11, 6-8pm
Tom Molloy's New World is a group of nine different LP sleeves-all from the same recording, Dvořák's New World Symphony-whose text has been painted to blend in with the cover image.
Elaine I-Ling Shen
Blackbox
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 11, 6-9pm
Everything Is Possible Again, an exhibition of photographs and sculptures by artist Elaine I-Ling Shen that explores the complex nature of childhood and human impulse.
Martin Sztyk
Big Medium
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 11, 7–10pm
Martin Sztyk’s show, Narratives, will include work from several series he has been working on, including Urban Forest, Empty City, and New London Stock Exchange. Sztyk says: “My work is heavily narrative-based. I tend to depict scenes of crude inhabitation within vast landscapes as a way to investigate spatial experience. The representation of the built environment through detritus and derelict structures brings forth images of current and possible future realities. In other instances, I fabricate narratives from what I think I learn from history mixed with my daily observations into environmental impossibilities only realized through the lens of digital construction and collage.”
KrisTin
Red Space
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 25, 7-10pm
Red Space Gallery is pleased to present artist Kristin Gamez (of the Más Rudas collective) and her performance and video installation project: *Falling to Pieces*.
Jennifer Davis, Mark Nelson & Terrence Payne
Gray Duck Gallery
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 3, 7-9pm
Through pattern, candy colors and imagery, Absurdities Crept In is a show of odd tales waiting to be told. Tales about the awareness of time, stumbling through life's fleeting experiences and one's true character. This exhibition features three artists with meticulous drawing styles and abundant illustrational talent, including paintings from Jennifer Davis and Mark Nelson and color pencil drawings from Terrence Payne.
Christine Blizard
Women and Their Work
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 17, 7-9pm
In When I was 16 I saw the White Buffalo, Blizard uses collage, sculpture, video animations and installation. Half of the exhibit represents her studio as a metaphor for: the daytime, the physical, the present tense, the here and now, but also the space where artists can go away and create.
Austin on View
31K Project
Mexic-Arte
Opened January 27
Diego Huerta’s 31K project represents the over 31,000 people killed throughout the ongoing drug wars in Mexico. In the photography, there is no distinction between the sitter’s color of skin, social status, religion or political beliefs. Diego Huerta and project partner Daniela Gutiérrez have traveled throughout Mexico and arrived at cities like Guadalajara, Campeche, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, Ciudad de México, Mazatlan, and Baja California.
Max Marshall and Andrea Nguyen
Red Space
Opened January 28
In the series Disambiguation, artists Andrea Nguyen and Max Marshall construct experiments based on scientific concepts and principles. The work explores a photograph’s ability to display a complex theory. Images are found and curated from Wikipedia’s archive, then re-photographed by the artists.
Loring Baker
Co-Lab Space
Through February 11
"This body of work is an investigation into my mind as a single mother. I use drawing as my main mode of exploration throughout all the facets of the work. The honest, crunchy, tactility of pencil on paper is something that speaks very clearly to me." -Artist Statement
Jonathan Sanders and David Lujan
Gallery Black Lagoon
Through February 12
New sculptural works by recent San Diego transplant Jonathan Sanders explore the possibilities of found object construction while Austin native David Lujan raises questions about the convention of printed and drawn media.
Collected Works: Group Show
B. Hollyman Gallery
Through February 25
Featuring the work of the gallery's photographers: Walker Pickering, Jo Ann Santangelo, Beau Comeaux, Alberto Mena, Loli Kantor, the late Thomas Benton Hollyman, Leon Alesi, David Johndrow, Tami Bone, and many others from the gallery collection.
Daniel Heidkamp
Champion
Through February 25
Daniel Heidkamp's solo exhibit: Glow Drops At The Chill Spot.
Jacques Vidal
Champion
Through February 25
Solo exhibit in the Project Room.
Evidence of Houdini’s Return
AMOA Arthouse
Through March 4
Through the creation of complex visual narratives, the international artists in this exhibition present provocative abstract forms that investigate art’s potential to interrupt and/or reconstruct elements of everyday life: Sterling Allen, Facundo Argañaraz, Strauss Bourque LaFrance, Katja Mater, Christopher Samuels, Justin Swinburne, and J. Parker Valentine. Each artists test the boundaries of working abstractly, with found objects and images, reformed digital technologies, as well as reference traditional techniques. While exploring the potential of objects in space, their ideas coalesce around an opposition to fixed forms.
Jill Magid
AMOA Arthouse
Through March 4
On January 21, 2010, 24-year-old Fausto Cardenas fired six shots from a small caliber handgun into the air from the steps of the Texas State Capitol, just blocks from the site of this exhibition. Coincidentally, Jill Magid was present as a witness. In Failed States, Magid draws connections between Fausto’s futile and tragic act and Goethe’s nineteenth-century epic poem, Faust. Magid mines Faust for thematic connections and develops a means of performative exhibition, treating the gallery as a stage to be studied.
Niklas Goldbach
AMOA Arthouse
Through March 4
Niklas Goldbach’s video HABITAT C3B explores a nearly deserted urban environment populated only by a handful of identical men engaging in an unknown mission. The clone-like characters chase one man that breaks from the group, recalling stock plot twists from science fiction.
Diana Al-Hadid
Visual Arts Center
Through March 10
Sculptor Diana Al-Hadid constructs forms that are a baroque complex of architectural structures and figurative allusions, which appear to be in a state between construction and deconstruction.
Justin Boyd
Visual Arts Center
Through March 10
In his site-specific exhibition, Dubforms, San Antonio-based artist Justin Boyd re-articulates the space of The Arcade by responding to its most striking element: a pair of floor-to-ceiling bay windows.
Laurie Frick
Women and Their Work
Through March 10
Laurie Frick draws from neuroscience to construct intricately hand-built work and installations that explore the nature of pattern and the mind. Using her background in engineering and technology she explores self-tracking and compulsive organization. She creates life's most basic patterns as color coded charts. Steps walked, calories expended, weight, sleep, time-online, gps location, daily mood as color, micro-journal of food ingested are all part of her daily tracking. She collects personal data using gadgets that point toward a time where complete self-surveillance will be the norm.
Carlos H. Lozano
Mexican American Cultural Center
Through March 20
In FINGERPRINTS of REALITY by Carlos H. Lozano, the photos recreate the daily life of the immigrant who works in both urban and rural arenas, and builds his future based on strong family ties. The photos
also record the realities of immigrant women, who risk their lives to sustain the welfare of their children. This exhibition takes a closer look into real human experiences that every day deepen the roots of Hispanic heritage in a nation full of immigrants.
Roy Medrano
Mexican American Cultural Center
Through March 20
“I started the series Barrio Scenes so that my grandchildren could see what East Austin used to look like, the landmarks, restaurants, automobiles, and street scenes. Hopefully through my art people will remember the
struggle our raza went through. I have a lot more to paint.”- Artist Statement
Miguel Andrade Valdez
AMOA Arthouse
Through March 25
Andrade Valdez’s video Monumento Lima is a chaotic, rapid-fire visual compendium of the monuments that occupy Lima’s traffic circles and pedestrian malls. They range from the forgotten to the futurist, the Spanish Mediterranean to the brutal, as well as the Modernist. In the video, the trapezoid emerges as a very popular shape due to its common motif in pre-Columbian Peruvian architecture.
Lee Lozano
Visual Arts Center
Through April 22
Curated by Katie Geha and presented in partnership with The Blanton Museum of Art, Pun Value: 4 Works by Lee Lozano is a case study of works by Lee Lozano from The Blanton collection, which will examine the artist’s process and influence on the art world of the 1960s.
Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani
AMOA Arthouse
Through April 22
In Toute la mémoire du monde – The world’s knowledge, Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani reinterpret French director Alain Resnais’ similarly titled 1956 film. Resnais’ twenty three-minute documentary sweeps through the historic French Bibliothèque Nationale on Rue de Richelieu in Paris, exposing how the library functions as a storehouse of all the world’s knowledge.
Austin Closings
Buster Graybill
AMOA Arthouse
Through February 19
The southern colloquial term “tush hog” is a name for a tusked feral hog, and sometimes for tough people who behave like them. Graybill’s Progeny of Tush Hog is a breed of sculptures that retains some Minimalist formal traits while also functioning as wild game feeders. It is as if the contemporary aesthetics of a Donald Judd sculpture escaped Marfa, TX and crossbred with the rural functionality of a deer feeder in the nearby rural landscape.
Lauren Fensterstock and Steve Wiman
AMOA Arthouse
Through February 19
Responding to the unique natural, architectural, and historical features of Laguna Gloria, sculptors Lauren Fensterstock and Steve Wiman create site-specific installations throughout the Driscoll Villa.
Paul Beck, Allen Brewer & Pat Snow
Gray Duck Gallery
Through February 19
True Story explores the purity of perception, the accuracy of memory, and the truth of desires. This exhibition features paintings from Paul Beck and Allen Brewer and watercolor mixed media works from Pat Snow.
San Antonio Openings
New Works on Paper
David Shelton Gallery
Opening reception: Thursday, February 16, 6-9pm
Exhibition with works by Jonathan Faber, Sara Frantz, Kelly O'Connor, Dan Sutherland and Vincent Valdez.
Issac Julien
Linda Pace Foundation
Opening Reception: Friday, February 17, 6pm
TEN THOUSAND WAVES was filmed on location in China and poetically weaves together stories linking China’s ancient past and present. The work explores the movement of people across countries and continents and meditates on unfinished journeys. Conceived and created over four years, Julien collaborated with some of China’s leading artistic voices.
San Antonio on View
Convergences: The Sculpture of Larry Graeber and Jessica Ramirez
Unit B
Through March 3
Convergences: The Sculpture of Larry Graeber and Jessica Ramirez, curated by Richard Teitz.
Steve Wiman
Sala Diaz
Through March 4
"My personal compulsions to save and collect veer dangerously close to hoarding, but, I am not a hoarder, I'm a collector. I collect because I see beauty in the worn patina of the discarded. I collect because objects stir my memories and emotions. I collect because nostalgia and sentimentality are valuable healers. I collect because there is great pleasure in doing so." - Artist statement
San Antonio Closings
Harold Wood
Blue Star Contemporary Art Center
Through February 12
"Levelland Points of Scale is the ambiguity between landscape and abstraction." - Artist Statement
Philip John Evett
Blue Star Contemporary Art Center
Through February 12
Phillip John Evett is a British gentleman and fine artist who currently resides and works at his studio in Blanco, Texas. His figurative and sensually abstracted forms have captivated both the San Antonio and international art scenes over a lengthy and accomplished career.
Phillip King
Blue Star Contemporary Art Center
Through February 12
Four Decades with Colour celebrates the career of Phillip King, one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. This exhibition will feature more than 20 sculptural and print works, dating from 1963 through 2011.
Sonya Clark
Southwest School of Art
Through February 12
Sonya Clark examines her African-American identity in a solo exhibition currently on display at the SSA, which centers around the symbolism carried in everyday objects and their interface with that most elementary material, hair. Exhibited works include large sculptures, photos, and mixed media objects that connect cloth, combs or woven hair with her personal narrative, as well as within the context of African-American womens history.
Houston Openings
Emily Peacock
Lawndale Art Center
Opening Reception: Friday, March 9, 6:30-8:30pm
Solo exhibit in the Grace R. Cavnar Gallery: You, Me, & Diane. Emily Peacock presents a series of photographs based on work from the seminal book Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph for the exhibition.
Jim Nolan & Linda Post
Lawndale Art Center
Opening Reception: Friday, March 9, 6:30-8:30pm
Jim Nolan and Linda Post present their first major collaborative project, a site-specific installation that looks toward Lawndale Art Center itself for inspiration for the exhibition: LOW IMPACT (RESISTANCE TO FLOW/THIS IS BOB DYLAN TO ME) SUBJECT TO CHANGE.
Randall McCabe
Lawndale Art Center
Opening Reception: Friday, March 9, 6:30-8:30pm
In the Project Space, a portion of Randall McCabe's 100' long drawing consisting of repetitive marks made since the drawing began in 2005 will be on view in the exhibition Scroll.
Houston on View
Carlos Rosales-Silva
Lawndale Art Center
Through February 25
Unfadeable So Please Don’t Try To Fade Me features all new work by Texas-based artist Carlos Rosales-Silva. Through varied formal languages, the work reflects the absorption and appropriation of minority culture by mainstream American society.
Jade Walker
Lawndale Art Center
Through February 25
CONTACT, features an array of characters – some fictional and some real – permeated by physical breakdown. Jade Walker's exhibition includes several sculptures and sculpture-based installations that are inspired by the physical repercussions of trauma on the human body.
John Sonsini
Inman Gallery
Through February 25
New Paintings by John Sonsini.
Luminous
Box 13
Through February 25
Artists Kristen Beal, Tobias Fike, Chris Lavery, Stephen V. Martonis, Rick Silva, Annie Strader and Matthew C. Weedman show how light remains a consistent source for artistic inspiration.
This Weird Place
Lawndale Art Center
Through February 25
In This Weird Place, all six artists engage the unsteady ground between figuration and abstraction using diverse, unique means: Lane Hagood, Alika Herreshoff, Cody Ledvina, Lee Piechocki, Anthony Record, and Eric Shaw.
TJ Hunt
Lawndale Art Center
Through February 25
For Breaking Ground, Hunt’s subversive and humorous gestures against boundaries in the physical landscape become a vehicle for exploring ideas of ownership—physical or otherwise—and appropriation. The resulting installation relies on the gallery as contextual site for the relocation of materials, addressing these ideas through a visual language that is at once ironically familiar and absurdly self-reflexive.
unBlocked: performance based video
Aurora Picture Show
Through February 25
DiverseWorks is a non-profit art center dedicated to presenting new visual, performing, and literary art. For each DiverseWorks exhibition, Aurora curates a screening installation that takes place in the private screening room known as Flickerlounge. Blurring the distinction between performance, video art and body art, these young artists from the University of Houston combine media, personal narrative and social commentary in their works.
Zoe/Juniper
Diverseworks Art Space
Through February 25
In another large performance installation, Zoe Scofield and Juniper Shuey will create an immersive environment of video, dance, photography and installation that extends and expands upon their touring dance work "A Crack in Everything." Zoe/Juniper use the Greek Tragedy "The Oresteia" as a lens to explore the emotional spectrum of justice and retaliation.
Prologue 2012
SKYDIVE
Through February 29
Prologue will celebrate the opening of Skydives new season, and feature the work of the three artists who run Skydive- Sasha Dela, Nancy Douthey and Brian Piana- as well as a selection of work culled from community of local artists surrounding Skydive.
Michael Kennaugh
Moody Gallery
Through March 3
Zero Road is a series of new oil paintings and mixed media drawings by artist Michael Kennaugh.
Joel Shapiro
Rice Gallery
Through March 18
Known for his geometric, abstract sculptures that appear to bound across museum walls, floors, and sculpture gardens, Shapiro has embarked on an entirely new body of work, creating room-sized installations of colorful shapes and lines that seem to hover in suspended animation. Shapiro describes his approach to installation art as “the projection of thought into space without the constraint of architecture.” He adds in an interview, “I feel like I’ve been working for so long to have finally built up this moment of discovery that I can get the work off the floor and be more playful in the air.”
Perspectives 177: McArthur Binion
Contempoary Art Museum of Houston
Through April 1
Perspectives 177: McArthur Binion is the Houston debut for this Chicago-based, mid-career painter and the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. For this exhibition, Binion has created a new body of work that extends his visual narrative through color and geometric form. Decidedly minimal, Binion’s work embodies a strong intellect rooted in the expressive capabilities of color and abstraction.
The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991
Contempoary Art Museum of Houston
Through April 15
The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is pleased to present The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991, a survey of leading women artists that examines the crucial feminist contribution to the development of deconstructivism in the 1970s and ’80s. This exhibition is organized by Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York.
David Anguilu
Lawndale Art Center
Through June 2012
Daniel Anguilu transformed Lawndale's north exterior wall into a mural. Anguilu’s work can be found throughout Houston, including locations in the East End and most recently on Midtown’s MHMRA building. Anguilu’s style is deeply inspired by his Mexican heritage, and mostly manifests itself as large-scale murals.
Houston Closings
Andrei Molodkin
Station Museum of Contemporary Art
Through February 12
Andrei Molodkin is an internationally recognized contemporary Russian artist engaged in deconstructing the economic realities of geopolitical praxis. Consisting of his monumental ballpoint-pen drawings and his three-dimensional constructions filled with crude oil, Molodkin’s exhibition CRUDE effectively articulates the space between people’s peaceful, democratic aspirations and the unending conflicts perpetuated by oil-politics.
Kent Dorn
Bryan Miller Gallery
Through February 18
Solo exhibition- New Paintings.
Dallas Openings
Michael A. Morris
Oliver Francis Gallery
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 11, 6–9pm
It's Just Meant To Be, an exhibition of new work by Michael A. Morris, is an extended meditation on various media of reproduction and how the lives of individuals are inscribed into images, sounds, and language. Loosely constellated around ideas explored in a short video titled Confessors (2010), the exhibition will feature alternative process photographs, 16mm film loops, 1/4” tape loops, 7” records, and other unconventional approaches to reproductive visual and sonic media.
Ian F. Thomas and Jon Shumway
Brazos Gallery
Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 7, 4-6:30pm
In their collaborative installation Incidental Transformations, Ian F. Thomas and Jon Shumway's project digital video and light onto ceramic forms. The Pennsylvania based artists offer a reexamination of traditional media and a restructuring of gallery usage. Erecting several walls and blacking out windows, the installation engages interior/exterior dynamics, requiring audience members to disrupt lighting patterns and projections as they navigate the re-situated space.
Dallas on View
Rebecca Carter, Terri Thornton and Sally Warren
Free Museum of Dallas
Opened December 2, 2011
A text, a photograph, a rock, a narrative, a person, a memory, a place, a trauma: any number of things may enter within close proximity, coming close enough to be "held," intimately handled and unquestioned, preserved without understanding. The act of holding bears testament to their meaning in Things Held and Never Understood.
Eric Eley
The McKinney Avenue Contemporary
Through February 18
Coincident Disruption, a large scale installation by Dallas based artist Eric Eley, employs historical camouflage strategies and impromptu construction techniques to create an aerial landscape. The installation is an investigation of concealment and explores hiding as an act of avoidance rather than ambiguous visibility.
Kyle Confehr
The Public Trust
Through February 18
Kyle Confehr primarily creates ink on paper drawings focusing on the absurdity of brand allegiance, irony, consumerism, social media, the notion of an “in” crowd and many other facets of modern culture. Breaking Rad will feature new and recent works on paper as well as a collaborative site specific painting installation with Favio Moreno of The Bodega Negra.
Marilyn Jolly, Melba Northum, Susan Sitzes
The McKinney Avenue Contemporary
Through February 18
Transience: Imperfect, Impermanent, Incomplete, an exhibition of work by Marilyn Jolly, Melba Northum and Susan Sitzes, exemplifies each artist’s close affinity for found and collected materials that reflect a sense of time. The mixed media of two-dimensional and sculptural works directly reflects the artists’ alignment with the Japanese worldview and aesthetic of Wabi-sabi.
Nigel Cooke
The Goss-Michael Foundation
Through February 18
The show consists mainly of works that belong to the Goss-Michael collection and local collectors. The exhibition has been created in close collaboration with the artist and, is in fact, one of the most comprehensive shows of Nigel Cooke’s work, covering all series of his work up to the present.
Print Sweet: New Editions
The Public Trust
Through February 18
Featuring new editions by Bodega Negra, Willie Binnie, Kyle Confehr, Blakely Dadson, Heyd Fontenot, Brian Gibb, Letecia Gomez, Steven Hopwood-Lewis, Tania Kaufmann, Taro-Kun, Lawrence Lee, Magnificent Beard, Mylan Nguyen, Brent Ozaeta, Brendan Polk, Jeremy Smith, Sour Grapes & Billy Zinser. Each artist’s piece was produced in an edition of 10. The works range from $75-$250.
Rob Pruitt
Dallas Contemporary
Through February 18
Pruitt’s interests lie in creating environments where participants feel free to improvise and experiment outside of their comfort zones. In his signature style, Pruitt’s installation of glitter panda paintings has never before been shown and is the largest number of panda paintings to be shown together.
Walter Nelson
The McKinney Avenue Contemporary
Through February 18
Graffiti on Aspen Trees – Nature vs. Man, an exhibition of photographs by Walter Nelson, investigates man’s presence and effect on nature.
Circle Werk
Centraltrak: University of Texas at Dallas Artists Residency
Through March 3
Curated by Heyd Fontenot, CircleWerk will be a cooperative/collaborative experiment in video production. During the course of this exhibition, the gallery will be used as a film-making studio by a number of artists interpreting stories from the Old Testament. This group endeavor brings together a variety of designers, painters, sculptors, performers and filmmakers working together for the first time.
David Jablonowski
Dallas Contemporary
Through March 18
David Jablonowski’s first North American solo exhibition entitled, Many to Many (Stone Carving High Performance), challenges the traditional “one to many” relationship between the artist and the public advocating instead the “many to many” dialogs of multi-layered voices.
FAILURE
Dallas Contemporary
Through March 18
Austin-based artist FAILURE will present his first major institutional exhibition at Dallas Contemporary. FAILURE has been painting graffiti outdoors since 1993 and began with the FAILURE poster imagery in the early 2000’s in Houston. He will present an exhibition of wheat paste posters with spray paint and collage.
Benjamin Terry and Giovanni Valderas
Lago Vista Gallery
Through March 29
Richland College presents Fragment, new art installations by artists Benjamin Terry and Giovanni Valderas. Expanding their unique styles of painting and figure/ground abstraction the artists embrace the challenge of working on two curved walls in the Lago Vista Gallery. Both artists currently explore notions of loss and erasure through layering, providing persistent figurative content as a platform for conceptual and formal inquiry.
Mark Manders
Dallas Museum of Art
Through April 15
The first major North American exhibition of work by acclaimed Dutch artist Mark Manders, Mark Manders: Parallel Occurrences/Documented Assignments features a body of new sculptures and works on paper created specifically for it. This nationally touring exhibition includes roughly fifteen new sculptural works and three loaned works, one of which is from The Pinnell Collection of Dallas.
Elliott Hundley
Nasher Sculpture Center
Through April 22
Elliott Hundley's The Bacchae featuring 11 recent medium- to large-scale wall-mounted and free-standing constructions highlights his investigations of the ancient Greek tragedy "The Bacchae" (ca. 406 BC) by Euripides. Encompassing a variety of media including assemblage, theatrical staging, and photography, this exhibition continues the Nasher’s exploration of sculpture’s rich and myriad possibilities.
Dallas Closings
Edward Ruiz
Conduit Gallery
Through February 10
Visual artist Edward Ruiz couples his current artistic interests in digital video mapping and real time sound analysis to seamlessly marry geometric sculpture, music, and mathematic technology as a means to create all encompassing sensory installations of sight, movement, and sound.
John Randall Nelson
Conduit Gallery
Through February 10
In Fraught, Simply Fraught with Narrative..., John Randall Nelson embraces the concept of artist as story teller and mystic.
Steven Miller
Conduit Gallery
Through February 10
Steven J. Miller’s small-scale acrylic paintings are straight landscape paintings of an imagined, not too distant future in a world that may or may not be our own. The familiar objects and places (cities, trains and houses) in the paintings are integrated with the unfamiliar (islands shaped like thumbs and fantastical twenty-third century architecture.)
Sarah Williams
Marty Walker Gallery
Through February 11
Marty Walker Gallery presents a solo exhibition of Sarah Williams' new urban landscapes of industrial American roadsides: NIGHTFALL. Draped in the shadows of night, buzzing electric lights from commercial structures penetrate the
scene.
Fort Worth on View
KAWS
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Through February 19
The work of Brooklyn-based artist Brian Donnelly, who makes his art under the moniker “KAWS,” is the subject of the first Focus exhibition for the 2011–2012 season. KAWS’s vast body of work includes graffiti (early in his career), murals, paintings, and sculpture. Following along the continuum of Pop art, his work critiques contemporary consumer culture, blurring the boundaries between it and the art world.
Marfa Closings
AutoBody Featuring North of South, West of East
Ballroom Marfa
Through February 12
Neville Wakefield (Curator), Meredith Danluck, Liz Cohen, Matthew Day Jackson, and Jonathan Schipper.
Announcements: Events
Austin Events
Valentine's Day Special
Women and Their Work
Saturday, February 11, 3pm
Stop by for a glass of bubbly and find sweet things in the Gallery Shop: handmade Valentine's Day cards, blown glass bud vases by LBK Studio, chocolate truffles by Lina's Cocoa Couture, jewelry by Lisa Crowder and many more.
Artist Talk
Lora Reynolds Gallery
Friday, February 11 , 7pm
Tom Molloy: New World
A Conversation of Printmaking
Visual Arts Center
Saturday, February 25, 2- 4pm
Against the backdrop of the New Prints 2011 exhibition, a selected panel will participate in a conversation about the fine art print. Moderated by UT's Ken Hale and Leonard Lehrer and held in conjunction with Printmaking Convergence project, the discussion will feature printmakers Bill Hall, Miguel Aragón and others.
San Antonio Events
TEN THOUSAND WAVES Inauguration
Linda Pace Foundation
Friday, February 17, 6pm
The Linda Pace Foundation announces the presentation of a special three-screen edition of TEN THOUSAND WAVES by Isaac Julien. The work was co-commissioned by the Foundation in 2009, and its presentation continues the organization’s mission to support the work of contemporary artists. The presentation will be inaugurated with a special event, a conversation between Julien and Steven Evans, Executive Director and Curator of the Linda Pace Foundation.
Houston Events
Music Program
The Menil
Sunday, February 12, 5:30pm
CHANT • SONATA • DUET
Gather in the Menil foyer, with members of the St. Paul's Methodist Choir who will lead a chanting procession - inspired by medieval traditions - to the Byzantine Fresco Chapel. The music continues inside the chapel with performances of J.S. Bach's Cello Suite #2 in D Minor (BWV 1008), and Osvaldo Golijov's Mariel (1999), a duet for marimba and cello.
Panel Discussion
The Menil
Sunday, February 19, 7pm
The chapel closing provides an opportunity to examine how art and spirituality inform the entire Menil campus. Joining Menil Director Josef Helfenstein are Annemarie Weyl Carr, Pamela Smart and William Vendley.
Artist Talk
Lawndale Art Center
Friday, March 9, 6pm
Jim and Linda Post, Chuy Benitez, Emily Peacock, and Randall McCabe.
Dallas Events
A Discussion of Darryl Lauster, Of Thee I Sing
Barry Whistler Gallery
Saturday, February 11, 2pm
The conversation will be led by Lauster, Assistant Professor of Intermedia/Sculpture at UT Arlington, and his colleague Dr. Ben Lima, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History.
Artist Talk and Image Presentation
The McKinney Avenue Contemporary
Friday, March 9, 6:30pm
Ian F. Thomas and Jon Shumway.
Announcements: opportunities
Call for Applicants
Land Arts of the American West
The College of Architecture at Texas Tech University
Deadline: April 9, 5pm
Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University seeks to cultivate collective energy within an expanded disciplinary range of examinations from architecture, the built environment, public culture, literature, science, and geography to explorations of contemporary art practices.
SOMA Summer
SOMA
Deadline: April 15
Six-week summer program for international artists, curators, critics and art historians conducted in English in Mexico City: July 02 to August 11, 2012. Application deadline: Online applications will be accepted until Sunday April 15th, 2012. The application review process begins March 1st, 2012.
Call for Entries
Creative Capital
Deadline: March 1, 4pm EST
Creative Capital is now accepting online Letters of Inquiry for grants in emerging fields: Literature and Performing Arts. Creative Capital provides integrated financial and advisory support to artists pursuing innovative and adventurous projects. Selected grantees receive up to $50,000 in direct support for their project and advisory services valued at more than $40,000.
The University of Texas at San Antonio
Deadline: March 23
The University of Texas at San Antonio, announces New Art/Arte Nuevo: San Antonio 2012. This biennial juried exhibition will feature the work of artists living and working – or with roots/raices – in South and West Texas. A print catalog will accompany the exhibition.
2012 Austin Screen Play Festival
Austin Film Festival
Regular Deadline: May 15 ($40) Late Deadline: June 1 ($50)
The Writers Guild of America, East is now the underwriting sponsor of the Drama Screenplay Award category (open to Historical, Western, Drama, Family, Romance, Horror, Thriller, etc.). Drama Finalist scripts will be judged by a select panel of WGAe screenwriters and the winner will be presented by a WGAe representative at the Awards Luncheon during the 2012 Conference.
2012 Austin Film festival
Austin Film Festival
Deadline: June 1 ($30)
Open to spec scripts for any currently airing television program and original pilot scripts: sitcom spec, one-hour spec, sitcom pilot, and one-hour pilot.
