Dallas gallery hopping

I prowled the scene this afternoon. Here's what I saw and thought.

At Barry Whistler Gallery, Lawrence Lee is still up and shining with some of the most elegant lines I've gazed upon since I first got acquainted with Fragonard's tree drawings back in the days of Bush I. Lee mines old racist depictions of African Americans and his supple imagination to produce some truly witty narrative-based graphite and ink and tea and who knows what drawings of crazy-assed tall tales that probably make sense only to him. So why tell the stories? Because they look great. And there's always that astonishing line of his.

The image above is from Lee's show at the now-defunct Clementine Gallery in Chelsea a couple of years ago. He's getting better.

Road Agent may or may not be defunct also. It still has the "Installation in Progress" sign on the door from last month. As I understand it, gallery owner Christina Rees has accepted a position as director at TCU's off-campus exhibition space over in Fort Worth.

Fort Worth 1, Dallas 0.

Dunn and Brown is offering Dale Chihuly glass stuff to discerning folks in the Metroplex. Why? I don't know. Maybe the bills are coming due. Still they had a kickass small group show in their "project" space with works by Trenton Hancock (whom I love and not just because he once speculated that everybody's soul looks like a pre-teen Caucasian girl), Jeff Elrod, Erick Swinson, Vernon Fisher, etc.

Swinson's savagely trompe l'oeil sculptures of a pre-hominid creature and a stag shaking off the bleeding"velvet" from its new antlers take the Halloween prize for amazingness and craft.

Down in the Design district, Conduit offered Michael Tole and Joe Mancuso. Too many flowers on one picture plane (yes, that's the point) and painstaking renderings of Chinese decor. Cool, but why? I can't say. Somebody tell me.

I tried to see the new stuff by Dornith Doherty at Holly Johnson, but the place was temporarily shut when I dropped by. Should have called first, I guess.

Over at Marty Walker, I caught a sneak peek of William Lamson's new work, and it was a pleasure. Building on his videos from last year, he set up several ad hoc machines designed to use wind and waves to make drawings during his recent tour of South America. The Chilean coast wave works were delicate and appropriately atmospheric. Others were bolder and more aggressively "expressionistic." Whatever that might mean when a kite is doing the expressing.


Above: William Lamson, Kite Drawing Jan. 31, 2009. 740-915 PM. Colonia Valdense, Uruguay.

The Goss Michael Foundation offered a small Mark Quinn survey. He's the dude who cast his own head in his own blood. If he makes it, he means it. Got it?

Quinn's Mother and Child (Alison and Parys), 2008, a marble sculpture of a nude woman and her baby, was an extraordinary thing to behold. Handsome and at peace with her body, Alison was born without arms and with improperly formed legs. Gallery literature quotes him as saying "She's very beautiful, she just looks different."


He's right.

A food show

My piece is up and running at Project Gallery in Wichita, and I'm quite satisfied with it. Here's a quick, down-and-dirty edit of some installation shots.



The opening was Friday night. Saturday, the gallery organized a potluck dinner. Everybody brought something to share. My wife and I brought some homemade, locally sourced food: home cured bacon, home cured pastrami, a salad of purple hull peas we grew in the community garden, some home canned okra pickles, and some home canned pickled watermelon rind.

I fried the bacon for about the first half hour of the event, feeling a little bit like Rirkrit Tiravanija, but sillier and more bacon-y.

It was a lovely weekend.

Kentridge in Fort Worth

My wife and I paid a visit to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth today. We drove to Cow Town to see the William Kentridge show, and holy mother of charcoal, the man is much better than I thought he was. I already knew he was remarkable, but the FW show is a revelation. Here's a version of a film that's in the show:



The title is Journey to the Moon. It may be in the exhibit, but my recollection is that this is not the same film. A room with multiple projected videos offers a variety of related pieces, many of which are titled Fragments for Georges Méliès. Méliès was the film pioneer who created Le Voyage dans la Lune in 1902 -- a landmark in early cinematography and filmic story telling. Coming a century later than Méliès, Kentridge's videos locate the 21st century artist in the history of movie making and conflate drawing, performing and filming. Not to mention conflating artist with model, director with performer, and process with content.

I took some notes today, but I need another shot at it all before I can review it. Two and a half hours in the museum wasn't enough. That's one of the troubles with video. Duration is like that -- it just takes time to haul it all in. We'll hit it again tomorrow after we check out of the motel.

Eliasson

My review of the Olafur Eliasson survey at the Dallas Museum of Art is online here. There's an error: the captions for two images are switched tonight, but I've asked them to fix that.

The image above is Room for One Colour (2002).

Art's spectrum

I saw two shows in Dallas over the weekend that just about set the limits for the spectrum of activities covered by the blanket term "contemporary art."

At the Dallas Museum of Art the Olafur Eliasson survey "Take Your Time" celebrates and explores the conundrums surrounding perception and consciousness -- specifically the consciousness of perception considered as experiences in a continuous duration. It's all Bergsonian philosophy and the embededness of perception in the ever changing objects of its awareness, except when it's all look at the facts of the museum experience and how that context attends what you're getting out of these things you're looking at. The audience Saturday was enthralled. Smiles and appreciative murmurs abounded. Fun philosophy. (image via www.olafureliasson.net)



At Conduit Gallery I caught the last day of a smart, hip show by Fahamu Pecou, a painter and graphic designer based in Atlanta. His day job involves working with assorted hip-hop performers, helping to design the particular street-smart, tough guy images of masculinity so central to marketing their music and personas. This led Pecou to generate a Warholesque campaign for himself involving a series of paintings based on imaginary covers for (mostly) actual magazines like Artforum and Tema Celeste featuring himself as a star. His campaign slogan: "Fahamu Pecou is the shit." It's all the intersection of public image, race, and constructed gender executed with a fierce wit. The title of the painting above is Warn a Brother.

Art and remoulade

Friday night, we attended an opening reception for Pix2 at UT-Dallas. John Pomara, who teaches there, invited art critics in the DFW Metroplex to select one artist each for inclusion in the show. I chose Josie Durkin, the new sculptor at my university. Her work is wonderful. Here's what I wrote about her for the show's brochure:

"I became a fan of Josephine Durkin’s work when I first saw it a couple of years ago. Formally inventive and courageously beautiful (you have to be brave to make things so ravishing), her work is also informed by a web of human/social associations. Consider those rocking chairs: They’re made from laser-cut and folded digital photographs (patent pending – really). Chairs conform to our bodies to one degree or another. Their contours and proportions reflect the articulation of our bones. So it’s not a stretch to read Josie’s arrangement in social terms with the chairs metonymically standing in for a crowd of people, an audience for the (blowhard?) fan before them. Little fans of a big fan, they rock and nod agreement to the asymmetrical power relationship implied by the work’s relative proportions and by the unilateral transmission of energy. I’ve been in that situation, and I’ll bet you have, too."

It's great to see Josie getting some local attention. Of course, inclusion in a university gallery group show isn't as significant as her solo show up in Wichita's Ulrich Museum. I plan to head up there to check it out in March.

After the opening, we drove to Big Shucks for dinner. A dozen oysters on the half shell, some ceviche, cole slaw, and really good fried calamari, which came with (mirabile dictu!) remoulade, also very good.