Webb Sights

Webb SightsResolve to break free of other tired old holiday traditions. We suggest a mind-numbing, radio-blasting road trip this weekend to Waxahachie. Really. Get the hell out of town and escape to the Webb Gallery's consistent, artful take on the Twilight Zone. Proprietors Bruce and Julie Webb cultivate quirky, obsessive, often psychotic, and sometimes institutionalized "outsider" artists. This week, the Webbs introduce two new iconoclasts to the followers of folk art.

Details

Every weekend through January 5. Hours are 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday and by appointment. (972) 938-8085

Webb Gallery on Waxahachie's downtown square at 209-211 W. Franklin

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More About

• Charles Stagg
• Willie Wayne Young
• Bruce Webb
• Waxahachie
• Julie Webb

The gallery's Puzzling Experience show features Charles Stagg's DNA unit structures made from carved wood, painted and finished with tongue oil, and balanced into sculptures of up to 14 feet in height. Stagg, who grew up on a hog farm in Vidor, took what had been a pigpen and built a concrete dome after returning to East Texas in 1982 following a military career and mid-life wanderings. As he cleared the land he experimented with stacking logs in patterns, which led to his current art based on what he calls "unit structures." His molecular models often resemble DNA strands.

Also showing are delicate graphite-on-paper drawings of roots and bones--mostly hyper-realistic renderings with an occasional abstract--by Willie Wayne Young, a Dallas native who doesn't read or write. His two-room house is nothing more than a shelter around his private world of obsessive drawings of the collection of organic curiosities he finds and collects on walks through vacant lots and along railroad tracks. Young's collection of sticks, twigs, pods, thorns, seeds, and bones line the windowsills inside and out. He works with a pencil in his left hand and a magnifying glass in his right, with arms crossed and eyes inches from the paper, according to Bruce Webb. "He's obsessed with rendering his collected objects exactly as he sees them," Webb says.