Running With Scissors

Ann Glazer makes snowflakes and silhouettes at the MAC

Comments (0) By Annabelle Massey Helber Thursday, Jun 27 2002

The last time the McKinney Avenue Contemporary invited an artist to slap black paper cut-outs on its white-walled gallery, controversy ensued. Back in January 1999, Kara Walker waxed the MAC's walls and posted black-paper silhouettes depicting sexual atrocities and violence which were as dark as her intended commentary on America's shameful history of slavery.

Details

Opens Saturday with a reception from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. and runs through July 28. Call 214-953-1212.

New Works Space of the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, 3120 McKinney Ave.

More About

Don't look for any political agenda in Dallas artist Ann Glazer's upcoming installation of black paper images at the MAC. Glazer's paper views are more sensuous than sinister; her black, abstract shapes will transform before the viewer's eyes into a different sort of personal experience. "It's as if you were looking through trees," Glazer says. "You see black outlines, and if you stare long enough, there's a Rorschach-type effect. As you make your way and wander, your own stories play out."

Trained as a painter, Glazer grew frustrated with her own obsessive need to change imagery on large--some 10-by-12-foot--canvases. "What was most interesting to me was moving things around," she says. "You can't constantly change a big painting." Now she's quite a cut-up, creating small and large images which she layers and collages together. "I can move them from wall to wall, so I'm obsessively changing them. I've been adding to this stock of images for one and a half years." She says her new work is about looseness and obsession. As soon as she left the canvas to try to sketch on a computer, partly to satisfy her own sensibilities and partly to accommodate the interruptions and disruption of raising two small children, she knew she was hooked in a new medium. "In a matter of minutes, I could see hundreds of different options that would have taken years to play out on canvas," she says. "The possibilities are always the charge for me."