Audio By Carbonatix
Giggles Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me three times and I let loose a booming guffaw with great decadent pleasure. In what appears to be a string of exhibits based on simulacrum and fakery, this show is part of Angstrom Gallery’s ongoing development of a philosophy of laughter. Curated by one of the participating artists, Steven Hull, Giggles brings together drawing, picture-making and painting in a tour de force of light-heartedness. Hull’s colorful drawings and painted sculptures occupy one room of the gallery. Working in collaboration with his children, Hull makes art that is circuitously autobiographical. While Hull is loath to recognize it, the work’s greatest strength is its Conceptualism–its ridiculing of traditional gallery space. With works hung low for viewing by children, and featuring paint-splattered assemblages of child’s things, this portion of the show is indeed more Happy Meal than meat and potatoes. Unfortunately, the ideas behind the work remain too childlike–incipient and undeveloped. The front gallery is host to automatic contour drawings by the Texas-born New York-based artist Marcos Rosales and the paintings of the Japanese-American artist Kaz Oshiro. Rosales takes the old Surrealist trope of blind contour drawing–sketching while not looking at the sketchpad–and makes it new again. While not all of the drawings are terribly interesting, the most powerful are those of sheer words, such as “Suicide” and “Prozac,” as they capture a certain anxious malaise of the contemporary moment. Oshiro’s paintings, by far the best work of this show, are in keeping with the fake realities of the photographic work of Daniel Gordon and the sculpture of Kevin Landers, also two Angstrom-represented artists. Oshiro makes “paintings” that look like things–a Dunkin’ Donuts trash receptacle, a worn-out car bumper and a beat-up old dorm-room refrigerator. Casting trompe l’oeil in an entirely new light, Oshiro constructs wooden frames in various and necessary shapes, stretches canvas over them and paints them accordingly, making “paintings” that look like objects. Ultimately, the great strength of this show is the grouping–that the artists are showing together. There’s no boredom in this trifecta. Through October 9 at Angstrom Gallery, 3609 Parry Ave., 214-826-8322. (Charissa N. Terranova)
Ann Stautberg: Recent Photographs At first blush, Stautberg’s large-scale photographs of plants seem rather old-school and humdrum. Even getting physically closer to them, trying to penetrate them by studying the surface for evidence of craft and fabrication, does little to make them come alive. But the raison d’être of these images is located precisely in what you don’t see. It is in their subtlety and process–in the fact that they are painted photographs. Combining painting and photography, Stautberg’s approach is delightfully mongrel. The process is something akin to painted postcards of the late 19th century. But the look is far different. The colors of the forms you see–stalks, tendrils, leaves and the wispy play of shadow and light–operate at two levels. Most immediate are the blues, silvers and verdigris of Stautberg’s color palette. After careful viewing, though, yellows and reds emerge. Stautberg makes clean form out of organic substance, and the way she does it is, intellectually speaking, the most interesting part. Through October 16 at Barry Whistler Gallery, 2909-B Canton St., 214-939-0259. (C.T.)
Wherever I Go, There I Am, Polaroid Self-Portraits by Julie Ross Julie Ross has a penchant for the beauty and elegance of easy production–and it’s doing her right. Shooting from the hip as it were, Ross has discovered the amazing possibilities of the photographic readymade–the Polaroid snapshot. For Ross, the Polaroid snapshot provides a perversely accessible sense of authenticity since singularity and chance are part of its mechanical apparatus. The Polaroid image is always without a negative and by definition lends itself to on-the-spot non-deliberative shooting. While they are once-in-a-lifetime images, the subject matter remains constant. Limbs outstretched and camera nimbly if not precariously balanced at arm’s length, Ross always shoots herself, usually capturing her head and neck in distorted form. For the most part, though, the distortions are a result of the machine and its necessary accoutrements of film and light. Ross uses outdated film, sometimes even the wrong film, to create variations in color palette, with the verdigris tones not so unusual to Polaroid shots giving way to blues, grays and silvers. Yellow light dances like lightning across blurred fleshy composition, the blurs arising sometimes from the topsy-turvyness of the setup and other times from the artist’s choice of odd but simple guises. Further disturbing any such sense of equilibrium are the images in which the artist has pulled pantyhose over her head. Here the beauty of light and muted tones gives way to the macabre of lifelike but faceless babies. These images bring to mind the distorted doll forms of the Polish-born Berlin-based avant-gardist, Hans Belmer. On a similar note, while her own training as an artist seems to be just budding, her work nevertheless reveals a lifetime of references, from the dynamism and incisiveness of Giacamo Balla and Man Ray to the jaunty nonchalance of Andy Warhol and Richard Prince. Stay tuned…I hope we see more. Through October 2 at Gray Matters Gallery, 113 N. Haskell Ave., 214-824-7108. (C.T.)
Dan Rizzie He’s back and just like he was before. This is an old dog who likes repeating old tricks–tricks that were never that interesting to begin with. In keeping with canine metaphors, there is something peculiarly Pavlovian about the continued reception of Dan Rizzie and his work. Instead of the artist being the dog, though, in this instance it is the public, with their unquestioning and herd-like support of Rizzie’s work seeming ever so similar to a dog’s conditioned response to a buzzer. An old Dallas artist and SMU graduate, Rizzie is more of a decorator than an artist. Rizzie combines doilies, do-rags and bits and pieces of castoff text with large painted tulips to make monstrosities of boredom. If we agree to call this work “art,” then everything on the walls of chain restaurants and chain hotels is “art,” too, as that’s where (if anywhere) his work belongs. While his work may be garbage, he nevertheless is laughing gleefully all the way to the bank. The moral to this story is that, given the right demographic circumstances, namely an intellectually supine public, garbage sells, and it sells well. Through October 2 at Gerald Peters Gallery, 2913 Fairmount St., 214-969-9410. (C.T.)