Site 131
131 Payne St.
12 to 5 p.m. Fridays and by appointment
The Line, a new exhibition curated by Site 131 co-founder Joan Davidow, has quite the diverse roster of characters. See if you can keep up. First we have Texan Kristen Cochran’s suspended fabric wall drawings, whose flowiness suggests humans once inhabited them. Korean-American Kyung Jeon's lady figures don couture costumes, coyly alluding to cultural assimilation. Then we have two deceased artists: Texan Helen Burkhart Mayfield, who drew her haunting self-portraits while writing in pain, and Alessandra Michelangelo, who created colorful anthropomorphic paintings. Midwesterner Ann Toebbe’s architectural paintings look like a board game, and Philadelphia native artist/draftswoman Lynne Woods Turner focuses on geometry, repeated patterns and symmetry.
courtesy Joan Davidow
Artspace 111
111 Hampton St., Fort Worth
Opening reception 5-8:30 p.m. Friday
Dust Bowl wishes and tumbleweed dreams: A Plain View explores the vast expanses of Texas through large-format, color film photographs. The photographs, made with a 1950s Graflex Speed Graphic view camera throughout Texas over the course of four road trips in early 2017, use expired 4x5 Kodak color film. Jason Lee, the artist, is an actor best known for playing the lead character in My Name Is Earl, but he’s also a devoted hobbyist of rural exploration. Lee took a series of road trips earlier this year traversing the outskirts of small towns in Texas, film cameras in the car. He’d done a lot of this in other states over the years, but never in Texas (where he now lives). Following Friday’s reception, the collection will be on view through June 18.
Joshua West – I, a Stranger
Haley-Henman Gallery
422 Singleton Blvd.
Opening reception 5 p.m. Saturday
Joshua West's second solo exhibition at Haley-Henman is all about abstract portraiture. His vividly colored subjects appear less as posed studio subjects and more as images collected from his subconscious and social media. In West’s words: "To gaze into the human portrait is an exercise in empathy and a unique form of human connection. Just as the painting is a vehicle for expression by the artist, it becomes an expression of the viewers who bring a lifetime of memories to the image.” Following Saturday’s reception, the exhibit will be on display through July 8.
Barnaby Fitzgerald – Concordances
Valley House Gallery
6616 Spring Valley Road
Ongoing through June 10
Concordances is Barnaby Fitzgerald’s eighth solo exhibition at Valley House. One intriguing painting features a scantily clad, possibly clay man trying to wrangle control over two wayward stallions as what looks to be a tsunami is about to engulf them. Have we all not had that dream before? Fitzgerald, who grew up in the Perugia region of Italy, has taught painting at SMU since 1984.
courtesy Valley House Gallery
Galleri Urbane
2277 Monitor St.
Ongoing through June 17
Conceptual artist Anna Kunz prepared for Heroes, her first show in Dallas, by constructing a model replica of Galleri Urbane because the show includes site-specific “porous paintings.” The space is as much a player here as are the works themselves. She’d never visited Dallas but researched the city’s seasonal light to see how the layout would affect each piece with respect to its exposure to sunlight. Kunz’s works range from paper to paintings to dyed fabrics functioning as nets. Feel free to touch whatever you want. This is experiential art, not the Louvre.
