Audio By Carbonatix
Alex de Leon The question begs: What to do with art that makes avid if not heavy-handed political statements in an era so eager to wrest itself from the rant, screed and morality inherently connected with political art? Is it the responsibility of art to engender social revolution, much less social consciousness? Do we care? These are the questions instigated by Alex de Leon’s miniature city of wayward form made from placards the artist has bought from homeless people. In de Leon’s hands the desperate, hand-written scrawls of the homeless–“Will work for food,” “Homeless veteran,” “Need help, God bless you”–become the writing on the walls of a small town. At the head of the town sits a church, also fashioned from homeless placards, that focuses our attention on the phrase “God bless you” recurrent throughout the small installation. Enveloping this shanty urbanism, video monitors, three televisions and one video projection show highway scenes taken from the artist’s studio. The point-of-view looks up from below as if shot from underneath a bridge or highway overpass, the usual haunts of homeless men and women seeking shelter. Has the artist informed us that he is like the homeless? Or is he an opportunist, cadging from cadgers an unfortunate livelihood? This is a small installation that will make you think. Through June 12 at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, 2801 Swiss Ave., 214-821-2522. Reviewed May 6.
By: Photographs by Nan Coulter As the prepositional title of the show suggests, Coulter’s photographs set in relief images that are in between: pictures that are pregnant with the remains of what came before and the possibilities of what comes after. While Coulter has photographed world-renowned cities, you won’t find picture-postcard images of palaces or famous monuments in this collection of 18 photographs at Iris. “Versailles” is represented in passing, by way of two shots of subway trains, spray-painted and speedily moving along. The très chic Musée d’Orsay in Paris is not seen in terms of the transformed 19th-century train shed that it is but rather a blurred shot of a silk-screened starlet’s head on a museum-goer’s purse. Since being on the move means also taking breathers on street corners, not all images are shifty and blurred. One of the most poignant is Coulter’s photo-of-a-photo titled “Leominster, England.” Seen through a window, this father-mother-child shot à la Sears family portraiture casts an eerie presence, as you might think you’re looking at the real family rather than their verisimilitude. But who’s to say what’s real and what’s not with today’s photoplay? The photographs of this photojournalist turned magician of the banal are good to go and on the go. Through June 5 at Iris Restaurant, 5405 W. Lovers Lane, 214-352-2727.
Drawing Under the Influence: Lee Baxter Davis & His Protégés Paying homage to Lee Baxter Davis, a drawing professor, printmaker and draftsman retiring after a 30-year career, this exhibition shows the varied profits that one force of artistic influence can bear. Greg Metz’s political satires made from charcoal on paper, Georganne Deen’s colorful computer-generated cartoons, Gary Panter’s delicate and small black and white surreal urban vignettes, Ric Heitzman’s kitschy, 1950s animal doodles, Linda Stokes’ sad portrait of Kurt Cobain so many years after his suicide: All of this and much more is the end result of Davis’ teachings. The exhibition stretches somewhat (perhaps not enough) the idea of what “drawing” might mean. Now, let’s see drawing really do some acrobatics–like leaving altogether the picture plane for three-dimensional space. Such a stretch would ratchet up what already seems to be at stake in this work–the fervent need to express and take a stand on political and social issues. Through June 12 at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, 2801 Swiss Ave., 214-821-2522.
Mixed Media Works by Mary Ellen Leger and Paintings by John Hathorn The paintings and sculpture of Leger and Hathorn make for an exercise in the synesthetic–a cross-wiring of the senses wherein one’s eyes take on the tactile sensibility of hundreds of tickly finger tips. In “Braille Series #13” Hathorn has combined paper on canvas, shellacking cast-off copies of National Geographic published in Braille to make bumpy, dotty surfaces with a patina and waxen finish. In other planar pieces she organizes pages from regular-print books–one in French, the other Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire–in bands across canvases. From afar these paintings look like AbEx-inspired compositions of horizontal stripes. The artist also works in other throwaway materials, combining wax, steel and tea bags in certain pieces and wire and paper in others to make sculpture that is at once flaccid and weighty, precarious and sometimes tall. The Soutine-inspired abstraction of Hathorn also operates according to text but more in homage to individual writers rather than employing words and sentences as raw aesthetic material. Using thick swirls of multicolored paint, Hathorn writes letters to his favorite writers in a vocabulary of abstract and painterly blobs, smudges and swishes. In a less painterly piece, “Migratory Poem (for Italo Calvino),” the artist has combined an old shirt, paint, charcoal and a written inscription from himself to the writer Calvino. If you are a consumer of the innovative and new, I would say that Leger’s work is going to be more palatable to you. If you like pretty-pretty rehashing of the already-done, then you’ll appreciate the work of Hathorn. Through June 12 at Craighead-Green Gallery, 2404 Cedar Springs Road, Suite 700, 214-855-0779.
Paintings by Hyun Ju Chung and Mixed Media Works by Connie Arismendi Bringing together the otherwise distinct work of Chung and Arismendi is the physics of layering. While working strictly in oil on wood, the Korean artist Chung works the picture plane simultaneously with thick, impastoed paint and swatches of stencil-like fabric. Layering fabric atop paint and paint atop fabric, Chung’s small-scaled series “Memory of Anonymous Weed” brings to mind the fabric-imprinted canvases of Mark Flood. Arismendi’s mixed media results in a far different play of layering. Arismendi builds drawing on top of drawing but with space literally in between. In “Twilight,” one of the better works, the artist has delicately drawn a flower on a translucent sheet of Mylar and placed it on steel studs above a large blue acrylic panel depicting fish swimming free-form beneath. If you’re an aficionado of New Age imagery, then Arismendi is your artist. While Arismendi’s palette of pastels and diaphanous lady heads can be vaguely cloying and simple, Chung’s pictures of rope and doodly graffiti leave you questioning the new possibilities of that age-old medium of oil painting. Through June 12 at Cidnee Patrick Gallery, 2404 Cedar Springs Road at Maple Avenue, 214-855-5101.
Photographs of Texas by Allison V. Smith Smith makes pretty, slightly out-of-kilter photographs of West Texas’ meagerly urban landscape. Taken while on a brief sojourn in Marfa last fall, the sometimes brightly colored and always compositional images of Smith betray a photojournalist segueing into the realm of art photography. And arty they are. With electric light bristling against twilight, shadow rubbing up next to storm-puddle reflections, “Side Street” is Magritte without the intellectual high jinks. Smith’s photographs seem like a catalog of quotations with none of the conceptual punch of the people she quotes. Aptly titled “Birds on a Wire,” Smith’s shot of birds on an overhead wire brings to mind Hitchcock without any of the horror or conflict. The blue paint on the wall of “Sandy’s” conspires with the blue color of the roof to make a composition reminiscent of some of William Eggleston’s best work–but without any of the perky everyday perversity. Maybe this should be a show on the “without”–appropriations without much invention–of a photographer transitioning from journalism to something else. Through May 29 at Barry Whistler Gallery, 2909-B Canton St., 214-939-0242.
Turner and Venice If you love the city in idea and form, then this exhibition of work by the 19th-century painter J.M.W. Turner is a must. Turner’s scintillating views of Venice do more than tickle the eye. These urban vistas transport you back in time to an earlier chapter in the history of abstraction within painting. With a total of 33 oil paintings and some 128 works on paper, it’s a vast showing of one old master’s obsession with the miracles of a city built on water. The careful splash and daub of his brushstroke can be mind-boggling, but Turner’s watercolors might very well steal the show. Through May 30 at the Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Metro 817-654-1034. Reviewed April 1.