Dumpster pools. Performance art. Local designers. Gallery openings.
This weekend we celebrate local artists. The people who don't fly off to summer homes and instead stay put, baking in Dallas' concrete heat with the grackles. They're performing at the DMA, selling their goods at the Dallas Contemporary and covering the walls of our galleries. And the best part? As your reward for staying put too, all of this is free.
Here's a guide to the weekend's best art events.
Thursday 8/8 Performance Art Double-Dose -- An interesting element of DallasSites: Available Space, the all-local DMA exhibition, is the amount of room being given both directly and indirectly to performance art, a medium that's been back on the regional upswing in the last two years.
Slurp up two body shots of it Thursday as Apophenia Underground (the collective behind the Deep Ellum Windows project) intersects with PerformanceSW for a panel discussion featuring Rachel Cook, Anthony Thompson Shumate, and Jesse Morgan Barnett, moderated by Darryl Lauster. You'll get a few performances in there too, a highlight being when the AO updates from their just-wrapped, six week road trip: a cross-country gig documented on Tumblr that turned each day into a piece of performance-based art. See this from 7 to 8:30 p.m.
Elsewhere in the DMA: Interestingly enough, that direct conversation about the medium is counterbalanced with HOMECOMING! Committee's ongoing showroom, which is itself an evolving blend of 2-D, installation and performance. Set off further, and also booked from 7 to 8:30 p.m., is a performance hosted in that space titled I hate it when a book smells bad by local body mover/shaker, Danielle Georgiou. There you'll find a double-scoop of theory, blending Antonin Artaud's ideas that "cruelty leads to a believable reality" and Trisha Brown's concepts of avant-garde performance. It's all free at the DMA (1717 N. Harwood St.).
Saturday 10/10 Be a Dumpster Diver -- Leave it to the Dallas Contemporary to make a resort-worthy dumpster pool. While other dumpster pools have been just that, the one DC's putting up from noon to 8 p.m. has a wrap-around deck, a swim-up bar and a mural by Sour Grapes painted along its exterior. Oh, and it's FREE. The pool is an added lure for the Design District Market, which says it'll have "plenty of free beer and wine" to go around AND stalls of local vendors like f. is for Frank, Hari Mari flip flops and so many more. Air out that caftan and spend the day at the Dallas Contemporary.
Art Openings, because it's evening and you're wet. -- Wring yourself out, then drip over to the Design District and Oak Cliff for the night's opening art events. You'll start off on Dragon Street, where the summer's heat has cleared the way for experimentation.
At Photographs Do Not Bend (1202 Dragon, Suite 103) there's a dark rooml-ess world, as the gallery shakes out Fun Show II, its second offering of all-collectibles that have no connection to photography. It's weird, with estate sale vibe, offering everything from an Eames style lounger and ottoman to riding boots, sculptures and throw-back toy robots. It's up until August 31.
Head to Red Arrow Contemporary (1130 Dragon St., Suite 110) for A Momentary Glitch in Transitional Spaces, where artists H. Jennings Sheffield and Gissette Padilla shuffle time's folds via layered images and projections. Here you'll wander these artificial catacombs of perceived past in the now, portaling yourself into the install. It's up until August 31. The opening reception runs from 6 to 9 p.m.
Visit Circuit 12 (1130 Dragon St., Suite 150) for its latest install of Regional Quarterly, the gallery's curation-heavy series dedicated to Texas talent. In this run you'll see Repetition. Ritual. Memory, a two-man show by Dallas artists Kendra Briscoe and Marilyn Jolly. They'll present their own interpretations of home, comfort and familiarity while drawing from sculpture and painting. This exhibition runs until September 3. Saturday's opening is 6 to 10 p.m.
Cross the road to Cohn Drennan (1107 Dragon St.) to find a heavily-populated talent pool at the group exhibition Summer Camp. There you'll see work by more than a dozen artists from the gallery's stable presenting across the spectrum of mediums. Surely you'll find something to love. This show stays up until August 31, and is viewable during the gallery's reduced summer hours: Thursdays through Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. The opening reception runs from 6 to 8 p.m.
The night's most anticipated opening happens in the evening's smallest space, so mind your manners and keep the pushies at bay when you visit Sally Glass' solo exhibition, Am I Still Ill, at the Safe Room (231 W. Jefferson). In the upstairs gallery of Oak Cliff's Texas Theatre you'll see life's missed connections relayed through video, photography, sound and more as Glass appropriates the space for an intimate tale.
For her first solo show in two years the artist highlights those moments of failure in both the concrete -- structural, architectural - and the more abstract divisions of memory, thought, theory and language. She'll express points of misalignment in text and sound, and in turn reveal the beauty that sits along its crested gullies. This gallery is miniature and the guest list is obscenely large, so do everyone a solid and wear that deodorant. This opening runs from 6 to 10 p.m., and that lobby bar is open all night, baby. Visit thetexastheatre.com.
