Sculptor Shawn Smith likes to take stuff apart so he can put it back together–pixel-by-pixel. He finds images online, and then crafts them into 3D reality: One little piece at a time. He starts with a Google image, usually nothing more than a thumbnail. He zooms in until the image…
Some art leaves a singular, momentary impression. Other work sets the mind afire. Michael Reafsnyder’s paintings definitely fall into the latter category. In this week’s FLP, “I’ve Got a Feeling,” Reafsnyder takes the eye on an amazing race through every scrape, swirl, and, dribble and blob.Get close enough–we swear–and your…
Look who’s got some brand spankin’ new shoes. Like the rest of us, the Deep Ellum “Traveling Man” sculpture’s been a little chilly this week. And being made of metal, can you imagine how much worse that must be? Finally, someone took pity on his big robot feet and sized…
Steven Culbert is one of those artists who eschews the idea that there’s any limit to the number of ways you can paint. You can see that in his current show, Big and Small, at Jacques Lamy Gallery. Upon viewing the show, you might not even guess that all of…
While the rest of us are freaking out about what to buy Aunt Fern for the holidays, Conduit Gallery is basically blowing up with shows. There’s Jeremy Red’s solo show of unconventional portraits, Catching Up — his first here since he moved from Denton to Seatle, WA in 2003. There’s…
The piece is called Lake Austin Motel, Room 133. But as soon as I hear the title, I think of Lake Austin Spa Resort. I imagine the reclining figure is taking a much needed break after taking Nia classes and kayaking in the lake all day long. The black and…
Quilts have long been misunderstood. People have considered them craft, pretty blankets sewn by women with too much time on their hands. Although many quilts are quite beautiful, they are also incredibly powerful. Frontier women crafted them to shelter their families from the dangerous cold. Slaves created them as creative…
It was pretty damn magical Friday night in the Arts District. The galleries were open late and light, video, and sound installations of one kind and another dotted the streets as part of Aurora. The Nasher hosted the final ‘Til Midnight of the season with The Bright playing on the…
It felt a little dangerous and inappropriate to be viewing English-born artist Nigel Cooke’s work, as if as viewers we had slipped inside his head to see insecurities, dark humor, questions and answers — some of which it was difficult to feel as if we had the right to see…
Her name is Stacey Maynard but she calls herself Lucky Girl. And rightly so. Maynard, unlike way too many people, is actually doing what she loves — creating art. The high school art teacher working in a variety of media hails from Australia, but she’s celebrating her first solo exhibition,…
What do clocks, a desk, logs, cardboard boxes, equipment of one kind or another, buildings, a train, meters, fans, a chair, radios, a tractor, a bed, blocks, toy trees, a dollhouse, a telephone, an electrical outlet, Saturn, record players, cut pages from a children’s book,a grandfather clock, train cars, cash…
Irritation and pity are not the expressions I imagined a shark would wear upon being captured or killed. But that seems like precisely the expression it has in Dallas and Union Valley, Texas artist Pamela Henderson’s piece “One of Eight part of the series Ellipsis and Hatchet Acrylic.”Three people, presumably…
Outside of Murray Street Coffee Shop in Deep Ellum a neon spray painted mannequin sits, chained to the base of a tree. Aurora is spelled out across her chest and right leg in stickers, and a presumably once legible date sits across her upper abdomen. There’s a QR code smack-dad…
In “Fall,” part of a series, not surprisingly titled “The Seasons,” Olga Polunin personifies the season as a beautiful, young, Asian woman. She is bare breasted and the composition ends just beneath them, reminiscent of any number of European paintings, in particular the School of Fontainebleau piece “Gabrielle d’Estrées and…
Outside Tranquilo Yoga Studio in Bishop Arts the community is encouraged to add their own answer in chalk. So far there are some good answers and some great ones. I asked a friend that’s an art teacher what his would be and he said, “Convince a kid that has had…
It’s literally the elephant in the room. Only in Kirk Hayes’ “Protective Covering Smoldering,” someone is trying to cover him up. Desperately. But they’re doing a terrible job of it. Terrible. The pink blanket silhouettes what is clearly an elephant. Except, it’s not just an elephant. It’s also some sort…
Last night I ate the art at the Dallas Contemporary. Everyone there did. It was an installation/performance art piece, one of the Contemporary’s LEGENDARY events, called Made in Texas and created by New York artist Jennifer Rubell, and the point was not just to see the art, but also to…
It’s nearly 2012 and still women are not represented in art, history and any number of other realms as prominently as they should be. As we slowly remedy that, we do what I like to call “add women and stir.”…
You can’t help but wonder who it is that’s being trained on this particular day. At once fanciful and thought-provoking, Heather Gorham’s work, “Training Day,” challenges the viewer’s expectations. The sky is mottled and the horizon line drips down. It looks as if you could wipe away the white and…
We’re not gonna lie: We love the Los Angeles-based artist that is Brandon Bird and have for years now. We love that his favorite thing to eat is meals (followed closely by snacks)” and we ordered our first set of Law & Order valentines around five years ago. When an…
Sure, we’re no Vegas, but Dallas is known for some iconic neon signs, perhaps more so for the ones that have gone dark, like the original Pegasus and the Alamo Plaza Hotel Courts signs. The Alamo closed in 2008, and last summer Unfair Park toured the vacant property days before…
Abstract paintings can appear so abstract that it’s difficult to interpret meaning from the crowded geometric shapes or intersections of paint splashes and splotches. Abstract painter David Collins layers abstract images on each other in his works, but the result is not an onslaught of imagery that leaves one looking…
