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Dichroic reflections, neo-geo shards, lemur tails, subaqua-ography, yarn bombs, big burger art, hand-shakes, Trailer Cakes & red velvet cakes

words + photograph by J R Compton with help from Anna Palmer

Brandon Behning and Eugene White, Artificial I.D. - Brian Ryden, Madness - Dwayne Carter at Plush, through June 2    Collected Memory - Sally Ackerman, Shannon Brunskill, Carole Cohen, Cecelia Feld, Grethe Haggerty, Barbel Helmert, Robin Herndon, Judith Seay, Cat Snapp, Mary Tomas, Ronda Van Dyk at Mary Tomas, through June 9    Jeremy McKane at Cohn Drennan, through June 16    Heyd Fontenot, Margaret Meehan, Stephen Knapp at Conduit, through June 16    It's all Relative - Ed Stafford, Erin Stafford, Elissa Stafford at Red Arrow, 1130 Dragon Street, Suite 110, through June 16    Brad Ellis, Orna Feinstein, Tracey Harris at Craighead Green, through June 16    Asian Invasion - Theo Wujcik at Galleri Urbane, through June 16    Letters from Home - Murielle White at Cris Worley, through June 16    Surface Pattern - Dean Monogenis, Pepa Prieto, Misato Suzuki, Thomas Spoerndle, Morgan Blair, Lucas Martell, John Guthrie, James Roper, Jessy Nite, Eddie Villanueva, Books IIII Bischof, Maxomatic at Circuit 12, through June 16    Harakiri: To Die For Performances - Please Pass the Remote and Red Velvet Carnivale - Big Rig Collective at CentralTrak

Brad Ellis   Tripping Through the Thicket   mixed media on canvas   84 x 66 inches   $14,000

We started at Craighead Green, where Dallas artist Brad Ellis showed what might have been yet another cut and paste job, revealed upon closer inspection, textured paint in precise shapes, extending what everybody and its mother's been doing this last decade or so since Lance Letscher hit these shores, and he may only have been the leftmost extension of another wildfire fad from one of the coasts or even Iceland.

Brad Ellis   Tripping Through the Thicket   (detail)   mixed media on canvas   84 x 66 inches

Up closer this re-remix reminds of Norman Kary's precision collaging, or James Michael Starr before he went back into Advertising. Careful incisions mixed with cross-axis textured geometric ellipses, with maps and text pages for color, tone and ever more texture into a ever-so-carefully arranged amalgam of color and shape.

Heather Gorham   I'm Dreaming of Your Insomnia   acrylic on canvas   48 x 60 inches   $5,000

Always nice to see new extensions in painted fantasy, but there's no date. I want to know when this painting was done. I'll assume it's new, struggling with furry long-tail demons and bound out of control in a slanted red-sky brown tent-like place of more lemur-tails lined up waiting to jump.

Stained Glass in the Cathedrals of Commerce

It's been there for years, but I'd been avoiding Conduit, because it'd got so terribly familiar. This also a rare photo on an opening night, with so few cars swimming in that wide space that likely later grew to overflowing. We were way early. Serene in near emptiness, under that stormy blue sky, there's that short, disjointed spectrum of colored opaque windows. Inside Conduit, we loved and hated and/or were indifferent — with one resplendent favorite.

Stephen Knapp   False Prophet   2012   dichroic glass, light and hardware   15 x 13 x 1 foot   with Anna silhouette for scale

I used to use red quote marks in the DARts Calendar to denote quotes from galleries, "Stephen Knapp's most recent work, his Light Paintings, consist of dichroic glass (glass containing multiple micro-layers of metals or oxides, which give the glass dichroic optical properties) which is bracketed onto walls with a single light fixture illuminating the entire piece. Light that passes through the various pieces of glass is collected and dispersed on the wall in a colorful array of shape and form."

Stephen Knapp   False Prophet   (detail)   2012   dichroic glass, light and hardware   15 x 13 x 1 foot

Although the details took a few seconds to jog in, I recognized the style and technique from Knapp's Seven Muses along the tall walls at the Charles W. Eisemann Center for Performing Arts and Corporate Presentations in Richardson, Texas.

Seeing its late-Stella 3D details up close was ever more fascinating. How its colors work and interact is amazing to almost touch. According to Wikipedia, "The main characteristic of dichroic glass is that it has a particular transmitted color and a completely different reflected color, as certain wavelengths of light either pass through or are reflected. This causes an array of color to be displayed. The colors shift depending on the angle of view. Dichroic glass is an example of thin-film optics."

Stephen Knapp   False Prophet   (detail)   2012   dichroic glass, light and hardware   15 x 13 x 1 foot

Getting even closer, we begin to see how the marred and sometimes mauled wall of Conduit's oft-used and abused Project Room adds to the interest and texture of this intriguing piece — and gain a better notion of how it works.

Conduit Porch

Then out the familiar, echoing concrete ramp past the machine-textured, low-tech porch, with a rock holding the door open amid a mild Mondrian landscape of right angles and iron black lines off to yet another gallery. Anna kept a list according to opening times, so we switch-backed around the artsy neighborhoods along our winding central levees, staying strictly this side of the river.

J R at Marty Walker's Front Door well before they opened

To Marty Walker, which wasn't open yet and wouldn't be for awhile, but we couldn't see any reasons on the visible interior walls to come back, although they've been having great gifts of wonder in their video room, not even hinted at from outside. Only rarely do we hit everything on our list, although the tiny print at the top of this foray only lists where we actually went in.

EAT Hamburger

Down the street and around some corners we kept passing this unsigned artburger by a dark and totally unappetizing building proclaiming "OFF-SITE KITCHEN," although later, there were a bunch of people gathered there, doing gossip-over-the-fence routines with next door.

End of the Line for Art

I've been wanting to photograph well this end-of-the-line marker outside Cris Worley / Gallery Urbane for awhile, but I kept concentrating on the green grass ditch that fills with water sometimes, neatly forgetting where it was along the winding overflow ditch for the Trinity River.

Yarn Bombed Hydrant Dance

Back on Dragon Street, somebody has only very recently rediscovered the elusive charms of public color and texture in bombing yarn.

Smiling Numbers Yard bombed Pole - photo by Anna Palmer

But we especially liked the contrasting colors and bright textures of this smiling kid with gaping numbers teeth and an intriguing array of dark form textures a third the way up the pole.

Jeremy McKane   Rabbit Hole   2012  48 x 60 inches   archival digital print on aluminum   $7,5000

Then to Cohn Drennan Contemporary for Dallas photographer Jeremy McKane's sometimes sub-marine photographs printed on aluminum for a texture and tone we hadn't seen anything quite like work before, although I've become fond of Kenda North and and more recently, Kathleen Wilke's now not-at-all similar underwater photo work, we were pleased to see another new direction in subaqueous ography.

Drink Donations, Snack Donations, Swear Jar

I shot several photographs there, but easily the most memorable piece at the new Red Arrow Gallery were these jars. I assume the sugar havens of tea and wine. I wonder if they made their cost from donations, where swearing starts, and who keeps enough quarters. We were there early, and there were none, yet.

Gallery Sign for XXX

Although we were both fond enough of their big red sign flapping in the wind to keep photographing it as if it were original, I keep thinking Red Arrow should be a moving company with an armada of big vans.

No comment.

I kept feeling I was in the wrong place, and turned out we were, despite the Dragon Street Address, we found what we were looking for around the corner and down the sidestreet to Circuit12. But this was a gallery, so of course we wandered in.

Circuit 12

Eventually, we were arm-led around the corner to Curcuit12 where we sought Surface Pattern, Circuit 12's premiere exhibition of almost entirely artists from out of town, because as owner Dustin Orlando explained, "all the other galleries in Dallas show local work," and he wanted his to be different. We wondered about that and thought, 'would that it were,' but he said they were showing a few Dallas artists and seeking others, but he proudly listed where all their artists were from. The big colorful wood construction in the far corner, I remember, was from Madison, Wisconsin. That might be it over my shadow reflection's left shoulder in this front-door shot.

Brian Ryden   Pavlov's Dog   acrylic and tape on canvas   27 x 33 inches   $700

For a big change, we didn't stop first at Plush, where I liked Ryden's neo geo abstracts, although I at first thought none of my pix turned out. Later, I looked closer at this one that was fairly well rendered. Sharp, at least. His intricate medleys of constrained, dark spectra shapes hurtling through space kept my attention. I circled and stared, then came back to capture their souls, drawn by their almost disorganized complexity.

Anna's Handshake, Dwayne and His Work at Plush

Out in the better-illuminated project porch, old friend Dwayne Carter's newly printed but essentially similar — maybe a little lighter — work to that reviewed not so long ago by Michael Helsem got our attention. He was talking how pleased he'd been to have his work hanging in the background in some media event somewhere, and I thought I'd make something of the notion here. Dwayne, of course, jumped right in to direct the shoot. Anna and I both liked the way her arm balances those legs on the right behind him.

Looking Up at the Cup's Packed Front Porch

Running low on energy we dined vegetarianly at The Cosmic Cup on Oak Lawn Ave — inside, where it was quiet and serenely among much odd wall art, although a small band was setting up outside our window to the porch as we left, and we wondered what they'd sound like, but we retired briefly to the little park across the Trinity, where we ate Trailer Cakes Anna had bought from the soap-bubbling snack truck on Dragon.

This place in the big middle of the Trinity Flood Plain is about to be over-arched by yet another new bridge, and we wondered if we and the other day-life of the area would still have surface-level access, but we've long liked that lilting little park with its pond where odd birds including Tricolored Herons sometimes feed.

Cupcakes in the Park

Had a great sky and is always a gentle place where we encountered strange humans — I'd read in a novel recently about a guy who whistled tunelessly, and that calmed his brother in a precarious time, and we could hear our local whistler from far over and long away over the current bridge from the city side, walking down the middle of the ocassionally busy two-lane road — with Harold Clayton's stone 3D cows in the middle distance toward the darkening skyline.

Satty Night Traffic Through The Canyon

Then, in kinda a hurry to see what CentralTrak was really up to — despite what they'd listed last week, I worried a Saturday Night stand-still traffic jam through The Canyon might keep us from the 'performance' I'd read in their "advance publicity was to be a movie about a dance troup, but I've learned to check it out anyway, and we arrived early into their first wild dance performance which pertained to birds, with birdsongs in the audio-dance mix, was active and full of informal and impromptu dance moves. Even eliciting a few startled laughs. Grand fun watching bodies in informal near-abandon.

Please Pass The Remote

I've been following CentralTrak's ongoing "art performance" series that for awhile paralleled and nearly interacted with the Performance Art series at 500X, and this might get added to that already odd mix of performance forms. Again for the Trak, this was art performance, not performance art, but the two share so many syno- and anto-nyms it contrasts and confuses the sames and differents.

Sharing Red Velvet Cake

The Trak announced a half-hour break and we were oddly fatigued, so drove to nearby Deep Elm, where Mocha's warehouse district parking was gill-crammed with what turned out to be a big wedding, and we found one open slot in the lot right up front, walked up the stairs to try the coffee shop door, but it didn't budge. Then we were caught off-guard when the barristo invited us in, so we got our coffee and choco fixes and back to the Trak in time to be the dance gathering into another energetic and entertaining performance, concluding with audience members invited to participate in a red velvet cake.

I'd had enough sugar for the night, so I photographed the event to add to my ongoing coverage of recent art performance in Dallas, when I finish this one and meet a couple other pending deadlines.
 

Shamrock Hotel & Continental Gin Open Houses & Billy Hassell at The Mac

Sunny Sliger's World at Shamrock Hotel Studios

We visited Shamrock Hotel Studios April 14 and found this inside Sunny Sliger's studio. That's her on the left. Sliger will be in Cura Cura Cura that Terry Hays and I are curating at the Bath House Cultural Center next August, but I like being in her world anyway. Sliger's sometimes collaborator Marianne Newsom did the outside of the Shamrock.

Shamrock Exterior collaborated by Marianne Newsom and Sunny Sliger

Lizzy Wetzel   Felt Shoud

Looking up, inside the Shamrock, I found this, but as seemed usual there and at most not-exactly-gallery-like-spaces lately, there didn't seem to be any direct way to find out who did it. I liked it swimming in the skylight space like a dissected shark, especially in those electric colors, but I don't know who to thank for it.

Billy Hassell   Great Blue Heron, Grassy Lake   (detail)   2012   oil on canvas   72 x 96 inches   at The Mac

Nice about The Mac, they usually make finding out who did what easier. Above is a quiet detail in an otherwise busy nature scene not really dominated by a Great Blue Heron, but I prefer cozying up to Hassell's details, like this vivid macro.

Billy Hassell   patterns   screen   reverse

His patterns, too, are exquisite. This is the back of the screen that faces into the big gallery on the right during his show there. A complexity of lush colors in service to a luxury of color and pattern.

Billy Hassell   Rio Blanco At Dusk, Colorado    (detail)   2012   oil on canvas   36 x 80 inches

I suppose I could say the same thing about this detail, except it's a bird. Probably a real bird, although it looks a little fantastical the distinct way Hassell paints them.

stacked jugs at The Mac's Project Room

Stacking jugs, shining light on it, and calling that art is nothing new. DARE (Dallas Artists Research & Exhibition, the nonprofit entity that themac used when they started existence) co-founder Tracy Hicks had a show at the Dallas Museum of Art what, fifteen years ago, of his jars of fogs and other iridescent things that remind me too much of this neat stack of translucency.

Corey Godfrey   untitled   $80

I've been watching Corey Godfrey's yarn painting since the bottom of Art Here Lately #9, and this is the best yet. At The Kettle, where it shines.

Andrea Guay   Red Aspen Study   2012   oil on maple board   6 x 8 inches

On my screen, this red study is a little smaller than real, so consider size in relation to looseness. Then the next one which was hanging unframed in her upstairs Gin Building studio, she wanted me to crop to the edges of the image, which I've done, but I really liked it loose on its kraft paper ground so much better.

Andrea Guay   Connection   2012   oil on kraft paper   30 x 30 inches

I liked this one for its feeling of space and volumes. Color's are nice, too. Andrea told me before she came to Dallas, she sent out a bunch of requests for info about studios, and that the one she sent me was the only reply she got from the whole bunch. I probably told her to contact Bob Nunn, who told her whom to contact about renting the space she has at the Gin, where she's been since she got to Dallas. In fact, she told me, she got the Gin space before she moved her family into their home.

"Yeah, I told her, "I usually answer my emails."

Rest  $200

This was on a shelf in the hall upstairs at the Gin Building open house. The tag nearby told me all the caption information I have. Now whoever's it is will probably use my photograph of it as if they shot it and never heard of me, just because I couldn't find a good place to put my copyright notice. I'm not asking for money, but credit would be nice.

David Anthony Harmon   2012   Elm and Trunk   oil on canvas   $75

You may know about Elm Street. Trunk is where a trunk line for the railroad used to be, slicing an angle through near-downtown Dallas, not far from the Gin Building. There's often puddles there. I know it well, though I've never photographed it this lyrically. David Anthony Harmon seems to be one of the few proud painters who knows to put his name on any public tag on his painting. I might have run this one anyway, but it's nicer to put a name to it.

I was lining up to photograph an especially nice abstract that day, but a very officious voice told me they didn't 'low now photograph taking in there, so I quick-marched out without an explanation of what I was up to. You invite people into your studio, so your work will become better known, and then be rude to them? That's weird.

S K Landscape

Another one of Shoka Kamaria-Ford's paintings was this inner-illuminated commercial landscape I liked it for its odd treatment of light and space..

David W. Klucsarits   Saturday, 2:35 AM   2012   Castilene   3/4 life size   a work in progress

His card, nearby, said that's what his name was, but I had no luck tracking him down to his website, which does not seem to be what it said on the card. I was hoping to identify the sculpture, but this is all I've got, and I'm not sure about that one. Except that I do like the vomit-cantilevered sculpture; that's funny, of course, but it also helps show the breadth and dept of artistry at the Continental Gin Building.

painting by Heather Helen Ray

Here's another one of those "I'm not sure where I got this, but I liked it so much I photographed it anyway, and thanks to David W. Klucsarits, it's now captioned correctly.

That painting is so perfectly lighted. A dark, back-of-downtown place, with blurring lights and people beginning to blur, too. I know it so well. Great, shadowy, dark, feeling. Great setting, too, leaning back on top of a bookcase with a cigar box, dishes and toys.

Ty Milner   Very Large downtown Dallas painting from a photograph   a work in progress

Looks like a major accomplishment in the works. As always, if anyone can steer me right on titles, mediums or sizes for these work I've managed to miss so far, I'd be much obliged. My latest email is on the Contact Us page, and yes, I answer emails.

Good night,
J R
   

Radical Regionalism Panel: Strike Two

Radical Regionalism, a panel discussion hosted by Central Trak 6:30 Thursday March 29 with Wanda Dye, Benito Huerta, Vicki Meek, Charissa Terranova  Matthew Cusick and moderated by Leigh Arnold.

Panelist Chairs, Bottles, Cheap Riser and Microphones
 

I knew better, but I did it anyway. I attended the so-called "Radical Regionalism" panel discussion at UTD's Central Trak in Deep Fair Park Thursday evening.

At least I knew enough not to go to the earlier panel at the DMA, called by those who were there, The KERA panel, where a bunch of White Guys discussed pretty much these same topics, only from an All-White male, upper-crustian, new-to-town point of view. Like this panel's most intelligible speaker, Benito Huerta, I knew there wouldn't be any real racial representation there — nor any awareness of community. But there wasn't much of that rare stuff at the Central Trak think tank, either.

This panel was obviously intended to be politically correct, as only an American graduate university can, although it comprised three White Women, one Black woman, one White man and one Latino — as usual at art events here men, especially of any color, were seriously under-represented with twice as many women on the dais.

The women included a UTD student moderator who commenced the panel by reading aloud long, detailed panelist vitae, then propelled the discussion off in no direction whatsoever by asking the one White guy to talk about his work, while she slowly cycled through projections of his images, the first of which made an apt illustration for this panel's topic and had been used in its publicity, but his newer work, though intelligent and engaging, had little pertinence to the panel's proposed themes.
 

RE gallery founder Wanda Dye and artist Vicki Meek
 

To her left, her professor and good friend, White woman, serious art critic and historian, teacher and freelance curator Charissa Terranova [See Jim Dolan's interview with her a few years ago.) gradually bumped into her usual Marxist, et al. theoretical furrow, although it didn't seem as fiery this time. Maybe she was distracted. Next was White male artist and recent Dallasite Matthew Cusick, whose helicopter-rental aerial photographs underlaid with maps illustrated the publicity, and who talked for nearly twenty minutes about his art and all its layered meanings, neatly side-stepping the discussion topic.

Next right was Wanda Dye, UTA architectural instructor, Urban Design Consultant and gallery founder, whose RE ("repurposing, reclaiming, and recycling") Gallery debuts in The Cedars this fall; and the one Black woman — artist, educator and South Dallas Community Center manager and self-avowed "Philadelphia Yankee" Vicki Meek. Finally, on the far right of stage left, one Hispanic man — artist, teacher, director and curator of The Gallery at UTA, and [Take a breath.] "Co-founder, Executive Director, Co-Director, Vice President and now Emeritus Board Director of Art Lies, a Texas Journal," that nobody mentioned quit publication in June 2011.
 

"Co-founder, Executive Director, Co-Director, Vice President and now
Emeritus Board Director of [the failed art publication] Art Lies," Benito Huerta
 

The experience was unnecessarily heavy on White Women, ethnic artists and off-topic talk — never mind that almost any art panel discussion in these parts that needs Racial and/or Gender Diversity, will get those same two noted art ethnics, and generally Charissa, too, as if there were no other Latin or Black art persons or Art-crit Theorists in all of North Texas. I like Vicki, and I greatly admire some of what she's tried to do in this community, although she snapped at me twice that evening, and Huerta is a remarkably cogent speaker — despite that highfalutin' mess of a former title (Was he kidding?), all of which the UTD student moderator enunciated with a straight face.

I was right on with him on the topic of race. I count crowds. There were 55 persons in attendance, including the panelists, videographer and assorted latecomers who each briefly starred in a rectangular flood of slanting daylight just right of the stage. Six were Black or some shade thereof. Latins are more difficult to gauge. They look like everybody else to me, although sometimes an accent gives one away. There were both Latin and non-Latin accents from the crowd, and not nearly enough questions, certainly nothing provocative — but then I left early.
 

Moderator Leigh Arnold, Dr. Charissa Terranova and recent Dallas Artist Matthew Cusick
 

The moderator did not moderate, but led the discussion far afield from the first, then let it wander in the off-topic wilderness. None of the panelists ever seriously engaged Radical or any other form of Regionalism besides us being here talking about the same old stuff artists always talk about, and where all of our conversations usually devolve anyway — ourselves and our eternal struggles against pick one: racial stereotyping, commercialism, public ignorance, nobody to critique our work. Etc.

So it was essentially tedious, with disconnected fragments of intelligence that cut little ice and led no one into original territory. Audience artists asked, but nobody talked about any serious Sense of Community, how that is created, nurtured or allowed to grow. Altogether, they listed a long and scattered catalog of publications that do not embody the kind of regionalistic attitude in the sky they sought.

But never did anyone mention DallasArtsRevue, which though it does not engage in scholarly art criticism, has been here 33 years and counting, being the first and longest-running floating crap game of art and regional criticism in North Central Texas, where we go out of our way to create resources that directly serve Dallas-area artists. Like these:

a solid list of area Art Schools & Classes; our superb Arts Calendar that always lists every artist, not just the ones you've heard of; The Galleries and Art Space Information page; and the gritty-nitty resources of How to Start Showing Your Work, How to Photograph Art and How to Design & Publish an Invitational Postcard. Then there's the Artists Opportunities page of jobs & competitions, and Dallas & Texas Artists With Websites.

Finally, I got fed up with the idiocy and walked out.

The Lineup: Leigh Arnold, Charissa Terranova, Matthew Cusick, Wanda Dye, Vicki Meek and Benito Huerta

Cassandra Emswiler Gilds the Silk Lily at Oliver Francis

Gilding the Silk Lily - Cassandra Emswiler, Mixed Fruit - Kevin Todora at Oliver Francis, opening 6-9 Saturday, March 24, though April 7

Cassandra Emswiler   Gilding the Silk Lily   detail   2012   mixed media
 

One of the sharper textural delineations. Squares, rectangulars and circlines vs soft and diffuse feather light above the candle and white, bright projection onto sharp, red plaid below. Blues and reds and whites in lights and dark.
 

We walked into the semi-darkness of Oliver Francis gallery's front room seconds after it opened, looked around, investigated a little, and I knew we had, at last, found a show worth writing about. Not that I knew what to say about Cassandra Emswiler's subtle compositions gathered in stacks and piles and clumps on floorings and deckings, risers, umbrellas and whatever elses around the rooms and in the corners. Layers of disjunctive materials in textures, colors, mediums and shape. They drew me, pulled at me, peppered me with questions I could not answer and pleased me surprisingly. Enigmatic combinations a little like middle Frances Bagley on the steep rise up.
 

Cassandra Emswiler   Gilding the Silk Lily   detail   2012   mixed media
 

Probably the most pleasing, almost commercial — due the spiraled swatch books pages — amalgam of shapes and colors in the show, sometimes even mocking each other with red contrasting yellow and deeper reds offsetting the spotty gold-brown-black supporting parabola in beige, brown, gold and whiter than the floor below. And again that bright light spot from under the umbrella and on the wall behind the cloth.
 

At first, Anna says, "Emswiler's room confused and caught me off guard, but as I stood there taking in the arrangements of mostly familiar items, I felt comfortable enough to want to sit on the floor and stay a while." That easy contentment has got to be a a lot of their allure. These deceptively simple pieces are, and they definitively are not confrontational. If you're expecting sculpture to say the sorts of things you've heard all of your watchful, art-appreciating life, these may throw you. I think I know different, although I have my moments when I catch me longing for solids, shapes and emptinesses that represent accepted concepts in the predefined pantheons of art understanding.

But isn't it lovely sometimes to be baffled?
 

Cassandra Emswiler   Gilding the Silk Lily   detail   2012   mixed media
 

A warping, malleable screen, drooping almost to dripping, soft in its unfocused projection yet harsh in its unseen blues in overexposed images just as sharp as they need to be. The rest of the cast in matching hues with splashes of blue light and those tiles everywhere around.
 

I should remind that it was near dark in there. Darker than some of these images show, although the works that incorporate bright, colored bare bulbs or projections shining, may over-accentuate that darkness, since ambient light levels always were plenty to enjoy the subtler details and hidden disambiguation. The pieces had to do with everything sculpture always does but subtler and more expansively. Go see it, and maybe you'll understand or disagree entirely.
 

Cassandra Emswiler   Gilding the Silk Lily   detail   2012   mixed media
 

Pristine white fur with tail vs. hard-edged marble shapes, colors and textures I should have but didn't touch. A gentler but contrasting perch for luxurious cat fur — beauty perhaps without the beast, but with the trimmings.
 

All through exploring this show and writing this story, however, was the ongoing, deep-down, potentially debilitating notion that I might have seen these episodal eruptions of three-dimensional, often oddly synesthetic expressions before, haunted me.

I was still thinking that with any luck, what I'd seen were earlier Emswilers, and though I still wonder where exactly, I realized that they wouldn't have stayed with me if I hadn't been moved by them the time before and the time before that, and those might well have opened me to liking these more.
   

Cassandra Emswiler   Gilding the Silk Lily   detail   2012   mixed media
 

I felt ineptly enchanted with the insect wing tacked to the wall while tethered to a block of square weight amber-gold, else it might fly off. A colorful bit of fantasy I kept staring at, not really sure why.
 

So I tracked down her [downloadable PDF] online CV learning I might have seen them at any number of Dallas venues over the last few years as one gallerist, curator, juror after another recognized their originality and felt need to show them off. Perhaps I should know every Dallas artist, but it's a relief to learn one whose work thrills me like this is a Dallas artist with a rich, local-based vitae.

Because Emswiler's enigmas are wrapped in such disparate things as insect wings and cat fur, leopard skin, swatch books, candles puffing feathers and blazing color bulbs energized by long, crinked cords, odd shadows or other clever projections, they remain memorable, and because her deft sense of composition and diverse materials and mediums and modus operandi are so varied, and almost or all the way through multied in the media, they make us ponder and wonder. I hope I get to see more of her work, and after that, more still. And that, now I've written about them, I'll remember where I saw them last when I see them next.
 

Cassandra Emswiler   Gilding the Silk Lily   detail   2012   mixed media
 

I think of this as cubes and tubes and rectangles with a wicked straight up-slanting shadow of Pisa. Red, brown and the inevitable grays both real and projected mixing my dreams and the artist's. Shapes inside forms reverberating in as simple a composition as was there. Co-starring an off-stage light stage right — but don't ignore the talented ensemble of floor tiles.
 

NOTE: I rarely ask artists about their shows I'm still trying to understand, but I didn't want to mislabel images, so when I asked gallerist Kevin Ruben Jacobs for the show list, he referred me to the artist, who told me these were all one piece in one show called Gilding the Silk Lily, so that's what I've gone with down this page, if repeatedly. I almost asked for a price list, but thinking through the show, the idea of expensing unfolding piles of conceptual brainstorms begged too many questions. I didn't bother, although there's several that, if I had more room and less to fill it, I'd love to own, priceless though they may be.

Xpo excerpts, rubber rubbings & food art on a wet night

500XPO - John Aasp, Joshua Banks, Willie Baronet, Michael Blair, Jeff Bradley, Lindsey Brown, John Calabrese, Jim Clement, Kristen Cochran, Kenneth Collins, Jack Cornell, Carrie Crumbley, Andrew Currey, Jose Dominguez, Kathleen Donovan, Kathryn Falvo, Cydney Ferguson-Brey, Jessica Fuentes, Jonathan Garcia, Devyn Gaudet, Lori Giesler, Timothy Griffin, Steve Hamilton, Blake Hampton, Jessica Hargrave, Stuart Hausmann, Ayesha Hayat, Lauren Herbst, Amy Herzel, Ronnit Ilan, Shawn Jackson, Alison Jardine, Graham Jones, Kelsey Kilcrease, Matthew Koons, Philip Lambert,Travis LaMothe, Seth Lawrence, Matthew Lee, Tsun-Chuan Liang, Kristin Lockhart, Lucas Martell, Nathan McGuire, Oscar Mejia, Thomas Menikos, Nathan Milas, Ashley Milow, Tiffany Milow, Mark Mueller, Shayne Murphy, Anh-Thuy Nguyen, Brandon Nichols, Irby Pace, Ricardo Paniagua, Alizsha Pennington, Simone Riford, Andrew Riggins, Evett Rolsten, Jessica Sailors, Timothy Seifert, Janan Siam, Kristina Smith, Olivia Smith, Kent Sollenberger, Alison Starr, Frank Tringall, Magan Van Groll, Michael Westfried, Tori Whitehead, Kristen Works, Michael Wynne at 500X, jurried by Aaron Parazette, through March 4

It rained that night.

I forget how many places we looked at art that night. I do remember it rained, and that inside every gallery was a mini gallery of wet, dripping umbrellas that people just plopped there irregardless of what it made the art presentation area look like, so it did and did not look like art. 500X' pit [above] was no exception for their annual, juried Xpo show, that we weren't very impressed with — it hadn't the high quality nor unified look of my favorites of those competitions over the years, but two pieces by the same artist stood out.

I can imagine — and remember — how a single curator can impart a special look to an otherwise unrelated body of work submitted for competition, but how some jurors do that escapes me, yet several have. Rather than looking unified, this show looked too much like one of the venerable 500X's Open Shows, where you pays your money and your art is in, few questions asked. Still, there were a spare few gems mixed in with the too much of visual fill.

See our previous coverage of the Expos and Xpos in A Grahic Art Sensibility and Visiting 500 Expo 2003 and last year's Expo 2011

(view from the other side)

   Alison Starr   Phant   (two views)   2012   dryer lint, stuffed animal parts, thread   7 x 2.5 x 3.5 inches

The small image, viewed from right right, looks more like an elephant. The larger one, from the opposite side, shows more texture and detail, the best of which is not at all elephantine. The object size is probably between the two. The object itself is absurd, but not a mere wad of dryer lint. Not happenstance. Done carefully with precision, yet loose, nothing hidden. The thread, stitches, hairs all right there, adding to the joy of it.

Alison Starr   And Then What   2011

I've been watching Starr's work for years, and I have a ceramic bowl she made that I love, but she jumps mediums and styles and presentations like she doesn't have the faintest notion what she's up to. Yet she assuredly does. Something perverse in me wants her to show a singular style, a straight line in the sand, but either that's not in her or it's not coming out. Video, performance art, little stuffed birds floating — each new piece in each new medium offers a new discovery, usually enigmatic. Now, why'd she do that? I wonder, then settle into what's going on before my eyes. I still wonder, but I also enjoy.

Tour - Jesse Morgan Barnett at Marty Walker, through March 17

Jesse Morgan Barnett   Such Customary Writings 2E   2011   photographs   dimensions variable

I greatly admired the rubber crushmarks on concrete at Marty Walker — the artist terms them "an aestheticized punctuation to a violent decrease in speed." They are what's left after a collision on the highway. And though I've got used to Walker's changeups of her winding warehouse space, the crush of humans through her latest reorganization crammed too many people into too small pockets, some where we couldn't even view the work for the viewers. The only visual relief was the video room, but the vid was insipid and the room was mostly empty with nothing to see, except three people conversing about something else. Ever since that show, though, I've been watching places where rubber met the road and other abuttments and spaces.

Three Squares - Melody Hay at Davis Foundry, through March 31

Melody Hay painting from her Three Squares show at Davis Foundry in Oak Cliff

Everything was food or food-related at Melody Hay's show at Davis Foundry, including a splatter of stainless-ware on the floor out front and real food neatly arranged almost like tiny art inside. We noshed and looked, and it took me awhile but gradually I got into the art, too. I'm still figuring out what exactly draws me. But I like the style of presentation more than content. Her almost informally loose amalgam of paint on wood sucks me right in.

I've been staring at this piece — this is the one — for more than two weeks and I've only just now realized part of the three-dimensionality I like so much is that the plate's center circle is transparent, floating over real wood-grain wood. That may account for the odd bit of three-dimensionality I admire so much here, and none of the other, more ordinary paintings there did it for me.

The painter took her time to tell us exactly what all those bits of food texture were, but I didn't care, I was still absorbed in wondering about the apparent depth

I've long been a sucker for the tonalities available from painting on wood or panel. That and the only slightly abstracted reality of the colorful foodstuff, the floating circle and not at all the painting of a drawing of a glass of water. It's the technique that grabs my attention, and not many of the pieces do that, but this one certainly does.

I made other photos of other work there and elsewhere, but the more I look at them, the less I care.

Gregory Horndeski: 30-years in the Art Biz

Horndeski: The First Thirty Years - Gregory Horndeski at Norwood Flynn Gallery, through March 3 2012

Gregory Horndeski Testing Product
 

I've known Greg since he was just a few months into his thirty years as a professional artist. I haven't seen him much since he and his wife moved to Santa Fe in April 1996 — according to the text around the painting of his New Mexico home down this page, but even before he recognized me this time, we were engaged in one of those dense, pointed and consistently amusing conversations I've always admired him for — along with his dedication to his art and his entertaining sense of fun.

He was attired in high-tone Santa Fe couture black with bright-braid banded black hat, matching coat and a lush, color-threaded black dress shirt and black slacks terminating in radiant, paint-splotched sneakers his gallerists insisted he wear. I remember the first pair of those once-white shoes he'd got paint all over many years ago, but it seemed anachronistic and slightly demeaning he'd still have to show up for his Thirty Year Retrospective wearing the latest versions of cute shoes.

I've always liked him and his work, which has gently grown more painterly sophisticated, without losing the primitive edge of his unpretentious style. When we first met, he had been a math teacher learning to love the work of Vincent Van Gogh from a big glossy book. He wanted to paint lots of thick color on canvas with a palette knife, and that need changed the trajectory of his life.
 

Gregory Horndeski   How Can Some People Be So Stupid   1985   acrylic on linen   25 x 31 inches   $3,500
image provided by the artist and extensively tweaked by J R Compton
 

He missed the bin a couple times and had to scramble for the little white ball, even lost it altogether once. After he perfected his trajectory, however, the white ball dropped lazily into the black boxy bin well up the wall from the painting, fell through the attached, S-curving pipe and into the intricate and interconnected raceway of the metal facing for Pinball Painting No. 11, seen on the far right edge of that photo. It bounced back and forth, slowly descending the face of the verdant treescape like a mild Pachinko machine, dropped into the tray below, and Greg thwocked it up again.

If you look carefully, about a third of the way up the bare sliver of that painting, you'll see a white ball lodged into its edge. When I pointed it out to Gregory, he explained his precise measurements of radii that should have precluded it from doing that. I suggested a wad of gum just there to keep it from pocketing, but then we agreed the ball would probably stick to it. Anna suggested he "tilt" the piece, and careful not to topple the complexity of attached bin, tunnel and painting, he gave it a careful bonk, and the ball tumbled down the spring-strung face.

Note, too, that the artist has obsessively lettered long, unparagraphed texts and staffs of musical notes onto the black frames around this and other pieces down through his first thirty years of painting. That's another Horndeski hallmark. White, hand-lettered explanations and explorations on the frame all around the piece. Up and down the sides, across the top, sometimes upside down and across the bottom and, if the piece hangs higher than most of us stand, the text likely continues inside-out and backwards as well as right-side-up, up and down the frame.
 

Gregory Horndeski   Trying to Play Ball Where They Can   1986   acrylic   42 x 54 inches
not in show but uniquely Dallas-based
 

If so, there'll be a mirror handy, so you can read the mirror-reversed text left to right and down to right-side up. I found just such a mirror on the top right of another piece in the back gallery, that I must have been the first to grab, since it was wet-paint stuck to the thick black surface. I nudged it unstuck and read some mirror text, quickly tiring of that game, then started wondering how he'd shipped a wet-paint painting from Santa Fe.

I remember when Greg amazed himself earning hist first solo show at Alternate Gallery deep on Main Street very early in his early 80s career trajectory, the fact that he used to — may still — charge by the square inch, and his home in the kitsch-clad Sherwood Forest Apartments on Northwest Highway, gill-filled with his work — stacks of it — in every room, cranny, nook and closet. Now he shows farther and wider, and though there may be a few unsold pieces tucked into a storage space, his work is probably not stored all through the house anymore, although a few pieces in this retrospective have, like old friends, been around for decades.

Long an admirer of his work, I am privileged to own this 1988 Gregory Horndeski that stares down at me as I write this and almost everything else. It's one of the most interesting paintings in my collection and an elite member of my "scary art pieces," thus an absolute favorite. It may be the most controversial Horndeski piece ever, although I've been out of touch long enough to not know anymore. It is likely still the only Gregory Horndeski painting published and written about in Art Forum, and I am happy he let me pay it off over time.
 

Gregory Horndeski   KKK Grand Dragon and Its Ghoulish, Night-crawling Minions   1988
acrylic on board   25 x 31 inches   J R Compton Collection
 

In 1988, a couple of Years of the Dragon ago, my friend Margie Handy and I produced The Dragon Show in the downtown Dallas Public Library's big street-level gallery. I expected fine fine art and careful arts & crafts dragons — and we got many superb pieces. But hoping for more cutting-edge work, I invited Greg to do something different, off-handedly suggesting "a KKK Grand Dragon."

Greg ran with the idea, surprising us with this startling piece — a lurid landscape dominated by a giant, purple, winged creature with a high tail and tall, white-pointed-hood, and a gaping toothy reptilian mouth breathing streaks of yellow flames against a swirling indigo night sky scattered with stars, and standing among a seething tableau of writhing worms, trees and four dark men hung from their branches.

The library didn't seem to mind Greg's portrayal of the dragon or the brown worms who only come out at night, but it objected to the portrayal of America's more than century-long history of lynching, and despite having books that photographically illustrated that long history upstairs, they refused to allow the piece in our otherwise innocuous dragon show, because they worried it might offend someone.

So I bought it and have been writing about and showing it ever since.
   

Gregory Horndeski   Self-portrait After St. Sebastian   1991   acrylic   28 x 22 inches
 

Although Greg may have included himself in other, especially early paintings, neither this nor the one other, Alfred Einstein-like visage I saw on the CD catalog, resembles Horndeski in any overt way, and I don't recall any actual self-portraits among the paintings. Although certainly not all of his work is represented in that digital directory.

I remember a neat and crisply colorful series of smaller paintings I often lusted after that showed a reclusive academic — him? — in little offices on the remote tops of mountains many years ago. I think I remember identifying those figures as Gregory, although I'd have to see them again to know if they actually looked like him, besides figuratively being him. Note the red-shirted guy with his head in his hands low in the next image down.

Saint Sebastian was an early Catholic saint martyred during the early Roman persecution of Christians, and he is often portrayed in art and poetry tied to a post and/or shot with arrows. Once rescued from that outrageous fortune, Sebastian again criticized the emperor, and was clubbed to death for it. So you can perhaps imagine why artists so identify with Saint S, although this green-eyed, green-clad guy etched in blood and splintered through by trees, only vaguely resembles Gregory, it is one of the most human-like resemblances in Horndeski's history, reminding that self-portraits are not so much about visual exactitudes as deep-down feelings.
 

Gregory Horndeski   Pipe Bomb for Artists   2003   metal pipes, hand mirror, plumb line and bob   43 x 17 x 3 inches  

I did mention obsessive, didn't I?

As you can see from the selections arranged chronologically down this page, Horndeski's work follows many dissimilar paths that sometimes dovetail. Some serious, eloquent and original; many beautiful; a few pretty goofy yet altogether human. In some, we can almost hear the music he's noted around the edges, and in others we happily lose ourselves in the adjunct literary minutiae. Then there's this short, odd and sporadic series of semi-sculptural work that, although it combines all those descriptions, still defies easy classification — his fully 3-D pipe bombs in metal, wood and paint.

There's a January 31 2000 They're Playing Your Song pipe bomb broadly notated and neatly framed in massive but short selections from the "Funeral March from F. Chopin's Piano Sonata Opus 35 in B-sharp Minor," leaving little room for a small painting including a tiny blue-sweatered hero pounding an office desk in anguish in a graveyard on a hilltop against mountains and a distant orange sky that almost obscures a planet-pocked black cosmos. Six months later an equally ornate June 6 2000 work, The Supplicant's Pipe Bomb appeared with its self-story. A month after that on July 1 he added a Pipe Bomb for the Lonely.

Then on April 15 2003 Horndeski painted the inevitable Pipe Bomb for Artists: "What's the matter? Got painter's block? Oh, it's much worse than that, huh. You can't see any reason to continue painting. Boy, I hear you. An artist's life can be a miserable 1. Especially if you actually expect to make a lot of money & have people drooling over your work. Why you probably have a better chance making it as a professional baseball player." etc. Which was followed on March 6 2006 by a Pipe Bomb for Lawyers.

With few exceptions through all his work, there's always at least a glint or two of the dark cosmos as seen from earth either blatant in the painted backdrop or hidden back there, to remind us who and where we are, and the relatively minor part we play in the life of the universe — another Horndeski hallmark that continues through the decades.
 

Gregory Horndeski   A Eureka Moment   2009   acrylic on masonite and wood    30 x 36 x 3 inches   $5,900
image provided by Norwood Flynn Gallery and extensively tweaked by J R Compton

He is a different sort of artist who has long made pictures of things, places and people we recognize in the human condition, aesthetic and personal. More recently in the progression of his work, here represented by a chronological presentation over Gregory's last thirty years, he has rendered landscape realities that look like abstractions, with plenty of plant life and greenery spatulaed onto vivid, three-dmensional surfaces. The piece Norwood Flynn is using to promote this retrospective [below] may be my new favorite, and I'd like to use it to promote this story on the DARts cover, except it doesn't look that much like all that preceded it. It is beautiful, lushly green and thick of paint and texture.

It does and it does not look like reality, but it is thickly redolent of another eureka moment of, we assume, the painter fishing on a rainy autumn Day. That's him with a light blue hat, black top and blue jeans on the green shore just left of center along a dark roiling creek at the bottom.

Gregory Horndeski continues deftly dancing his personal visions, avoiding the intervening echoes of other artists' styles and techniques, and all but ignoring the rest of art history, staying true to a personal expression, which in the last few years is being almost overgrown with lush flora.

These visions are evocative, almost realistic and deeply personal, like a favorite memory playing in thick, dense paint.
 

Gregory Horndeski   Fishing on a Rainy Autumn Day   2010   acrylic   22 x 26 inches
 

A CD of the artist's documentation of some of his work accompanied the show, and it was a treat to see his full 30 years of work — even though they're not all there, allowing me to visit old favorites and deeply miss others, while catching up with new visions and study his 30-year history I saw begin in Dallas toward the end of the last century.

Couple of Quickie Stops on an other night entirely

Continuum - Michael O'Keefe at Valley House through March 31   Baptism by Fire - Bill Haveron, Seditions - William Powhida, Humming Music and Grinding Teeth - Jeff Gibbons at the MAC, through March 31   Images: Past/Presence - Gary Bishop at Afterimage, through April 24

We tried to go to the second gallery first, but traffic was a booger on Central we foolishly thought would be quick between. We ended up on the Tollway, turned right seemed like miles, could not talk the valetteers into just letting me park, like last time. "We'll only be there a few minutes," we promised. And parked across the street behind a wall, and walked in. No biggie really, but it seemed rude when way more "staff" parked in the back lot than showed their cheery faces inside.

Kathy Boortz   Royal Tern   2010   nearly life size   found and sculpted metal and wood

Met more valet-haters as we left as promised, a few minutes later, and I saw a mostly white & gray Kathy Boortz I recognized and knew by name. It had color, but no ID. I had been set to enjoy, hoped to stare into art space and dream, but everything was white. Or gray. One squiggly patch of light blue some guy bought as I wondered if anybody ever did that at openings. I wrote this down, then had to fetch it out of The Slider in the middle of the night in my pajama bottoms tucked into my sox 'cuz it was cold when I put them on this morning, then watched a nine-hour movie.

"Drained of color. The life sucked out of it." Too pristine everything, chipped statues to vacant drawings on all the walls. Intricate enough gray, but nyeh. Then out into the valet courtyard, up the hill past two square spots on the grass against the bldg I should have got away parking on the way in, precluding the whole valet whazoo, met three other valet-haters, two said the show on McKinney was great and funny, so we got more interested.

David McCullough hangs great show at themac

Down the Tollway, around and up McKinney, stopped in the lot to contemplate a parker adjusting his angle, then found two more slots this late at amac opening night and took the one straight-in. Inside we found L A in-jokes and too much art you had to read to get, and yet another Bill Haveron hoohah. I'd give him a break if he was from around here, and we hadn't seen him the weekend before.

Part of a Haveron blitz for no apparent reason, and when that happens, there's often a third or fifth or seventeenth showing at themac too. I'm guessing because their owner is in cahoots or the promoter pays some bills. Happens too often to be coincident. Wanna buy a big-time art guy from outta town yet another show in Dig B? Give themac some cash. They ent got the sense to find their own.

We ended up ending up at the Afterimage, where I almost always find something to dream off on, and did see one too many photo of too many ex-Presidents, but they did it for me more better than the feature, which was tried, true and tedious journaphotolist with nary a nod to art but some famous faces — major chagrin after he was ballyhooed as "a long-time major influence on the Dallas photography scene."

I couldn't see it. I always liked him when we'd show up at the same news back when we were both photog journalists, but I didn't see it then, either.Though I jumped at the chance to friend him last week, thought we could catch up. Didn't he have a brother who fixed cars?

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