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  Seashore and Boulders, by Tony Saladino |
Maturity Has Taught Artist To Relax
Maturity Has Taught Artist To Relax By Erin Keever Like landscapes? Gallery Shoal Creek has got 'em. The exhibition Contrasting Views: Jerry Ruthven and Tony Saladino features nostalgic vistas by Ruthven paired with more adventurous compositions by Saladino. After a visit to the gallery and a chat with Saladino, I realized this group of work represents a departure for the Fort Worth-based artist, one that resonates a revelatory tone. Saladino is increasingly interested in the act of painting, or what he calls the dichotomy between "process and product." The crux of his painting, he says, is the division of space. Using the Fibonacci number series and the Golden Mean as the bases for his design, he overlays formal elements, accentuating areas of the pictorial space (through the ratio represented as 1.618). Ideas of naturally occurring phenomena in the universe are a great part of the artist's awareness. Ironically, relying on these structural underpinnings liberates Saladino from past constraints. He admits he doesn't worry about what he once thought of as "mistakes," and now appreciates his newfound expressive freedom in ways that coincide with maturity. In this exhibition, most successful are Saladino's depictions of Hill Country geography flanked by Diebenkorn-like exercises in colorful stripes and shapes as well as gestural lines. In "Stream and Bed," Central Texas stones sit satisfactorily between an abstract section on the left and mounted print proofs on the right. Saladino sometimes incorporates his preliminary proofs into his paintings to underscore "process" or the stages of image making. After nearly 30 years of creating art, Saladino admits he doesn't struggle so much with determining a definitive stylistic identity. He's learned to relax a bit in his work, and from here the view looks promising. (Contrasting Views: Jerry Ruthven and Tony Saladino continues 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays -Saturdays through Dec.18, Gallery Shoal Creek, 1500 W. 34th St., 454-6671.) |
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 Cutouts, by Ann Glazer |
You Wonder What You Can't See By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Ann Glazer draws all over the place. Actually, she really undoes drawing, isolating lines and forms and even the artmaking materials themselves. In the middle of the gallery at Women & Their Work sit two large wood platforms piled several feet high with crumpled drawings. Some are vigorous jumbles of black lines on white; others are black Rorschach-like blots dropped on yellowing pages of "The Classical Reader." A few color drawings dot the pile. At the gallery entrance are a pair of enormous crumpled drawings. On two walls are some framed similar drawings; on the gallery's other two walls are black paper cut-outs of Glazer's energetic splatterings of abstract forms and lines, each cutout greatly enlarged. The cut-outs are drawings essentially, only they're not on something. If the rather sparse installation as a whole comes off as too self-consciously hermetic, the combination of Glazer's individual works carry appeal. The crumpled drawings -- small or large -- don't reveal their physical entirety, making you wonder what you can't see. Then again, the cut-outs aren't exactly complete drawings either. Or are they? What is a finished drawing? Glazer doesn't tell. (Ann Glazer continues 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays through Dec. 23, Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca St., free, 477-1064.) |
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 Untitled, by Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui |
Portable Worlds By Jacqueline May Gallery 106, a space within Flatbed World Headquarters dedicated to showing contemporary Cuban art, is currently presenting black-and-white photography by Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui. In the artist's series, "Sabina's Letters," part of Portable Worlds, he has composed images in which video correspondence sent to him by his sister is projected onto everyday objects from the artist's U.S. environment. This is then manipulated by the use of multiple exposures. The effort to create a connection with a distant, beloved person through art results in a series of quiet, poetic images. For example, one untitled picture is of a happy child held by an older man, presumably his father. This loving image is projected onto the side of a stack of books, as if to suggest that their lives are recorded therein. A wistfulness and sense of distance is present throughout the show, and in some photographs, it seems as if the artist feels his immediate surroundings are less real and vital than the images sent to him from afar. An untitled work features a video landscape turned upside down and projected onto a series of file folders. This piece contrasts the freedom of movement in a landscape with bureaucracy. The theme of writing and paperwork is continued in another work, in which blended and fragmented family images are projected onto a partially open spiral notebook. It appears to be a visual pun on letter-writing in the form of video correspondence. |
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 photo by Bret Brookshire |
Communing in the Air By Robert Faires When we look at art or talk about art or even listen to other people talk about art, we come at it from the ground up. We're standing on our legs or sitting on something that does the job of our legs, supporting us from underneath, pushing up from the floor or ground, to which we're rooted. It's really no different from so much of the rest of our lives, in our classrooms, in our offices, in our homes. Bend down to knee level and look across the space you're in; it's the same in almost every room: all legs. In fact, it's so common that we don't even think about it, about being so earthbound. But it colors and influences the way we move and work and act and interact, how we receive information and even how we observe and appreciate beauty. Now, what if you were able to erase all those legs? You still have the seats, still have the tables and desks to work from, but they're all hovering above the floor. You'd be liberated from the ground, free to listen to, look at, work on, play with, consider the world around you, from the openness of the air. Think about how you feel suspended in space: lighter, less encumbered, more relaxed, and yet also more energized, playful. It's the feeling of a swing, that of the front porch and that of the school yard. That's what awaits you at Arthouse right now. The 3,000-square-foot exhibition area of the Jones Center for Contemporary Art has been transformed into a large open room in which tables, desks, and seating for 60 people all hang from the ceiling by cables. All of the pieces are made of birch plywood and are so spare of design as to give even a Scandinavian architect pause -- the tables are essentially flat boards and the seats little more than two planks bolted together at right angles -- but they're attached to the metal lighting grid on the ceiling in a way that allows them to swing back and forth and, in the case of the seats for individuals, to swivel a full 360 degrees. That may not sound like much, and when you first see it, it may not even look like much -- hell, it's a roomful of swings, and what's so remarkable about that? But when you're in it, actually sitting in one of the swings yourself, with other people who are also in the swings, then it becomes this surprisingly enjoyable, invigorating experience. It feels different than a classroom or office or library. There's a sense of the world being oriented differently, from the sky down instead of the ground up. It's a looser, less formal, and more flexible world. None of that imposed order and immobility, the lines of chairs and columns of desks locked rigidly in place. The seats are arranged but not in stiff geometric patterns. They're all over the space, some in small groups, some apart, almost private. The arrangement shows uncommon sensitivity to space, with lots of breathing room around the seats, so that in a cluster of swings or even at a table, you can feel solitude, room for reflection. But the distance is manageable enough that you can swing over it for an intimate chat with someone in an adjacent swing. At least that's what I found myself doing during the talk by Matthew Geller, the New York artist who designed this installation for Arthouse (which he has whimsically titled sixty weak knees). As he showed slides of some of his other work -- projected, by the way, on one of the tables, which was turned on its side and hung so it could serve as a screen -- I gently rocked back and forth, in a constant, almost meditative motion that would have been disturbing in a traditional environment but, as I noticed in looking around me, was the norm here. It was as if we were all on our personal little porch swings, with all the sense of serenity and neighborliness and perhaps nostalgia that association brings with it, but by virtue of being in this common space, we were all swinging together. Which is what made it feel perfectly okay to lean over in the direction of Arthouse Director Sue Graze to offer a comment on the program. Because of the physical setup, I was able to -- and inclined to -- interact with others in the space in ways I might not have otherwise. That was precisely what Regine Basha and Kevin Alter had in mind when they conceived "Lounge!," the Arthouse exhibition of which sixty weak knees is the centerpiece. Basha, an adjunct curator at Arthouse, and Alter, associate dean of the UT School of Architecture, shared an interest in how communities interact with art and architecture, and they wanted to find a way to carry the topic to a larger audience, to set up a forum for discussion in which talks would be given and films shown and dialogues entered into but in which the space itself would generate that discussion. To that end, they concocted a proposal for artists to design the space for this Arthouse forum, a "lounge," they called it, trusting the artists to interpret that word in any way they chose. The only stipulations they made were that the designs had to accommodate the screening of films and a fairly large number of people. Of course, Basha and Alter had no idea that their lounge would take the form of a roomful of swings. They didn't know what to expect from the responses. All they hoped was that they would be inventive and different. On that score, they were not disappointed. One proposed using dozens of soft sculpture columns that could be repositioned to create temporary walls or benches or bleachers. Another suggested turning the interior of Arthouse into an old-fashioned drive-in, with a movie screen on one wall and real cars jammed into the space pointing at it. Proposals were based on sound, on the original topography of the site, on the idea of an "anti-lounge." In all, 25 proposals came in, each one coming at the concept of "Lounge!" from a very different -- and imaginative -- angle. Fortunately for us, Basha and Alter have displayed them in the office exhibition space of the Jones Center. They offer some tantalizing alternatives to sixty weak knees. But once the curators saw Geller's proposal, the other submissions were doomed to be just alternatives. sixty weak knees connected with their vision in a way that was immediately captivating. Its design combined simplicity and elegance and subtlety, and the roughness of it was very much in keeping with the raw character of the space. Those swings seemed to belong among the exposed brick and metal beams. And Geller took care to address where they belonged in the space, putting deliberate thought in their placement but leaving enough flexibility so they could be moved for different events. The artist had put considerable effort into his design -- he told the Arthouse audience that he determined the height for the swings after measuring every chair in his own house to see what height they were -- and it showed. The curators consulted with a local engineer, Jerry Garcia, to evaluate the feasibility of the proposal, and once he gave it the green light, sixty weak knees moved toward reality. With the phenomenal contributions of artists Jason Singleton and James Brandon, the swings were built and installed over a week in mid-November, and the exhibition opened on the 20th of the month. Since then, the installation has been gathering curious stares from folks peering through the wall-sized window that fronts the space, wondering if the museum there has given way to a furniture showroom. Geller acknowledged the installation's utilitarian appearance, joking that it "looks like some perverse IKEA thing." People wander in, slowly maneuvering about the swings, wondering if it's really okay to sit in them, then tentatively testing them out. But when they settle in and push off and those feet leave the floor, a change takes place in them, a softening of their demeanor, an easing. They've let gravity slip from their shoulders and found a new place to be, and to be with others, communing in the air. "Lounge!" continues through Jan. 16 at Arthouse, 700 Congress. For more information, call 453-5312 or visit www.arthousetexas.org. |
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 Woven Bamboo, by Andy Goldsworthy, Kiinagashima-cho, Japan, Nov. 29, 1987 |
Art as Big as the Great Outdoors By Robert Faires There's big art, and there's big art. For an example of the latter, drop by Wooldridge Park this Saturday, where a team of local artists and citizens will be creating some really big art. I mean, huge. As big as, well, the park. In fact, the park will be the work of art, the whole block transformed through the addition and arrangement of dozens of hay bales and other natural materials. This "community land drawing," as it's labeled, is inspired by the work of Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, whose work is featured in the Austin Museum of Art's new exhibition. "Andy Goldsworthy: Mountain and Coast Autumn Into Winter" focuses on a body of work the artist created in the mountains and coastal areas of Japan in 1987. Goldsworthy typically makes his sculptures in and of nature, constructing them from wood, water, stones, earth, and such, then leaving them to be changed by weather and time. The Wooldridge Park homage is sponsored by AMOA in partnership with the Downtown Austin Neighborhood Association, the Austin Parks Foundation, the Downtown Austin Alliance, Austin Green Art, and the Rhizome Collective. Local artists Randy Jewart, Beverly Penn, Margo Sawyer, and architect Chris Taylor are leading the creative enterprise, but they truly want the community's involvement. To that end, they encourage all of us to swing by the park at Ninth and Guadalupe streets and lend a hand in its transformation between noon and 4pm Saturday. If you want to get a sense of how they developed the project, they'll be discussing it at AMOA, 823 Congress, 11am-noon. If you need any more incentive, light snacks will be available. For more information, visit www.amoa.org. When you visit the museum to see how Goldsworthy does it, you'll be able to see his own transformation of Austin, albeit a much smaller one. He visited the city in September of this year, and during an installation at a private collector's home, he fashioned a fragile sculpture of spider web and reed on the banks of Lake Austin. Six photographs, collectively titled "Web Drawings: Austin, Texas," document this work. It's their first public display, and they're accompanied by this poem: Curled rush lines The words offer a window into our surroundings, the outdoor Austin that means so much to us, through artistic alchemy. Experience the change, on scales small and large. "Andy Goldsworthy: Mountain and Coast Autumn Into Winter" runs Dec. 11-Feb. 20 at the Austin Museum of Art – Downtown, 823 Congress. |
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