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  Miss It by Daphane Park |
The Glamour Of Daphane Park's Art The Glamour Of Daphane Park's Art By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Daphane Park is a true original. When she was based in Austin, the University of Texas master's graduate impressed with shows at D Berman Gallery and Women & Their Work. Park's imaginative oil paintings on thick chunks of wood gave us a glimpse of her fantastical cosmos, each image a swirl of color and form that looked like very odd topographical maps. Or were they microscopic views of some heretofore unknown element of nature? No matter -- they were beautiful. Now Park, who lives and works in New York, has added people to her strange, singular world in "The True Originals" at Austin's Volitant Gallery. Park culled images -- or parts of images -- from discarded fashion magazines, using half-torsos or disembodied, wispy arms as a starting point for her sinuous and eccentric characters. Layering on gouache, watercolor and clear coat, Park makes the magazine images disappear and morph into her mostly faceless but sexually charged feminine critters. "Miss It (Our Lady of Murky Waters)" twists out of glassy water, her reflection mirroring her curvaceous, corseted body, her straight mane of whitish-blond hair (Cousin Itt from "The Addams Family," anyone?) obscuring her face but for a mouth full of glinting teeth. It's interesting to see how the world-traveling Park (she recently took an extended trip deep within the Amazonian rainforest) is developing her own compelling cosmology. It would be too facile to categorize Park's imagery as only surreal. She ooches just beyond surreal to a new level. Meta-surreal? Or perhaps just truly original. ("The True Originals: Daphane Park" continues 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, noon to 6 p.m. Sundays through Aug. 12. Volitant Gallery, 320 Congress Ave. Free. 236-1240. www.volitant.com.) |
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 Candace Briceño |
Austin-born artist broadens her landscape By V. Marc Fort Candace Briceño's mixed-media solo show at Women & Their Work, "Nevermore," draws inspiration from many sources, including the adolescent musings she encounters as a schoolteacher as well as the picturesque vistas she saw growing up on her family's South Austin farm. All the elements of Briceño's life -- including children, landscapes and relationships -- converge on the canvas and within her felt-based sculptures, yielding art that is simultaneously savvy, creative, colorful, humorous and complex. Born and reared in Austin, Briceño was a creative child who passed the time helping her grandmother complete artistic projects around the house, she says. "My grandmother spoke Spanish only, so our dialogue was through drawing. I was always drawing for her," says Briceño. Although her grandmother was not an artist by trade, "she did embroidery stuff (and other projects) more because the family was not well-to-do . . . to beautify her home." Briceño graduated from Johnston High School in 1989, unsure of what she might study in college or pursue as a career. Before she jumped into life at the University of Texas, Briceño's parents encouraged her to take a scattershot of classes at Austin Community College until she was bowled over by a lightbulb-flashing, "eureka" moment. "Most parents wouldn't have done that," Briceño says with an air of gratitude. "I was also lucky that my first art class at ACC happened to be with Sydney Yeager, and I absolutely fell in love with it. Everything just clicked and made sense." In conversation, Briceño speaks fast. On the canvas, her abilities are poignant, whip-smart and pervasively sharp. That intelligence -- along with guidance from her mentor, UT associate professor Michael Mogavero -- helped her breeze through the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas. From there, she earned a master of fine arts degree from the Art Institute of Chicago, among the most prestigious art schools in the world. The Windy City's bitter climate helped Briceño expand her artistic fortitude. She was required to complete quickly executed landscapes, her tubes of paint tucked tightly between her clothing and body to keep them from freezing. "Every day I was downtown, I would walk through the Art Institute museum, even if it was just for five minutes," Briceño says. "When you enter the Monet room, you think of color, and how landscape can actually be nonstatic and more time-specific." While strolling the Monet room's parquet floors, Briceño found the inspiration for four of her current exhibit's hand-dyed felt installations: "Fall," "Spring," "Winter" and "Summer." The exquisite pieces are composed of square felt patches that have been manicured and painstakingly clipped to resemble grass through the seasons of the year. Unlike many Art Institute graduates who stay in Chicago or rush off to New York, Briceño came home to be with family and friends in Austin, where she teaches art at Mendez Middle School. But the three years away proved invaluable to her artistic growth. "She works hard here in Austin to be known outside of town but is genuinely happy to stay and be an Austin artist," says Dana Friis-Hansen, executive director of the Austin Museum of Art. Briceño's first affiliation with Women & Their Work was volunteering at its old Fifth Street location. In 2003, she was picked for one of the gallery's juried shows. And now with her solo show, Briceño has come full circle. With Briceño's work also being featured in group exhibits in Dallas, Marfa, Miami and Chicago, her national profile has begun to expand -- right along with Austin's. "She's getting attention (around the country), which is great for her," Friis-Hansen says. "I like Candace's bravery to work with untraditional materials like felt, using her painting background to think about the colorful ways she can transform it. She's got a magical imagination that produces unexpected landscapes: part surrealism, part abstract expressionism and part collage." "Some of the drawings took a month and a half to do," Briceño says. "A lot of it, if I put it on paper how much I would get per hour for the time it took, I'd never get it back. I know the creation definitely comes from my desire and love for making the work. "I'm hoping that someone loves it in the same way, and wants to buy it and take it into their house," she says. "And if not, I get great compliments on it, and that's enough for me. It really is." |
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 Licorice by Sarah Greene Reed |
HEAT By Nikki Moore The high tech culture we live in has brought a seemingly new reality debate into play: whether or not virtual reality tools are appropriate and healthy enough to be used in teaching environments. Arguments on both sides are bouncing in and out of faculty and staff rooms from elementary through high schools, and the idea is up for consideration at the university level as well. In a recent publication titled High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs, Austin's own D. Diane Davis, professor of rhetoric at UT, raised questions about the divisions we draw between virtual reality online and imaginative reality offline. It seems that the primary concern raised by the anti-virtual reality camp is that virtual environments allow people to become something they are not and to inhabit worlds, personalities, and relationships that are not "real." Yet, as Davis astutely points out, whether onscreen or off, "real" is a very slippery term. Human beings are constantly about the business of redefining themselves through education, experience, and even role playing. Most of childhood play is a process of trying on different roles and personas, and for the adult world, books and art have always been valued for enabling readers, viewers, and participants to inhabit realms which are not particularly "real." Take D. Berman Gallery's current exhibition "HEAT," for example. Each of the works in this summer show draws its viewer into a realm that is, frankly, neither here nor there. Cynthia Camlin's Grotto series, with its watercolors resembling stained-glass, creates "false" depth perceptions on flat paper. Faith Gay's playful and nearly neon sculptures are certainly not made for this life, and we could never actually inhabit Sarah Greene Reed's graphically designed visual environments, due to their mixed scales. Christopher Schade's gouache and acrylic environments offer tiny virtual realities of the sort where right-bending tree limbs burn in brilliant but unmixed patterns of red, yellow, and orange against designed and dreamlike backgrounds, and Steve Wiman's timeless work with found objects plays on our need for recognition, yet transforms common pieces of stuff into endearing landscapes of color and history that have surely never existed outside of his creation. As each of these works conjure other worlds, I begin to wonder if any art at all could pass the reality test championed by virtual reality's opponents. As a player in this debate, art, and the worlds created in its musings, stands as a pertinent example of the power, importance, and growth that potential offline virtual realities can offer under optimal circumstances. Can the same be said for online virtual experiences? Step into "HEAT" and try out the theory – and a few alternate realities – for yourself. |
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 Sod by Candace Briceño |
Candace Briceño: Nevermore By Amanda Douberley Candace Briceño's work may be familiar from last year's "22 to Watch" at the Austin Museum of Art, but a lot can happen in the studio in a year's time, and this year has obviously been a productive one for the Austin-area artist. With "Nevermore" at Women & Their Work, Briceño continues her sustained inquiry into landscape-painting conventions, the chemical properties of pigment-dyes, and the range of possibilities for artistic practice opened up by the use of wool felt. At the same time, she has challenged herself to drive her use of color and line into new territory, with altogether strong results. Of the 18 pieces in the exhibition, Pond, Brownie, and Turf most closely resemble the Grass Islands Briceño showed at AMOA. These wall-mounted assemblages of brightly colored felt swatches, wrapped and stitched around wire hoops, appear similar to plants from a Japanese cartoon. Fantastic shapes with irresistible tactile qualities are patently artificial due not only to form but also color, which Briceño interprets through painting rather than straight from nature. A group of turf works referencing the four seasons take this organic conceit further; although they share the same diminutive size as the islands, however, these grassy felt patches are less successful, I think, because they are too small. On the other hand, the sod works showcase Briceño's laborious process of home-dying her materials. The felt threads that make up Spring subtly shift from a brownish-yellow through several shades of green, revealing a broad color spectrum that deftly conceals the effort that assuredly went into crafting the perfect hue for each felt blade. Color-saturated sculptures are complemented by subdued pencil and pinprick drawings. Taken as a whole, Briceño's drawings underscore the importance of line in her sculptures. These are sometimes machine-stitched, sometimes painted, or else embroidered around a soft form, creating a sharp edge along an otherwise amorphous shape. The punctured holes of Invisible cleverly mimic the regular spacing of a sewing machine needle to trace delicate floral outlines. Two huge graphite drawings, collectively titled Peel, reference the loosely assembled pile of felt bananas installed on a pedestal nearby. Rather than a pile, the drawn banana peels cascade down the wall in a nearly abstract and spatially disorienting mass. Other connections and contrasts abound. Sponge, which features a stand of stitched dark tree trunks and a bed of felt flowers that quite literally jump off the canvas, is a smart foil for works like Pond: If the grass islands are landscape dioramas, then Sponge is a soft painting. Seen together, they're two sides of the artist's practice that illuminate the diversity of approaches she brings to a single idea – two very different versions of Briceño's brand of landscape. All in all this makes for an intellectually stimulating viewing experience but doesn't add up to a particularly focused show. Briceño presents the seeds for multiple bodies of work in progress, a studio sampler that could have used a little curatorial editing (a group of acrylic-on-paper paintings, although lovely, felt totally out of place). Still, "Nevermore" whets one's appetite for whatever Briceño will do next. |
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 Umasi Chair by Wells Mason |
From Stuff, Art By Amanda Douberley Chances are you'll notice at least one of the four modified "Exit" signs by Austin artist Kurt Dominick Mueller, installed in various places high up on the walls at Arthouse at the Jones Center. The sentiment expressed by the whole group, "Stay Here For a While," is a polite request that you might want to take Mueller up on. Arthouse is crammed with a whopping 72 artworks for the 21st iteration of "New American Talent." This year Arthouse invited Aimee Chang, curator of contemporary art at the Orange County Museum of Art in Southern California – she's also an alumna of UT-Austin's graduate program in art history – to jury its annual nationwide talent search. Chang narrowed the field of around 1,100 submissions from 48 states down to 56 artists. As Chang readily admits, she squeezed in as much work as she could, but what the show lacks in visual-fatigue space, it makes up for with sheer energy and a squeaky-clean installation. There aren't many unifying themes this year, but Chang chose a large number of pieces that incorporate found objects. Sasha Dela strapped gallon jugs of Crystal Geyser to a huge piece of weathered foam to create Portable Water Floater, a wry comment on our overcommitment to bottled-water consumption. I can't tell if Dela's device is actually meant to help one float or to drag you – and your water – straight down to the ocean floor. Jeff Williams' Microwave is just as menacing. A hole cut into the door of a large exemplar of the ubiquitous household appliance would seem to spew radiation at everyone in its path as the big box hums contentedly. (The gallery attendant assured me that Williams removed everything except the light and the fan – for her sake, I hope she's right.) A mountain of twisted umbrellas by Elisa Lendvay, stripped of everything except a few shreds of nylon that cling to metal spindles, is a bit more playful, but only because the spiky Umbra Bush is safely tucked away in a corner. For her curator's talk, Chang presented "New American Talent: The Twenty-First Exhibition" in conjunction with "Thing: New Sculpture From Los Angeles," a recent exhibition of sculpture she co-curated at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. "Thing" is an apt, if cheeky, way to describe much of the work in both shows. For example, Katie Hinton makes a "thing" out of some "stuff" one might imagine finding while cleaning out the garage. Molt is an amalgamation of duct tape, Plexiglas, spandex, faux leather, acrylic paint, wire, and a shower curtain. Hung on a wall, the work vaguely resembles a horse (two thin strips of aqua fabric extending out toward the left side suggest legs), but beyond composition, color and texture draw the disparate elements together. There's a similar logic at work in Polly Lanning Sparrow's Recto-Verso (3 Configurations) and Mirror by Andrea Myers. Recto-Verso (3 Configurations) is a group of three rectangular elements that leans against a wall. The "stuff," in this case, is birch plywood variously covered in acrylic paint, linen, and felt. Like Molt, proximity to the wall draws immediate comparisons with painting, but the point here seems to be the artist's ability to change each element's position to achieve a new work. Mirror is another formal exercise, with a line of rainbow-colored fabric swatches laid out on the floor, which is echoed in a similar configuration of painted pieces of wood. Other allusions to everyday stuff are more oblique. A diamond-shaped painting with precise percentages listed in each horizontal band of color, by San Antonio artist Galen McQuillen, is perplexing until one reads the label: Memorial Day Picnic: French's Mustard, 8 oz. Jar, Front Label. Stephen G. Nyktas' digital prints also reference product packaging, but here it's what's inside that counts. Inside Out Lip Balm and Inside Out Yogurt Container are pretty straightforward (haven't you ever wondered how a tube of lip balm would look turned inside out?); however, the images resulting from Nyktas' somewhat juvenile experiment are clean, simple, and rather charming. In contrast to Nyktas' approach, Noelle Allen's The Mortivore, Neil Bernstein's Enubus #2, and Jenny Heishman's Ghost Bunnies all conceal more than they reveal. Allen transformed a piece of driftwood into a resin-coated apparition that resembles a Jurassic bird. Enubus #2 buries a vintage children's rocking horse under layers of bandage, industrial resin, plaster, crude oil, and World Trade Center ash. Bernstein added a bent unicorn horn to the rocking horse, took off the rockers, and suspended the horse from the ceiling. It's a poignant subject, but I think Bernstein's approach is overwrought. Heishman's Ghost Bunnies are a little silly and very seductive. The opaque glass forms, mounted on carved Styrofoam bases, do indeed resemble sheet-draped rabbits, but the beauty of their gleaming surfaces outweighs the oddity of their content. If I had to give a best-in-show award, it would go to Rebecca Holland for her pair of transparent plates of cast sugar, Pink Sheets, Large. On first glance, I thought they were simply sheets of pink Plexiglas – probably because I had just seen Tom Hollenback's Sluice, a steel and fluorescent Plexiglas construction installed in another room – but once I made my way into the corner and read the wall label, I immediately appreciated Holland's sweet play on minimalism's macho side. Although sculpture is the big attraction at this year's "New American Talent," a handful of paintings impress. Lori Nelson's Teen Fiction, a gem tucked away in the rear hall, features a dark-eyed young woman blowing smoke rings in an eerie wood. The combination of stylized oil-paint swirls and heavily outlined forms gives the painting a nouveau-art feel; Nelson's heroine even seems shifty enough to be a femme fatale, akin to Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations of Oscar Wilde's Salomé. In the main gallery, the large painting of a lingerie-clad woman attempting to resuscitate a colorful phoenix is equally enchanting. With Reviving the Bird (From the Phoenix Series), Karen Liebowitz draws on the peculiar brand of history-painting established in Mexico during the 19th century. Liebowitz's version is campily updated with a lacy blue nightie, but her handling of paint is dead serious and really good. Robert Lee Vanderpool's Western Tendencies is at the other end of the spectrum; he comes closest to the sloppiness and nonchalance of works like Molt, which is installed on an adjacent wall. A recent grad of UT-Austin's BFA program, Vanderpool presents a hallucinogenic Southwestern landscape, complete with saguaro cacti and pastel-striped mesas. In this painting, however, nearly everything is striped, including the sky. A metamorphosing spotted leopard/striped-shirt-clad figure in the foreground is slightly bewildering, but the work's oozing surface and unnatural color palette signal a surreal denouement. Hunter Cross, Rebecca Ward, and Michael Berryhill are among the standout artists from Austin. Cross contributes another proposal for an unrealized project, this time on Downtown Austin's rooftops (he showed several more earlier this year with the artist collective Open Doors at the Dougherty Arts Center). He'd like to blanket the tops of four buildings that flank Arthouse, plus the exhibition space itself, with a field of bright violet color just long enough to be captured by a satellite and loaded onto Google Earth. Once Cross' intervention entered the public record, High Five would disappear, leaving behind documentation accessible for around 18 months – the length of time it takes for imaging satellites to make their orbit of the Earth. Ward is a recent UT-Austin undergrad with a concurrent exhibition at Donkey Show in East Austin. For "New American Talent," she draped part of Arthouse's storefront window with evenly spaced strips of multicolored duct tape. Tape 5 is similar to Ward's contribution to the UT BFA show at Creative Research Laboratory in May but holds up well amongst the more mature competition here. Michael Berryhill's pair of graphics-driven pirate paintings combine carefully rendered schooners with figures encapsulated in geodesic orbs. Shiptrick left me wanting to see more, and we'll all have a chance later this month, when Berryhill is included in a group show at Volitant Gallery, a few blocks south on Congress. The big problem with Chang's installation, which is otherwise excellent, is her treatment of video. There are two monitors installed in the galleries. Each shows a DVD loop of five or six videos, some of which are more than 10 minutes long. In what is either a sick joke or a subconscious slip, an artwork that incorporates a seating element is installed immediately adjacent to each monitor: Wells Mason's Umasi Chair and Mike Womack's Cloud, two stacked chairs mounted on a wall, beckon to those with sore backs and tired feet. Visitors who are willing to stand there for 20 minutes or more and watch a video loop should win a prize (I sat on the floor). Unfortunately, few, if any, of the videos are worth the trouble. Cat Clifford's stop-motion animation, It took him twice as long to walk his fence line; he wrote poems, and Tim Harrington's Biblical puppet show, The Flood, should have been given their own monitors, as well as the respect these artists deserve. As it stands, if I made video art, I doubt I would submit my work to "New American Talent: The Twenty-Second Exhibition." Perhaps due to Arthouse's much-publicized Texas Prize, or maybe because of Chang's reputation, the number of submissions to "New American Talent" doubled this year. While I'm not sure to what extent this statistic contributed to the overall quality of the exhibition, juried shows are a mainstay for artists at many stages in their careers, and I'm glad to see this one growing. Austin has its own triennial juried exhibition at the Austin Museum of Art, a statewide biennial, and Arthouse's nationwide show. We're often criticized for being too insular here in Central Texas, and rightly so. At Arthouse, at least, you can catch a glimpse of what's happening in the rest of the U.S. |
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 Hummer by Conrad Bakker |
Exhibit Fun, Funny, Distinctive By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Lora Reynolds Gallery has been open only a little more than a year, but already it's developed its own very distinctive voice. And the current "Summer Group Show" shouts with that individual voice loud and clear. Don't expect regional favorites here. Reynolds rounds up her eclectic stable of artists from throughout the country and around the world. Do expect a sort of sophisticated absurdity, quirky humor and lots of refreshing celebrations of form, line and color. And the intimate scale of the gallery requires that the work on exhibit follow suit -- a welcome change from the sprawling installations that seem to brag that bigness is their only aesthetic point. Conrad Bakker quite possibly could crack up anybody. He takes the most quotidian, mass-produced objects -- Post-It notes, a plastic trash can, toy trucks -- and hand carves them, to scale, out of single pieces of wood, painting them in colors true to their original. At the exhibit opening, people mistook his trash can for the real thing and filled it with empty plastic wine cups (the artist didn't mind). His matchbook-sized Hummer sits perched in a gallery window on a long rod. Bending and squinting, you can stake a view of the little mega-car so that it looks as if it were parked across the street from the gallery. It's hysterical. Like Bakker, Francesca Gabbiani delighted with a solo show earlier this year. Now, she sends three new works to tempt us. If they weren't so beguiling, her obsessively crafted tableaux made of intricately cut paper would be scary and fetishistic, particularly since she draws from scenes of B horror movies. Benjamin Butler and Karen Breneman -- both new additions to Reynolds' gallery of artists -- hint at what we can look forward to this fall when both painters have solo shows. Though each has a distinct brushstroke and style, both offer new twists on the abstract landscape that are colorful, deft and potent with psychological weight. Nature never looked so captivating. ("Summer Group Show" continues noon to 6 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays through Aug. 17. Lora Reynolds Gallery, 300 West Ave. Free. 215-4965.) |
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 f8 Fine Art Gallery |
F8 Fine Art Gallery By Robert Faires "The Last Picture Show" isn't just an evocative name for the current exhibition at the F8 Fine Art Gallery. It's truly the last picture show for this West End showplace for visual art. Amy and Richard Griffin, who launched the gallery in 2000 and made it a home for the likes of painters Ray Donley and Jennifer Balkan and photographers Rosanne Olson and Raymond Copley (as well as the Griffins themselves), are closing the space at the end of July and casting their F8 to the wind, as it were. Over the six years the Griffins have had the gallery, it's taken so much of their time that they haven't been able to pursue their creative careers. So closing F8 is really freeing their photographic spirits. The couple isn't giving up gallery life completely, however. Come the fall, you'll be able to go across the street from their current home and find their work on display in a minigallery upstairs in the Wally Workman Gallery. And the West End won't be losing an arts space. Lisa Russell is opening a second location of the Russell Collection, and she's even absorbing some of the artists from the F8 stable to show with her older masterworks. Until July 31, though, it's still F8 and still at 1137 W. Sixth. For more information, call 480-0242, or visit www.f8fineart.com. |
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