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An artist's quest for an ever-changing identity An artist's quest for an ever-changing identity By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin For Yoon Cho, all the world really is a stage. On the job, in social situations, even in private at home, we're always constructing our identities, trying to control how others perceive us, she says. "We perform whether we think we are or not," the 35-year-old artist said recently as she stopped by the galleries of Women & Their Work, where her current solo show, "Nothing Lasts Forever," is on view through May 10. Digital photographs interspersed with four digital video projects fill the space, a sampling of just some of the work the Korean-born Cho produced in the past several years. Cho thinks a lot about how we let our physical and social environment shape our identities. She is herself the subject -- the performer, really -- in much of her work. In her "Texas Self Portrait" series she overlays larger-than-life-size color photographs of herself with different schematics or diagrams, such as the street plan of the Southwest Austin subdivision where she lives, each individual lot carefully outlined. Then there's her "Nuclear Family" series that features seemingly candid shots of Cho and her husband going about the tasks typical of their suburban lifestyle -- hanging curtains in the kitchen, jogging down the wide, new street, washing their SUV, gardening -- only there's an imaginary baby, silhouetted as a bright yellow cut-out, digitally inserted into the scene. Cho moved to Austin four years ago with her physician husband after spending most her life in big cities in the United States and Korea. The quiet sameness of suburbia shocked her -- or did it appeal to her? She still lives there, after all. And her ambiguity about her new surroundings is front and center in all her artwork. "The first thing the neighbors asked about was our kids," Cho says. Actually, it was the first thing her own family asked soon after Cho and her husband were married. So she created Christmas cards in 2004 featuring a portrait of herself and her husband dressed in their holiday finest, a silhouetted baby superimposed between them ("My mother actually thought it was funny," Cho says.). Next, she began staging more images for what gradually became the "Nuclear Family" series. As an extension of that project, her six-minute "Backyard Project" video shows Cho and her husband building a gazebo, the yellow silhouetted baby, now depicted as a toddler, romping with its toys (its gender is not identifiable). Are Cho and her husband trying to conform -- if even by digital magic -- to the norms of their new surroundings or are they razzing the suburban status quo? Both. The tension between conformity and nonconformity is pointed and tongue-in-cheek. Cho's search for her new profile in a new social surrounding began immediately after she moved to United States at age 17 after a childhood in Seoul. It continued as she worked through degree programs at two noted art schools -- Rhode Island School of Design and Parsons The New School for Design -- set out on a career as an artist and graphic designer in New York and took a college teaching gig in Korea. Daughter, woman, artist, Korean, new United States citizen, wife, Texas resident -- every new layer of identity is fodder for Cho's creative juices. At the Austin Museum of Art, where some of Cho's video works are included in the current exhibit "New Art in Austin: 20 to Watch," "Haircut" is three minutes of side-by-side footage showing Cho and her husband each having their hair cut in a shopping mall salon as saccharine Christmas music and mall announcements play in the background. While her husband gets a basic trim, Cho's long black hair is more dramatically cut so that it matches her husband's. How much does -- or should -- a woman assimilate when she gets married? "Identity always changes for everyone, constantly -- it's always evolving," she says. That's right, nothing lasts forever. |
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'Folded, Torn, Cut, Woven, and Pulled' By Salvador Castillo Sometimes, preparing for that perfect drawing is a difficult task. Looking down at that blank sheet of paper can be intimidating. The infinite possibilities shout out from each microscopic bump of the paper's surface. Maybe it's a colored sheet, and the hue has a nice gradation, or it's a sheet of kozo paper, and you notice the two sides of differing textures, but you just can't bring your utensil down to make a mark. So you resign to the beauty of the paper. There's nothing you can do. Or can you? Realizing that this sheet embodies different aesthetic properties, you let the paper do the talking. This is the scenario that is suggested in an intimate show at the Blanton Museum of Art. "Folded, Torn, Cut, Woven, and Pulled" consists of five artists' works of paper. To give it some art-historical context, you could read the blurb about minimalism's effect on artists gravitating toward paper as a material and medium in its own right. Yet even without that bit of info, you can see how the work is pared down to its base and still able to express and describe. The understated presence of these works matches the gallery's location in the museum. Give yourself time to look, and you will find it. University of Texas senior lecturer in studio art Sarah Canright starts things off with paper on paper. Canright weaves equally sized strips into a stable matrix. Unlike a spreadsheet or a chessboard, this latticework of horizontals and verticals has a soft warmth. Eleanore Mikus also creates grids on paper with nothing more than a single card. By merely folding and refolding, Mikus is able to create lines. They appear painted on, but they are wounds from being forced into a labored state – both delicate and hardened, like the lined faces and calloused hands of your parents. A fast and furious hand rends paper asunder. Stephen Antonakos tears a bright-green sheet in a curved motion, revealing the white fibrous center. This pulpy hara-kiri is repeated in Lilliana Porter's work as a strand of black yarn crumples the inkless print. There is no ink and no text, but both refer to the repetition of printmaking. With no ink and no repetition, Tom Molloy's repeat appearance in Austin is just as violent as it was at Lora Reynolds Gallery last summer. The cause for environmental alarm lately has a lot of thoughts floating around about what the world would look like without any evidence of human civilization. There is still a lot of activity from the barren views of the desert or tundra to the violent crackling of torrential storms. Life carries on. Clearing your workspace of the usual mark-making tools does not stop art. Building images and meaning can endure with a better understanding of the surface holding all of that now. Creation carries on. |
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Irresistible: Artist's talk by Ali Fitzgerald By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Austin artist Ali Fitzgerald has created in irresistible micro-opera with "Swan School: The Matriculation," her current solo exhibit at Art Palace. With an expressive line, Fitzgerald crafts a sprawling open-ended narrative from drawing-based sculptural elements. In "Swan School" Fitzgerald presents a dystopia where adolescent impulsive judgments rule and with that, a certain wanton violence. Yet the improbable 'Through the Looking Glass' architectural elements of Fitzgerald's installation ring with an ornate girliness -- a nightmare diorama decorated with swirly decadent details in white and gold. Somewhere in "Swan School" is the story of a little girl lost and left at a gothic boarding school. Everywhere in "Swan School" is Fitzgerald's talent for constructing rich, operatic tableaux that -- refreshingly in this age of self-consumed conceptual projects -- spin fantasical fictions. Fitzgerald will give a talk Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m. Art Palace, 2109 E. Cesar Chavez St. Admission is free and Fitzgerald invites questions after her talk. The gallery opens at 7 p.m. Don't miss it. You can catch a preview of the exhibit here |
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'Ali Fitzgerald: Swan School; The Matriculation' By Rachel Cook Ali Fitzgerald should write a screenplay with all the characters in her paintings, drawings, and now small sculptural objects. Fitzgerald started with the women from the Wild West, creating a whole mythology around particular female outlaws, which ended up as the subject/content for "On Virgin Land," her 2005 show at Art Palace. Now, she returns to the gallery with "Swan School; The Matriculation," a show built around a character called Sad Little White Girl, who is imprisoned in the privileged East Coast boarding school of the title. In an interview, Fitzgerald spoke about her interest in literature and her fascination with characters: "I love epic novels like Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, anything long and depressing. I'm also a big Flannery O'Connor fan; I think her short stories are incredible. I was always an avid reader, and I think this might be why my pieces are so character-driven." In the current show, Fitzgerald creates two distinctly different spaces in Art Palace: one filled with gilded, gold-framed, gold-paper cutouts and the other filled with two incredibly lonely sculptures/installations. In the latter, Fitzgerald sets the scene with a small carriage resting on the floor paired with a chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Both objects evoke the beginning of an epic tale. The small boat or lace-decorated baby carriage appears to be floating down a river made of canvas and modeling paste (although all I can imagine is cake frosting for a wedding-cake sculpture or a baby-shower present). The titles alone tell you the literary nature of the work: Not simple pleasures. Scene opens five times, a looming cradle is lowered as a cream-heavy chandelier chases and finally engorges it. And from the wetness and lace comes a girl. Her exit, so different from the others is slow and weak. No toothy explosion, no triumphant rearing head. Just a finger. (Sesame Street music box plays slowly). The river spills out onto even smaller paper cutouts, which are meant to be Sad Little White Girl's toys, except that they are made up of sharks and splinters, or so the title says. The centerpiece is a huge canvas backdrop of the boarding school, a Gothic cathedral interior that brings the narrative into focus with three stations and perspectives. Fitzgerald has shifted the scale to make the viewing experience optimal from the floor of the gallery, as if you were sitting to watch a puppet theatre for children. In front of the backdrop are three watercolor, modeling paste, and foamcore mobiles explaining Sad Little White Girl's future and past. The sculptural objects set the stage for the narrative based around the female heroine, Sad Little White Girl, and provoke a particular reaction and set of emotions. Each piece is obsessively worked over so that the modeling paste becomes a three-dimensional line, and the blend of wire with canvas makes the canvas act as a structural material and less of a painterly object. Fitzgerald has been through her own growing pains with this body of work, moving from the giant, mural-sized canvas of "On Virgin Land" to the three-dimensional objects and hanging sculptures of "Swan School." In addition, the narrative has grown more intimate and even slightly autobiographical. On the one hand, Fitzgerald has made an incredible leap in terms of materials and content, with her work containing a revealing openness in both the subject matter and her attempts to create something three-dimensional that still holds true to her painterly vision. On the other hand, the work lacks a kind of cohesion, and the loss of the figure as the central focus becomes slightly problematic. Since the Austin Museum of Art "20 to Watch" show, Fitzgerald has gotten a better grasp of the materials and improved tremendously in creating a more stable structure, but all this working out of ideas while exhibiting causes me to doubt her artistic direction. Maybe it is a good thing to see an artist teasing out her ideas in public, but sometimes I just want to enter into the final product after she has figured out the materials, gone through the growing pains, and been able to assess whether the narrative and characters work with the materials and objects presented. I feel like I never get that opportunity with Fitzgerald, because she is changing her process so rapidly from show to show. |
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Lance Letscher By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin He's simply one of Austin's favorites. Artist Lance Letscher has legions of fans who revere, and collect, his gorgeous, poetic collages made from carefully cut scrapes of old books and other found paper. Now, in the exhibit "Industry and Design," Letscher presents a new body of work in which he uses his delicate drawings as well as found drawings as collage elements. There's an opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, May 22 at D. Berman Gallery. The exhibit continues 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays through June 28. Trained as a printmaker, Letscher, a native Austinite and University of Texas art school alum, worked for years for artist Amado Pena and his fine art print business. Art world fans of Letscher's collages suggest that it's their mesmerizing quality that is so compelling. They tap into our our natural curiosity and our inborn desire to connects bits and put them into a whole,. "They reward prolonged looking," said Austin-based artist Will Klemm in a 2004 profile of Letscher published in the Statesman. "They never wear off." Klemm, whose own softly defined landscape paintings are much-loved and much-collected, said that after seeing Letscher's 2001 solo show at D. Berman he was so charmed and taken he did something he'd never done before: "I made my first fan call to an artist." Now, Klemm owns six of Letscher's works. " Lance's works are completely sincere —there's nothing pretentious about them," said Klemm. "They're products of a very earnest visual intelligence at play." |
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Jennifer Balkan: 'Hidden Meaning' By Nikki Moore Who am I? Often this is a question asked by a bleak, soul-searching self, hands on the counter, looking straight into the bathroom mirror ... as if somehow that reflected image is going to tell us something, give us a road map, give us an identity. In some psychoanalytic circles, particularly those following the work of Jacques Lacan, the mirror has more to do with masking than revealing. According to Lacan's Mirror Stage theory, from the moment a child first recognizes a mirror image as himself/herself, when that little wobbly legged "it" becomes "me," the child begins a lifelong contingent project of identity creation and maintenance centered on that mirror image. Over time, we associate what we see with who we are, and over the years, we embellish that association with clothing, hairstyles, gestures, smiles, scars, and wrinkles. Each day we take that mirror image and project it to others. The depth of our commitment to that visage is most visible as we cringe when cultures present us with ways of being that veil those faces, those images, and, ultimately, we assume, those identities. Painting has played a mirror role for centuries through the medium of portraiture. Monarchs had their likenesses made to extend the face of power, and sweethearts exchanged small pocket portraits in order to keep each other close. As Jennifer Balkan's newest work on exhibition at Wally Workman Gallery celebrates and challenges traditional portraiture, her paintings present something of an identity peekaboo. Whether nude bodies hold up comedic masks or fully costumed portrait sitters hide behind bright-red clown noses, Balkan's subjects seem both to hide and to come alive in painted masquerade. In her beautiful painterly style, with shades of pink, peach, and tan set against nearly glowing backgrounds of the palest sky blue, Balkan's visible brush strokes both give and create mirroring images of her subjects bathed in light. There is a play of animality in many of the masks worn by Balkan's models, and it is easy (habitual?) to read those plastic faces for signs of the "selves" they mask. In three glowing works titled Moths Fly to the Light I, II, and III, Balkan's symbolism reaches a crescendo in layer upon layer of maps, painted flesh, masks, and moths. Yet whether boldly masquerading or not, for all they reveal of bodies, these pieces leave you feeling, perhaps like philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did, that the painter's models may be all mask, all veil, only appearance without an essential substance. And while we can accept this in painting – in fact, have come to know that painting is always only a surface project – Balkan's exploration of masking may ask us to look back at ourselves with the same beautiful and accepting skepticism. |
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