Teresita Fernandez
In visceral installations of Teresita Fernandez ask viewers to look - at look again

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Sunday, November 01, 2009

Teresita Fernández's is an experiential, physically immersive art. And without the physical presence of the viewer - without you, there - it is incomplete.

Since January, visitors to the Blanton Museum of Art have been completing Fernández's "Stacked Waters," a site-specific installation created for the museum's cavernous two-story atrium. Shimmering acrylic tiles - their hue changing from deep blue to white - ascend the walls, the watery blue shifting in mood as the ever-changing Texas light filters in from skylights. Visitors catch their reflection in the glistening tiles, seduced by the illusion that they are immersed in a pool of water. With their presence, people activate "Stacked Waters." And so, unavoidably, all who encounter it become a part of the artwork itself.

With "Blind Landscape," a retrospective exhibit opening today that's organized by the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, visitors can engage with more of the artist's visceral yet lyrical large-scale work.

The New York-based artist will present a slide-illustrated talk about her work today at 3 p.m. in the Blanton's Auditorium.

Unveiled earlier this year, "Stacked Waters" is a gift to the Blanton from Austin-based collectors Jeanne and Michael Klein. And now the illusory blue pool acts as stunning prelude to an exhibit whose chapters unfold through each of a dozen of Fernández's meticulous installation.

If nothing else, Fernández's work is about the nature of looking. She challenges the often presumptive act of viewing and especially the presumptive act of art-viewing. Forget what you've seen before. Fernández will undermine your frame of reference.

Deftly, precisely, she transforms industrial materials - stainless steel, graphite, glass - into creations that mimic the natural world but are wholly unnatural.

Large overlapping layers of machine-cut super shiny stainless steel - incised with a foliage pattern - stack on the wall in "Portrait (Blind Landscape)," an ingenious re-consideration of traditional landscape paintings, in particular the 19th-century romanticized, luminescent scenes of the American West. There's no romanticism in Fernández's post-industrial landscapes. Instead, the reflective metallic surface bounces your portrait right back at you as your eye shifts back and forth between the details and the whole, the artwork morphing with your movements.

You're a part of "Portrait (Blind Landscape)" whether you want to be or not. You can't lose yourself in the piece if you tried. You are there.

Though not funny per se, Fernández's work is not without a certain latent humor and playfulness. Illusion is a key strategy, optical trickery most definitely at work. There's a gentle punch line lurking somewhere in each of her works.

Take "Drawn Waters (Barrowdale)." The 12-foot-tall sculpture might just be the biggest pencil drawing - or biggest pencil smudge - in the world. Sleek machine-tooled sheets of graphite cascades in a stream out of mid-air and pools in a heap of shiny graphite chunks. "Drawn Waters" swooshes down in a single movement, a gigantic gesture. It's a sculpture that's really drawing, an essentially minimalist exquisitely controlled piece that is nevertheless turbulent with motion.

Get it now? "Drawn Waters" is not what it seems on a first look. Like everything else she creates, "Drawn Waters" accentuates its own artifice.

Born and raised in Miami, the 41-year-old Fernández, who now lives in Brooklyn, garners wide recognition for her work. As the youngest artist commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park, her "Seattle Cloud Cover" gives visitors the chance walk through a covered skyway while viewing the city's skyline through tiny holes punched in multicolored glass. In 2005, she received the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" fellowship. Here in Texas this year, in addition to "Stacked Waters" at the Blanton, Fernández completed "Starfield," a large-scale commission for the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium.

"Stacked Waters" is on semi-permanent exhibit at the Blanton, likely to be on view for several years to come as it will continue to surprise and engage. But right now, with the current retrospective, a total immersion into Fernández's constantly shifting yet poetic universe is possible.

Hang on - that universe is continuously disassembling and reassembling itself as you look.

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'Katie Maratta & Owen McAuley'
D Berman Gallery through Dec. 12

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
November 6, 2009

You drive out of Austin, go west or even east long enough, the big sky of Texas opens up like the lid to a box of blue infinity. You walk into a building, any building, the world comes slamming down to dimensions defined by walls and ceilings, a shelter that prisons all senses even when it's the most soaring cathedral. You enter the D Berman Gallery on Guadalupe, you're going to find, for the next several weeks, the magnificence of the Lone Star State's wide open spaces stretched thin upon panels that are no more than 1 inch high.

This, called New Horizons, is the work of Katie Maratta. Vistas of sparsely populated, meagerly ranched Western flatlands rendered in ink, pencil, and image transfer onto inch-high panels that run to 48 inches long when they're not halted at a mere 12.

Amazing how something so large reduced to something so tiny can evoke the same sort of wistful, tumbling-tumbleweed feelings in the person perceiving it. I mean: You take a photo, even a fancy panoramic photo, of the actual scene that comprises all your eyes can see? It's a photo that reminds you of the feeling of vastness, the lost lonesome dovetailing of everywhere and nowhere, but it's just a reminder. Maratta's work – and I think it's partly due to its relentless monochrome, too – can put you right back into that wind-whistling state of emotion: It's precisely the size and tone of the faded Texas outlands inside your head.

The paintings of Owen McAuley, the other artist in this two-person exhibition, are precisely the opposite. Precisely, in subject and color and medium and size; what a fine choice for contrast.

McAuley works in oil on linen and (at least in this show) focuses on residential interiors. But here's another precise opposite: the opposite of banal. There are no homey scenes of fireplaces or arrangements of tables and flower-stuffed vases and the like in these paintings, no human figures to disturb the view. And the view is jarring. The view is, repeatedly, of light fixtures seen at strange angles within the shadowed surroundings that the fixtures' illumination struggles to define. The corner of a bedroom wall, the ceiling of a rubicund hallway, the roof of some industrial building in a floodlit night-sky parking lot. And one wilderness scene – The Needle Never Ends – with a strange yellow light, surely not the sun that we know, shining through a stand of trees atop a crest in the oppressive darkness. It's all very quotidian; it's all extremely fucking eerie.

D Berman Gallery has a knack for excellent artistic pairings; this latest exhibition is another (highly recommended) example of that.

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Study in nature
Dallas artist draws inspiration from environment in retrospective

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Friday, November 27, 2009

Each spring, when the magnolias bloom, artist David Bates paints a still life of the white, waxy flowers.

Bates doesn't actually have a magnolia tree in the yard of his Dallas-area home. But his next door neighbors do, and they are very accommodating and don't mind at all if Bates cuts off a stem or two to take back to his studio.

The annual ritual of magnolia painting is an aesthetic checkup of sorts for the 57-year-old artist.

"It's a barometer of where I'm going with my work," Bates said recently at the Austin Museum of Art, where "From the Everyday to the Epic," a modest retrospective exhibit of his work, went on view last week. "I like to see how I'm making things differently."

He also likes to make different things. For a few years in the mid-1990s, the prolific painter didn't paint at all. He made sculpture instead, and his annual magnolia still lifes from that period are three-dimensional riffs on his semi-abstract, semi-folk art stylized paintings.

Some of Bates' magnolias — three sculptures, a painting and a print — share a stretch of the gallery in the current exhibit. The youthful, lanky, plainspoken Bates — who was born, raised and has lived in the Dallas area his entire life, except for a year in New York when he had a fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art — also admits a visceral fondness for the quintessential Southern flower.

"I just love the colossal size of the blossoms," he says.

While the contemporary art world has shape-shifted around him, Bates has always let instinct, not trends, lead his way. "Besides," he says, "painting is always being declared dead. I just do what has always felt right to me."

That was the case in the mid-1970s as Bates left Southern Methodist University and struck out for the Big Apple. The only child of devoted parents, Bates spent his undergraduate years developing his talent for, and interest in, visual narratives — the quirky scenes of everyday life or else the natural landscapes he adored and in which he found endless small stories.

But at the time it was the brainy austerity of conceptualism and the coolness of Pop Art that reigned. And after a year in New York, Bates returned home to Texas, where he continued to follow his own aesthetic trajectory, one more aligned with early American modernist painting or even the still-life tradition of 19th-century painters.

(Where Bates fits in with contemporary art trends still vexes the response to his work. On the occasion of Bates' solo show in 2006, New York Times critic Roberta Smith called Bates' paintings "conservative if not reactionary" but then added, "I would say that I like them against my better judgment, but in truth I just like them.")

Bold in composition, filled with vibrant colors, blocky shapes and painterly yet brawny flourishes, Bates' regionally inspired images nevertheless found a following by the mid-1980s, garnering him exhibitions and collectors. (His work can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Blanton Museum of Art, among other institutions.)

Organized by Austin Museum of Art executive director Dana Friis-Hansen, the current exhibit — Bates' first solo show in Austin — offers a selection of the artist's major and often monumentally sized paintings along with drawings and sculpture. Everything has been culled from private and institutional collections in Dallas and Austin.

Bates paints what he loves, and his early narrative paintings reveal down-home scenes of musicians, fishermen, waitresses, beer and cigarettes on a dock-side table, a man selling fireworks at a roadside stand. The dynamic patterning of forms, the flattened perspective, the familiar subject matter all bear the unmistakable influence of Southern folk art.

But Bates is also having his own private ongoing dialogue with art history.

"Folk art is a form of abstraction," he says. "To me, it has the same formal qualities as Matisse or Picasso — or Edward Hopper and Marsden Hartley, for that matter."

Nature figures as Bates' ultimate theme. Fishing trips to the Grassy Lake nature preserve in Arkansas inspired about eight years of paintings for the artist, the dense, bird-filled cypress swamp — and the hunting guides who worked the swamp — spawning moody, intense landscapes that catalog with great detail the flora and fauna. After Grassy Lake, Bates re-discovered the Texas Gulf Coast, the destination of many of his childhood summer vacations.

But in 2005, Hurricane Katrina grabbed Bates' attention like no other event. A regular visitor to New Orleans (he had an almost annual gallery show there for years), Bates obsessively watched the television coverage of the storm and its immediate aftermath. He also drew obsessively, filling sketchbooks with renderings of media images.

Those drawings led to "The Storm Series," a sequence of potent and poignant paintings — some epic in scale — to which Bates continues to add. People figure prominently in the series, their anguish, their fear, their resoluteness neatly abstracted in bold forms.

"I had to do something," says Bates, explaining his artistic response to Katrina. "I couldn't just stand by. I had to create some kind of visual record of what went very wrong in New Orleans."

The stark, direct images of distressed New Orleans residents seem a far way from Bates' magnolia paintings.

Or maybe not.

Nature happens, whether benevolent and beautiful, or cruel and catastrophic. And Bates is just there to capture it in all its complex, curious fury.

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Review: Katie Maratta and Owen McAuley at D. Berman Gallery

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Monday, November 30, 2009

Artists Katie Maratta and Owen McAuley share an abiding love and fascination for a sense of place yet take different creative approaches to create their artistic valentines to place.

And yet, on view together currently at D. Berman Gallery, those differing approaches make for a pleasant synergy of comparison and contrast.

The endless expanse of the West Texas landscape inspires Maratta. But forget reverent, colorful homages. Instead the Austin-based Maratta gives quirky graphite drawings all only one inch tall yet some that sprawl four or five feet in length. With meticulous draftsmanship, Maratta renders the stuff of stark rural scenes — barns, highway signs, dust devils, windmills, birds on a power line, endless flat fields — in miniature.

The detail is compelling. And like you do in order to experience the wide open plains, so do you have to travel at length across Maratta's long drawings in order to see them in their entirety. Diminutive as these landscapes may be, they nevertheless cleverly represent the vast openness of the West Texas plains.

Like Maratta, McAuley also jiggers with preconceived notions of how place is artistically represented. McAuley, who studied at the University of Texas and now lives in New York, focuses on the most quotidian and downright anonymous locations and spaces.

Tire tracks through snow disappear into darkness in one small graphite drawing. A floor lamp barely brightens an almost bare wall in one of McAuley's darkly luminous oil paintings. In another, a ceiling light casts a glare into the corner of a room while the rest remains dark.

These rooms, those tire tracks, could be anywhere. Or everywhere. Never mind the exact the locale — it's not important because McAuley delivers the emotional potency of place.

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