'Holiday Group Show'
Davis Gallery through Jan. 9

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
December 18, 2009

It's that time of year again, art lover: when the galleries offer exhibitions featuring the artists whose works they've shown in the past 12 months or so. Such is the case at Davis Gallery, and it's a good chance to get an overview of what the venue has to offer. It's also, particularly, a chance to see some fine art rendered in several different media.

Among the gorgeous paintings and photography that you might have glimpsed in earlier shows are new works by Susu Meyer and Caprice Pierucci. Meyer's oil-on-canvas forest scene, the first work to be seen upon entering the gallery at the corner of 12th and Shoal Creek, fairly trumpets the freshness with its subject and title: New Growth. This is one of several careful evocations of landscape by this oil painter.

Turn the corner into the gallery's main room and there's a sculpture by Pierucci, Small Birch Cascade, fashioned from the artist's typical materials of shaped and stained wood. (To say "the artist's typical materials," though, provides a tone of dullness; one may as well use that dismissive-sounding phrase to describe the materials composing a latticework made of starlight and the heart of an ancient forest god.) That birch cascade is small, though, only in comparison to the nearby Pierucci sculpture called Vertical Birch, which stretches to a good 6 feet of wondrous wooden height.

Due to the solid history of artists and shows associated with Davis Gallery, these newer creations don't overshadow the other pieces displayed perfectly in the venue's intimate spaces. Sandra Langston's almost miniature "Little Bridges" and "Italian Views" series in pastel border an array of her paintings in oil, the stunning Old Olive foremost among the latter. Dianne Grammer also brings pastels to bear among the landscapes of this rough-hewn world.

David Leonard's vibrant oils of cityscapes offer visual counterpoint to these views of the natural realm, his Times Square nailing the urban tableau to a particular time (with its video billboards of Broadway shows and the distinct clothing of citizens) as well as a particular place. And, as wild animals can seem out of place in such a concrete jungle, so are David Everett's hand-carved and fully painted renditions of woodland and prairie creatures (a squirrel, an owl, an eagle, a buffalo) separated, even more than Pierucci's sculptures, into the third dimension beyond exquisitely framed flatnesses.

There's more to this show, yes – Christopher St. Leger, Julie Speed, Stella Alesi, Laurel Daniel, and still others – but we reckon we've already provided sufficient evidence that this "Holiday Group Show" is worthy of your closer attention, regardless of which holiday you might be celebrating.

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'My Wicked Twisted Sense of Love'
Women & Their Work through Through Jan. 7

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
December 25, 2009

Who doesn't have a wicked, twisted sense of love? Someone who's never had a broken heart, not even once, not even slightly wounded by that one high school crush with the tight jeans and the habit of humming Morrissey songs in the hallway between classes, much less by that co-worker they had a brief fling with in year 10 of their marriage but never told their spouse about? "Never told their spouse about," yes, who's wicked and twisted in that scenario?

"Listen long enough," writes the poet David Jewell, "and everyone is interesting and slightly destroyed."

Spend enough time at Women & Their Work's current show – part of a Downtown lunch hour, say, maybe a detour during a Saturday afternoon ramble – and you'll see where some of that interest and destruction has wound up.

This group exhibition is curated by Leslie Moody Castro, such a perfect middle name for this show, and she's gathered works by Anthony Romero, Laura Ann Meyers, Katri Walker, Gabriela Rodriguez, and Luis Carlos Hurtado: a quintessence of creative souls to render these signals of wracked romance.

Romero starts things off with a series of five videos, each playing in a different monitor, each featuring the artist as a version of some modern-day "shaman" pitching his availability on the Internet Shaman Dating Service. Damned funny, with Romero in different freaky getups and affecting diverse voices but also weirdly effective in its cumulative impact. Who among us could be so unself-conscious, if they've ever made their own lonely-heart pitch on a similar service, to feel other than as goofy/skeevy/Beyond Thunderdome as these passionate eccentrics?

Meyers harvests the high school crop of fantasy and longing, with her giant pink crepe-paper heart against one white wall, its title – CRUSH – scrawled in plastic cursive letters across the front of the symbol. Even simpler and more redolent of romantic yearning is Meyers' other piece in this show, where she's spelled out the name Mrs. Joseph Gough Daly IV in glittery pipe-cleaner calligraphy. Bonus: A little curious Googling will bring you, later, to the wedding announcement (on this just-passed Dec. 12) of the artist and the man who bears that name. (That's not wicked or twisted, though, is it? That's just a whole big pile of "awwwwwwww.")

What, on the other hand (or ventricle), is to be made of Hurtado's words carved into bark and the severed trunks of trees, arranged as for burning in a campfire? "Algo esta Pasando," these woods say, "Coma Bien, Via Bien" and "Hay Otros Dias Suaves." And it's all going up into flames, ashes to ashes, perhaps inspired by the light of someone's life and the fire of their loins, now consigned to burning dust? And what of the other works in this busted valentine of a show: Walker's videos and Rodriguez's drawings and watercolors?

Take a trip of eight syllables, we suggest, and see "My Wicked Twisted Sense of Love" at Women & Their Work. Bonus No. 2: Bring your significant other along, whether you're in the throes of emotional ecstasy or your dreams are on a train to train-wreck town, and try to work out the mystery for yourselves.

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'Teresita Fernández: Blind Landscape'
Blanton Museum of Art, through Jan. 3

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
December 31, 2009

Perhaps because we can't see it in its common state, streaming through the air, we don't tend to think of light as one of the more valuable implements in a visual artist's toolkit. But when you look at Teresita Fernández's art, well, it's all about the light.

As is evident in the solo exhibition "Blind Landscape," many of the other materials that the artist employs – graphite, polished steel, aluminum, glass beads – are meant to catch the light and play off it, to glint or glimmer as you pass by, to draw your attention with that flash of radiance, to suggest that in some unlikely way, a fixed and solid object is fluid, capable of motion. Glance down into the floor-mounted circle of Eruption, with its miniscule glass beads of orange, yellow, red, and violet, and the colors appear to shift, as if this were indeed a pool of lava you're peering into, its thick, volcanic stew an angry swirl. Move past Projection Screen, with its onyx beads loosely organized into a rectangle on the wall, and the pinprick reflections that follow you in a lazy arc over the surface of the beads work with their arrangement and the negative space between them to create a buzzing field of atoms, constantly vibrating and jostling themselves into new patterns. Reproduce these works in flat, dull hues, remove the source of illumination, and they would likely be static. Light is the invisible conspirator behind their animation, the intangible catalyst that brings Fernández's work to life. It's what causes the 14,000 graphite pebbles of Epic, set high along one wall of the gallery, to sparkle as you stroll from one end to the other, transforming it from an interior installation of unliving stone to a galaxy of dark stars against a bright sky – the Milky Way in negative. It's what makes the irregular, foliagelike cut metal of Portrait (Blind Landscape), Portrait (Blind Water), and Vertigo (Sotto in su) look like parts of trees lightly stirred by a breeze, the gaps between leaves opening and closing, the shadows stretching and shrinking.

Of course, light isn't the only agent responsible for this illusion of motion. There is the thing that's actually moving around these works: you, the viewer. But as we tend not to think of light as a tool of the artist, we tend not to think of ourselves as part of the artist's toolkit. And yet we are. It's our movement toward, past, and away from this art that allows the light to play off these reflective surfaces the way it does. We are as integral to the effects that Fernández is after as graphite or glass. And she happily reminds us of that repeatedly in this show. The layers of steel in Vertigo (Sotto in su) extend from a wall horizontally just above most people's heads, creating a small arbor that you're simply drawn to step under. And when you do and you look up (as you're bound to do), you see yourself hanging in the "tree" above you, the polished metal as reflective as the surface of a pool. With Ink Mirror (Landscape), the artist is considerably more straightforward about it; you stare at the long, tall slab of black fiberglass set in a snowbank of marble dust for any length of time, and you wind up staring at yourself.

It can be a bit startling and even disconcerting to catch your reflection in a work of art, but it's useful. We can all stand to be reminded that where art is concerned – and by that, I mean any creative endeavor – our role is not just to be a consumer, ingesting what someone else has produced; we're completing a circle that began with the creative spark within the artist's mind, closing a circuit that, just like an electrical connection, creates a charge. Like the light that plays across the works in "Blind Landscape" – and in Stacked Waters, Fernández's marvelous installation of liquid blue and white tiles that fills the Blanton Museum's atrium – we activate the art. It's something to ponder as you regard Epic's epic gray constellation or go swimming in the atrium's liquid expanse.

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