Current review

Review Archive

Mixed media exhibit -- part fund-raiser for Texas military vehicle preservation group -- offers array of startling pieces

Studio 2 Gallery keeps the art of war rolling

By Michael Barnes
Austin American-Statesman Arts Critic
July 13, 2003

Given Austin's political leanings, it should surprise no one that most artistic responses to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars aligned with systematic pacifism or outraged opposition to U.S. actions.

Studio 2 Gallery's group exhibit, "Keep 'Em Rolling," opts for a more ambiguous stance. In part a fund-raiser for the Lone Star Military Vehicle Preservation Association, this show encompasses unvarnished documentary photographs, artful images of equipment and intricate paintings that allude only tangentially to the subject of war.

The most startling works are ink drawings by Marc Dennis, who contrasts ruggedly handsome American GIs with gnarly-looking Nazis in a style that recalls World War II-era animations. By enlarging these exaggerated pop images of good and evil, then devotedly executing the details, Dennis forces the viewer to contemplate the mixed messages of war as art.

Gallery owner Tina Weitz contributes demure prints of old tanks, guns and ambulances, the subjects tightly photographed in order to strip them of human context. Particularly suggestive is a warplane, once the threshold between life and death, now decapitated, decaying like so much abandoned agricultural machinery.

Weitz's father, Ramon Williams, had no artistic pretensions in 1962 when he photographed soldiers, helicopters and fortified hamlets in South Vietnam. Now his images, like frozen slips of history, remind us that that real people, sometimes frightened, sometimes exhausted, fight wars.

Marc Silva's eccentrically spelled "Device for Eccecuting the Immaculate Invasionne" follows in his series of human hands complicated by metal extensions that sometimes look like scientific instruments, sometimes like tools for torture. For "Anne Frank -- The Last Entry," Channe Felton silk-screened words of the diarist, then overlaid images of Frank and concentration-camp victims with acrylics.

This is a show that tugs at your conscience and just won't let go.

`Keep 'Em Rolling' continues 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday-Fridays, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturdays through Aug. 2, Studio 2 Gallery, 1700 S. Lamar Blvd., Suite 318, 448-2622.

mbarnes@statesman.com; 445-3647