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  Print by Eric Avery |
Art and Science Mix with Fashion Art and
Science Mix with Fashion By Erin Keever A professor of psychiatry and an associate member of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Eric Avery is also an artist whose prints are on view in the exhibition "Heath Matters" at Slugfest Gallery. Avery draws from his experiences as a medical doctor and psychiatrist to teach, express social and political concerns and examine the relationships between art and medicine. One remarkable series of works consists of individual portraits of Avery's patients surrounded by cycles of scenes depicting events such as childhood abuse, drug use and molestation. The artist points out that the cyclical narratives surrounding each portrait do not necessarily correlate with the sitters' specific lives; rather, they make up the too-common larger HIV story. These black-and-white expressionistic woodcuts are printed on hand-made pulpy paper. The rectangular portraits fit inside separate raised frames, making them sculptural and quite powerful. Also on display are several of Avery's pamphlets on sexuality and infectious diseases, such as HIV. These pamphlets combine art and information, explaining diseases in a more accessible and less clinical way than most medical materials. One is even distributed in Texas prisons. A newer work, from a portfolio on well-being, is called "Baby Boomer Health Certificate." This candy-colored illustrated chart, complete with all of the major things "to do" and "not do to" to stay healthy, covers everything from monthly self breast exams to flossing your teeth. Directed especially at the artist's generation, the print acts as a graphic, but friendly, reminder of how to easily prevent disease. Yet in this context, it also highlights the discrepancy between art production and mass consumption, referencing printmaking's historic reputation as a democratic medium. ('Health Matters: Prints by Eric Avery' continues 1:30 to 6 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays through Oct. 15, Slugfest Gallery, 1906 Miriam Ave., free, 477-7204.) |
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 Lota Songbird, by Helen Altman |
Two 'Hot' for Your Eyes By Rachel Koper I like big art shows, so I really enjoyed previewing the 187-artist Red Hot • Red Dot sale at Women & Their Work. The annual show brings together artwork from a diverse swath of Austin's creative community. This year includes contributions from independent artists such as Steve Wiman, Bob Wade, Madelon Umlauf, Marc Silva, John Sager, Martha Peters, Anna Marie Pavlik, Andrew Long, Roi James, Pat Falconer, John Christensen, Heather Brand, Paul Beck, Jennifer Balkan, Connie Arismendi, Ben Appl, and Stella Alesi. Some of these artists are among the dozens who have shown in the W&TW gallery, and they return the favor by donating top pieces year after year. As an artist's career develops, so do her gallery affiliations, but goodwill stays put. The true curator of the show is not a single person but a mixture of benevolence, artistic pride, peer pressure, and a sense of community. That's exemplified in the somewhat rare cross-gallery pollination evident in the show. Kate Breakey (Stephen L. Clark Gallery), now living in Arizona, mailed in a piece. Top Wally Workman Gallery artists contribute, folks like Jan Heaton, Gordon Fowler, and Mary Fischer. David Berman sends a slew of talent around the corner: Lance Letscher, Faith Gay, Virginia Fleck, and Naomi Schlinke. Even some UT professors -- Bob Anderson, Michael Mogavero, Janet Kastner, and Susan Whyne -- participate. (Way to get off campus!) So this fundraiser is a great way to catch up with all your favorite artists, even some of the good ones who moved away. And every item is priced under $500! If you're just starting a collection, a fundraiser is a great opportunity to buy name artists' work at great prices. It may be sinful to gamble, covet, and fight your way to the bargains, but seeing this quality work clustered together gets a person pretty excited. I want to liberate some of these pieces -- take them away to my home and give them pet names. It's a challenge to choose just one. The Red Hot • Red Dot sale is Friday, Sept. 17, 6-8:30pm, at Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca. Admission that night is $50, but sale art is on display through Saturday, Oct. 2. For more information, call 477-1064 or visit www.womenandtheirwork.org. |
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 two lone the lurch, 2004, by Faith Gay paper and acrylic on masonite |
Shiny, Happy Creatures By Robert Faires Bright droplets of pure, vibrant color: the bluest sky blue, the greenest grass green, the yellow-est canary yellow, the purple-est eggplant, the most orange-y tangerine, ... each little globule is distinct, like a cell, and like cells, they cluster together, making lines, circles, and great, irregularly shaped masses of vivid neon hues. A snaky ribbon of crimson. A mustard eyeball with a chartreuse iris around a blood-red pupil. A lavender amoeba with a nucleus of saffron bordered in coal black. The colors are so rich, so radiant, they grab your eye and won't let go. And as you stare, their combinations and juxtapositions -- black against cream against orange, periwinkle against scarlet -- shimmer, animating these shapes on the wall before you into gleaming, happy organisms. Or perhaps it's not that they're happy, but you are. Because gazing at Faith Gay's fused plastic artworks inspires joy. Put simply, they're fun. And more and more people have been discovering that lately. A year and a half ago, Gay was invited to do the debut installation at testsite, the exhibition space/open studio established by Laurence Miller and Regine Basha in Miller's home. That was the young artist's first one-person show, and it earned her the Best Solo Exhibition award from the Austin Critics Table this year. ("That was very flattering," says Gay. "That made me really happy.") She was also asked to inaugurate another flexible installation space in a residence: the "blue room" in the house of JD DiFabbio and Brian Bowers, which doubles as plan B Gallery. Gay was part of the Critics Table Award-winning group exhibition "Summer Light" at D Berman Gallery in 2003, and now, she's opening a new show with Lauren Levy -- her first two-person exhibition in Austin -- in that space. That's a lot of recognition for someone who gave up art for a while after slogging through the undergraduate studio art program at UT. As a student, the Port Arthur native felt out of step with the prevailing trends in the art world and worried that her work didn't matter. "In art school," she says, "I thought, 'I'm not a conceptual artist, therefore I'm not an important artist. So I'm not going to make it.' And I beat myself up about that. It's tough figuring out who you are and accepting 'This is the way I express myself.' I got out of school and thought, 'Make art? Can't do it.'" Oddly enough, she was making money from art at the time. In college, she earned cash doing decorative painting in private and model homes: faux marble effects and "cheeseball, wacky theme stuff in kids' rooms." In the flush Nineties, the money for this work was incredibly good, and Gay's efforts were enthusiastically received by clients, but eventually the work started sucking some of the life out of her. She thought, "I don't want to expand my marbleizing career. What the hell am I doing?" So Gay stopped that and felt the desire to make her own art return. With a new acceptance of her creative direction, she built up a body of work she felt was credible and began to show it in venues such as Gallery Lombardi and smaller art spaces. By two years ago, she was so satisfied with her work and so confident about it that she actually considered art school again. She installed what she had in the place she was living and invited museum and gallery directors she knew to come see it and offer feedback on her submissions for grad school. Then, unexpectedly, she learned she was pregnant. "So those plans were: pffft!," Gay says. She realized, "I'm not going anywhere. This is what's supposed to happen now. Something needed to happen, and I was trying to make something happen somewhere else, and instead this is the good thing I got out of it." As fate would have it, the showing of work that Gay had done thinking she would leave Austin instead boosted her career now that she was staying. The day after she learned about her pregnancy, Laurence Miller and Regine Basha invited her to do the testsite installation. With her new physical condition spurring her on creatively -- "There's something that happens to you when you're pregnant that you're just, 'I gotta really get on this, because I don't know what my life is gonna be like for the next five years.'" -- Gay cranked out a wealth of new work, and once the show was up, Miller and Basha "showed the hell out of it," bringing in friends, patrons, and visiting artists and critics. As a result, Gay's career really began to take off. But her baby's birth last October has had an impact on that career, she says. "I don't know that my art has changed aesthetically, but I often struggle -- when I'm tired, when I don't necessarily have time to work on my stuff. You know, part of being an artist is sitting on your butt and staring at what you did for hours, not knowing where to go or what to do, waiting for a decision to happen in your head, for something to happen. I don't have that time right now. So I'm learning how to make decisions faster, to be satisfied with those decisions, and not stress out that I'm not going to be able to produce something as good as what I was working on. Sometimes I have that fear, and it's silly. It's just a thing that women deal with when they have children and their energy and their life are focused on raising someone and not on their career. You think you're not valued, that the things you're doing are not as valued." In response, Gay is trying to have even more fun with her art, and that's reflected in the new work for the D Berman show. She's experimenting with colored circles on a resin-coated grid. The dots are larger than the beads of her other recent work and the hues somewhat less electric, but they work off a similar interest in colors and color relationships and simplicity of form. And while they generate a cooler feel than the organic bead shape, the repetition and graphic quality still seize the eye and hold it, albeit in a soothing, meditative way. That's not to say that Gay has abandoned her beaded organisms. Far from it. After having been told repeatedly that people see objects and images in her nonrepresentational fused plastic works, the artist has created some new ones that deliberately play into that perception. Based on the same principle as Rorschach tests, they are bisected, symmetrical forms with the random imagery of inkblots. They take her familiar works up a notch in playfulness. And another line of new fused-plastic pieces takes that work up a few more notches in playfulness: human and animal figures, and simplified representations of nature, based on Native American petroglyphs and rock paintings. "Have you ever heard of Newspaper Rock in Utah?" Gay asks. "There's this huge rock face, and Indians passing through, pioneers, the Spanish, whoever, would just etch a little something on there. So there's this big mural of graffiti, and it's not words. It's little pictures: a snake or someone jumping over maybe it's the sun ... who knows what it is? You don't know who did it, you don't know when it was done. It's strange. But it's really cool." So, inspired by this rock, Gay is for the first time creating representational figures with the beads, each piece like a rock marking, to be slapped up on a wall in the manner of the Newspaper Rock graffiti: with "no rhyme or reason to it." Gay calls the figures "silly and goofy and cartoony ... really ridiculous." And looking at them scattered across a table in her home, I can see what she means. Put simply, they're fun -- the latest generation of shiny, happy creatures shimmering to life on the gallery wall, hypnotizing and delighting our eyes. "Faith Gay and Lauren Levy" runs Sept. 30-Nov. 6 at D Berman Gallery |
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 In Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's video 'Happy New Year,' a traditional dragon puppet is paraded underwater. |
Japanese/Vietnamese artist's social commentary gets deep in
videos By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Japanese/Vietnamese artist Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba makes memorials to the rapid changes occurring in contemporary Vietnam. To be sure, creating artistic homages to traditions that are being shoved out of the way by modernization -- or by the march of history -- is not an entirely new thing. Indeed it's a fairly common sort of aesthetic romanticizing. But thankfully, Nguyen-Hatsushiba isn't a romantic. Rather, what his two videos now on view at the Austin Museum of Art suggest is that Nguyen-Hatsushiba is probing the brave new cultural landscapes that history creates -- the places that are between the old and new. That makes sense coming from someone who is fundamentally involved with several cultures. Born in 1968 in Tokyo to a Vietnamese father and a Japanese mother, Nguyen-Hatsushiba received his bachelor's degree from the Art Institute of Chicago and his master's from the Maryland Institute College of Art. For a while, he was based briefly in Dallas (he still has family there). In 1995, when he had a residency at the ArtPace foundation in San Antonio, Nguyen-Hatsushiba made a couple installations using rice, the remains of dried vegetables and some documentary photographs -- not all that surprising. Now, Nguyen-Hatsushiba lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City and he presents us with two spectacular short films shot entirely underwater in Vietnam. And both are marked by strange yet exquisitely choreographed movement, rich images of saturated color and meditative soundtracks composed by the artist himself. "Happy New Year -- Memorial Project Vietnam II" features a traditional Asian New Year's dragon puppet, carried underwater by seven divers who gracefully dance the long creature through the water. Ahead of the dragon, two divers lead the odd and wonderful Fate Machine -- a cagelike orb filled with small round capsules that are shot out at random only to explode, their brightly-colored pigment creating slow-moving underwater clouds. "Happy New Year" (about 16 minutes long) is Nguyen-Hatsushiba's homage to the Tet Offensive of 1968 (the year of the artist's birth), a series of surprise attacks by North Vietnamese troops that started during the Lunar New Year celebrations and marked a turning point in the Vietnam War. After the war ended in 1975, tens of thousands of Vietnamese fled by any means possible, many risking their lives in overcrowded, poorly equipped boats. Refugee casualties were high. In explaining "Happy New Year" once to a critic, Nguyen-Hatsushiba suggested that the colorful orbs shot out of the Fate Machine are metaphoric for individual souls embarking on a journey -- a direct reference to the boat people who cast their lot to the water in the hopes that it would carry them to peace. Chased by the New Year, the little orb/souls maybe explode, but they do so in a cloud of gorgeous color, leaving the essence of themselves behind before drifting upward toward the light. With "Memorial Project, Nha Trang, Vietnam, 'Towards the Complex -- For the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards,' " Nguyen-Hatsushiba stages a strange underwater race between three pairs of cyclo drivers. A traditional mode of transportation, cyclos are bicycle taxis, typically hired -- and piloted -- by those of lesser means. The young male cyclo racers wear no scuba tanks (in reality, they are fishermen) and hence they bob up to the surface to catch their breath periodically before returning to laboriously push their cyclos across the sea floor. There's no winner in this curiously balletic endeavor. And once you learn that the Vietnamese government, in a modernizing effort, has banned the production of cyclos (they hamper automobile traffic), Nguyen-Hatsushiba's underwater race certainly suggests the myth of Sisyphus -- the legendary Greek king who was condemned to roll a rock up a hill in Hades only to have it roll down again just as he neared the top. While the cyclo racers seem to toil in vain, there is something about the way they do so in the suspended animation of a beautiful water world that makes their futile race appear not so desperate. Cyclos may be endangered, but Nguyen-Hatsushiba has shrouded them with admiration and beauty. jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699 |
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