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Austin Chronicle, Best of 2004 Austin Chronicle, Best of 2004 Women & Their Work: Best Art
Gallery Conveniently located between the UT campus and downtown, Women & Their Work has been celebrating female artists in Texas for decades. A nonprofit organization dedicated to educating our city about contemporary art and extolling the women who create it, their small, exquisite gallery is truly the finest in Austin. Their gift shop can provide just the right gift for any occasion, and visiting the gallery is always free. Austin Museum of Art: Best Museum More and more Austinites like hanging out and looking at what's hanging on AMOA's walls. Sometimes we're drawn to superstar shows like the record-breaking Andy Warhol retrospective, but we also like work by their own, and director Dana Friis-Hansen makes sure the city gets in-depth looks at sterling local artists such as Michael Ray Charles, Tre Arenz, and Lance Letscher. This is a museum folks feel at home in. Lance Letscher: Best Painter/Sculptor Er, how about best collagist, although what Letscher does with tiny little pieces of paper – from antique books, from modern magazines, from forgotten theses on resublimated thiotimoline – might be appropriately considered the finest marriage between both painting and sculpting. His work often flies beyond Austin's gilded cage these days, but this local-born artist, represented exclusively by Austin's D Berman Gallery, still wows 'em here in the old hometown. Arthouse’s Annual 5x7 Show: Best Art Show and Party The entries – by hundreds of artists – are all in a 5-by-7 format. The range of work in every possible medium is staggering, from some of the finest artists across the country ... and everything is $100. But that's just the exhibition. For the opening fundraising party, the works are tagged and prospective buyers jealously hover over the piece they have staked out ... and then all hell breaks loose at the designated moment when everybody lunges for the piece they desire, causing a near-riot as they snag the coveted piece. It is a party and exhibition not to be missed – a true Austin event. |
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 Diatessiraq, by Marc Silva |
Ancient History Alive! By Rachel Koper Diatessiraq is the title of a new painting by Marc Silva, a self-taught artist who works very slowly but whose paintings should not be missed. Silva works in his own world with its own language. The titles of his works sound like Old English or Latin, though they usually are invented words. In Diatessiraq, his archaic language fits like a glove around his image of fragmented stone hands touching an engraved tablet. The hands – Silva often paints his own hands in different fossilized settings – are both tense and sinuous, as if the missing appendage of a great Roman statue has wandered off, but they also seem alive and autonomous, like Thing from The Addams Family. The fingers push down actively on the cracks as if they're walking or standing. The script on the stone is impossible to read. It looks like it was engraved by several ancient cultures, and then the tablet was broken and reassembled at some later point. I've known Silva personally for seven years. He told me once that when he is glazing and painting at his slow, methodical pace that he feels like he is using the brush to dust the sand off of a buried relic, to unearth something that was already there. He began painting these careful, mystical works after doing undergraduate work in physics. He seems to draw from man's historical attempts at understanding the workings of the world around him. Marc Silva's new work will be on view through Oct. 30 at Studio 2 Gallery, 1700 S. Lamar. For more information, call 448-2622. |
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 Jill, Tasty on the Floor, by Zak Smith |
"Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New
Generation" By Wayne Alan Brenner Here's the good news about "Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation," the touring exhibit curated by Vicky A. Clark and Barbara Bloemink: It's well worth seeing. It's well worth seeing if you like to give your eyes a treat or you like to give your mind's teeth something complex to chew on or you appreciate the vernacular of comic books and graffiti or even if you don't. If you're familiar with the surreal work of cartoonist Glen Baxter, say, then you might feel a slight tingle to be looking at a large original of his; if not, you may still be delighted by his The English have always adopted a relaxed attitude to sexual fulfillment at the end of one hall. If you fondly recall the Gottfried Helnwein self-portrait used as the cover of a Scorpions album, then you'll likely enjoy the Disney-dropping message of the artist's mixed media work American Prayer, and you'll probably even forgive the misspelling of his name on the nearby title card. After all, what evocation of comic-book history would be complete without a typo or two, and who's got time to read text, anyway, when there are such vibrantly graphic treasures as Michael Ray Charles' painting (Forever Free) Beware and the Reed Anderson/Daniel Davidson video "Macho Shogun" to enjoy looking at? There's much to enjoy here, from the colorful mushroomy phantasms of Takashi Murakami to the sculptural collection of individually painted glass bottles by famed tagger Barry McGee, from the New Yorker-ish miniature portraits by Juliette Borda to Peregrine Honig's Gorey-tinted Awfulbet as rendered in ink and watercolor on 26 separate brown lunch bags. (You especially want to walk around to Arthouse's streetside display window, where Miguel Rodriguez's life-sized busts, Considering Informative Action, will give you a deeper appreciation of both superheroes and the potential of fired clay.) A smattering of the pieces in "Comic Release" seem little more than images that are fun to look at, and there's nothing hella wrong with that. The few innocuous creations are a welcome balm, in fact, as much of this show works the sociopolitical plow for all it's worth, using the sharpness of popular comic-book icons and design methods to dig up fresh perspectives on gender, race, class, and all the rest of the ground our lives are necessarily seeded, if not ceded, in. This exhibit's worth, I told you at the beginning, is the good news. The bad news is evident only in the wide world beyond the gallery, where the human race continues doing to itself and its surroundings the sort of things that fictional – whether visual or textual – tragedies and farces are created from. The only bad news is what some of the artists of "Comic Release" are expertly commenting on. |
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 Treetops, by Faustinus Deraet |
Plastic Eyes By Jacqueline May Faustinus Deraet's "Plastic Eyes" photography series is taken in black and white with a Holga camera. These cheap plastic cameras are beloved by the artists who use them, not in spite of but because of the unpredictable distortions and rounded shadows they produce in the periphery. These circular images are perfect for Deraet's work: He has a gift for examining reality in a meditative, universal sense, creating a sensation of existential awareness. Time, a shot of a public timepiece framed against a clouded sky, is subtly enhanced by a pair of diagonals formed by power lines, reinforcing a sensation of motion. Another time-related image, In a Hurry, is an image of a striped crosswalk with depersonalized figures flowing across. An oddly distorted sense of perspective is created by the stripes, which are nearly parallel to the picture plane. As they rhythmically diminish with distance, they echo the ever-present distancing of the past. Bike Rack and Chairs play with the theme of motion and stillness in time. Fountain of Abundance takes the series in a somewhat different direction. The fully modeled clarity of the central image, a font ornamented with a pair of sculpted twined fish, is contrasted with the flatness and blurring created toward the edges of the photo, so that a tension between flatness and volume is present, creating an otherworldly spatial effect similar to that seen in India's painted photographs. In the placement of pattern alongside illusionistic rendering, the picture plane is simultaneously asserted and denied. The Buddha is perhaps the artist's most direct take on spirituality. It is a simple photo of a monumental sculpted Buddha against the background of a clouded sky. |
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