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  Ann Matlock |
Ann Matlock: Tapestry Weaver Ann Matlock: Tapestry Weaver By Jean Scheidnes Ann Matlock weaves intricate tapestries of subtly shaded natural forms. She uses silk yarns that she dyes and spins herself. In all her work, she seeks to convey a feeling that the weaving is just a fragment of something larger, and not something contained by its edges. Matlock has been a working artist for 22 years and has taught art at the college level for the past 14. She now heads a fibers program at Lamar University in Beaumont. She spends the academic breaks and many weekends at her studio in Johnson City. Matlock is currently exhibiting at D Berman Gallery. Austin American-Statesman: How did you become a weaver? Ann Matlock: I first learned to weave on a little frame loom that my father made me when I was a little girl. Later, when I was working on my MFA at UT-Austin, I learned to set up a floor loom and loved the experience. Although the focus of my bachelor's degree had been painting and photography, I made weaving, spinning and natural dyes the focus of my graduate thesis. How long does your process take? It takes a very long time -- the textiles in this show represent three years work. The tapestry and brocade techniques that I use allow me a lot of freedom of design, but speed is not part of the process. On one of the large pieces, I was able to weave less than an inch in a long work day. The detail in these weavings is put there over time with a lot of attention, so I never lose interest in the work, and I hope that the people who acquire these tapestries also find a lot to look at in them. . . . All of the woven work has a somewhat three-dimensional quality, achieved by combining traditional tapestry techniques with brocade stitches that I developed. The sculptural quality of brocade adds to the sense of space in the work as well as depth of color. What tools do you work with? I use two looms, one 72-inch wide and a smaller 24-inch portable loom. I work on weaving only one project at a time. For spinning I use an antique wheel made in Quebec about 150 years ago. I also use many small tools -- shuttles, spindles, skeiners, bobbins and a bobbin winder, and a large vertical steamer for setting dyes. What materials do you work with? I used silk for all of the work in the exhibition at D Berman Gallery. I weave with four to five different commercially spun silks that I import from Canada, as well as handspun silk yarns that I make from three different types of unspun silk fiber. For larger work -- I have made weavings up to 15 by 16 1/2 feet in size -- I use wool, silk and mohair. This yarn is thicker than the silk and has the boldness that large work requires. Are your weavings used in furniture or any objects besides wall mounted art? At an earlier time in my career, I did more utilitarian work and wearable work, but the ideas I have now seem to work best on the wall. The exception is the occasional commissioned piece. You seem partial to plant forms. Why? I have also worked from sky, clouds and landscape, as well as some architectural forms. I have made watercolors of plants, rocks, water and natural landscape forms for many years. This has been my way of being focused and learning from the natural world. The colors and gestures of natural forms are an endless source of interest for me -- expressive, but also abstract. I may use animal and human forms someday in my work, but for now I find that I have more ideas that combine stylized plant forms with abstract motifs. Are there other artists or periods that you study for inspiration? Yes. I am inspired by artists of many different periods. Painters and photographers have taught me a lot. I also enjoy learning more about the art of indigenous cultures, and the Precolombian arts of the Americas. Right now, I am studying European textiles from the 14th to the 20th centuries -- both printed textiles and weaving. Next week I will be in Morocco, working with some textile workshops there and looking at everything I can. Ann Matlock's new works are on exhibit at D Berman Gallery through June 18.
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 Cynthia Camlin |
Cynthia Camlin Austin Chronicle D Berman Gallery, through June 18 Cynthia Camlin's new work takes her deeper into the explorations of perception and cultural paradigms. The works take on a philosophical emanation in their contemplative depictions of nature's changes, showing multifaceted crystalline formations on panels and three-dimensional cubes. The properties of a monad – modularity, flexibility, and isolation – are especially significant to Camlin's three-dimensional cubes. The crystalline forms on any given surface of a cube can mingle with similar yet separate crystalline forms on the other cubes. In isolation, the indivisible unit becomes the ultimate barer of self-containment, independent and unique with no beginning and no end, having the power of representation while reflecting the incorporeal activity of all other cubes. Camlin's earlier works depicted deer and elk engaged in combat while in complicity with the viewer. Her work since 1999 has turned outward to the conflict between man and nature, as well as inward in their impact. Utilizing the unique properties of an absorbent ground she developed over the years, each composition is built through the incremental layering of tiny geometric forms. By adding multiple layers of transparent color, Camlin achieves a luminous palette in each painting. A structural anthropologist concerned with the relationship between nature and culture, Camlin is dactylic, immediate, and always challenging in the complexity of issues she entertains in her work |
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Four different doors to self-discovery in 'Migration Uno' exhibit By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin It's the eternal artistic struggle -- the quest to define one's individuality through art. That's certainly what the four artists in "Migration Uno" pursue. Each in their own style, they struggle to map out who they are, where they have been and where they are going. But for this quartet -- René Alvarado, Sandra Fernández, Ana Fuentes and Gustavo Torres -- the journey toward self-definition constantly shifts. The four have moved across various international borders to arrive in the United States from Latin America; all oscillate continually between cultures and languages. To savvy Austin art observers, this kind of bicultural artistic expression is nothing new. The proximity to Mexico, a sophisticated research university with a stellar Latin American art and literary collection, and Austin's comparatively open and welcoming atmosphere -- indeed, artists from Latin America find Texas' capital city a comfortable place to create. More importantly, within the past year, the Blanton Museum of Art has announced that come February 2006, when its new building opens, the American and Latin American collections will be displayed together chronologically. The art of the Americas will be considered as a whole. All the more apropos, then, that two Austin art venues -- Gallery Shoal Creek and Vin Gallery (temporarily sheltered in Shoal Creek after a fire destroyed its home) -- collaborate on "Migration Uno." The artistic journeys represented in the exhibit exemplify how artists in our highly mobile age wrestle with their identity. Alvarado and Fuentes use a surrealist approach to represent lives that may be called, in a casual way, surrealistically dislocated themselves. Alvarado spent his early years in Torreon, Coahuila, with his mother while his father did migrant work in Wyoming. After years apart, Alvarado, his mother and siblings reunited with his father and the family settled in San Angelo. Born in Mexico to a Lithuanian/Polish-American mother and Mexican father, Fuentes has shuttled between the U.S. and Mexico her entire life. Now, she resides in Austin. In a similar manner, Alvarado and Fuentes anchor their vividly hued paintings with parallel figures. For Alvarado, the face is neither specifically male or female. Fuentes, on the other hand, uses the same haunting image of a young girl. Each artist then surrounds the figure with seemingly disparate symbols. Alvarado uses nopalitos, farm animals, guitars, flowers -- the stuff of folktales he heard from his grandparents. Fuentes employs actual old pages from books, bits of lace, vast and empty landscapes. Taken altogether, though, each one of Alvarado's and Fuentes' paintings can be read like a book, symbol by symbol strung together to tell a visual story. Fernández tells stories too, but uses collages of old photographs, fabric, paper and thread to do so. A native of Ecuador, she left her homeland in 1987 in a bit of a hurry when a right-wing dictator cracked down on nonsupporters. Now she crafts small sculptures and impromptu photo albums that represent an attempt to connect with the life she left behind. "I love organic things," she said recently at a gallery talk. "To me they take me back to the history, to my background, to my roots, to my ancestry." In a less personally nostalgic mode, Torres creates willowy bronze sculptures that seem at once ancient and futuristic. After attending art school in Mexico and launching his career there, Torres headed to California in pursuit of more sophisticated foundries. Now, with their mottled surfaces, his bronze figures of people and animals look as if they're centuries old and have been dug out of archaeological ruins. Are they old or are they new? Are they from here or elsewhere? As with everything else in "Migration Uno," the answer is "both." When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays through July 2 |
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