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Women & Their Work: Why W&TW? By Robert Faires Some people wonder why Women & Their Work even exists. Is there really a need, they ask, for an organization that promotes female artists exclusively? That may have been fine for the Seventies, in the heyday of women's lib, but haven't those times passed? What's the point of such an organization today? With Women & Their Work turning 30 next year, the pioneering cultural organization is choosing to tackle these questions head-on, in the two-hour panel discussion Women & Their Work: Why Then, Why Now, to be held this weekend at W&TW's home on Lavaca. The free event, which honors the late Rita Starpattern, the visual artist who co-founded W&TW and served as director for its first eight years, will feature an impressive gathering of artists, curators, and cultural professionals discussing the state of feminism and women's art over the last three decades, as well as W&TW's role as a central space and showplace for Texas women artists, nurturing them and opening doors for their work to be shown elsewhere both locally and nationally. Kay Turner, former member of the seminal rock band Girls in the Nose, now adjunct professor at New York University and folklorist for the borough of Brooklyn, returns to town to lead the discussion with artist and UT professor Margo Sawyer, choreographer Deborah Hay, art historian Saundra Goldman, Fluent-Collaborative founder and former Austin Museum of Art Director Laurence Miller, artist Connie Arismendi, artist and Texas State University assistant professor Joey Fauerso, and artist and Glasstire Editor Rachel Cook. If that crew can't answer those questions in an informed and lively manner, who can? A reception will follow. Women & Their Work: Why Then, Why Now will take place Saturday, Nov. 3, 3-5pm, at Women & Their Work gallery, 1710 Lavaca. For more information, call 477-1064 or visit www.womenandtheirwork.org. |
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 Katrina Moorhead RedGreen Blue Peony and Rising Attachments installation view |
Katrina Moorhead wins Texas Prize By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Houston mixed-media artist Katrina Moorhead is the winner of the $35,000 Texas Prize, the biennial award presented the Austin arts organization, Arthouse. Notable art critic Dave Hickey presented the award Friday night at a gala at Stubb's. Moorhead was one of five Texas artists selected as finalists for the no-strings-attached prize, one of the largest in the state. Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Justin Boyd, Margarita Cabrera and Bill Davenport were also named finalists from a pool of 136 nominated artists. Moorhead, who was born in Ireland in 1971, makes complex installations or site-specific work from typically common materials. Her installations "RedGreenBluePeony" and "Rising Attachments" are currently on view at Arthouse through Nov. 11, along the work of the other finalists. Moorhead-gallery-view-3_350.jpg ("RedGreenBluePeony" and "Rising Attachments" ) A panel of five judges made their selection based on the new work in the exhibit and the artist's overall body of work. Chaired by Arthouse's executive director, Sue Graze, the jury included Dallas-based art historian and critic Frances Colpitt; artist Eileen Maxson, the 2005 Arthouse Texas Prize recipient; Debra Singer, executive director of The Kitchen in New York; curator Franklin Sirmans of the Menil Collection in Houston; and Elizabeth Dunbar, curator of Arthouse. The five finalists were selected from a pool of 136 Texas-based artists who were in turn nominated by a group of arts professionals. The five finalists were commissioned to create new work specifically for the Texas Prize exhibition at Arthouse. The Texas Prize was started by the nonprofit Arthouse in 2005, and it's funded by a small group of philanthropists. This year's group includes Austinities Johnna and Stephen Jones, Jeanne and Michael Klein, Chris Mattsson and John McHale, Mary and Chris Ozburn, Lora Reynolds and Quincy Lee, Julie and John Thornton, and Mary and Howard Yancy. |
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 Jonathan Marshall The Bear Takes the Flag to Lenny |
'Jonathan Marshall: The Book of Lenny' By Erin Keever What do beacons, a bear, and a bicycle boat have in common? They all are part of Jonathan Marshall's post-apocalyptic tale and one-person exhibition at Art Palace entitled, "The Book of Lenny." Marshall's visual presentation of a narrative is multi-tiered and somewhat cumbersome to navigate, but is worth the effort. Because Marshall's images are meant to function like text, one could begin to map their route by "reading" the works on paper. These images are clues. There are crisply executed wrecked houses, transmitters, satellites and constellations. They are set within atmospheres that reveal less than they conceal; outer space, oceans or absolute emptiness. A large ink and gouache work depicting a roaring bear crowning a mountaintop seems to illustrate a pivotal story point. The colorful cotton flag on the gallery floor may be a relic from the bear's crusade. Then consider the "Bicycle Boat," an obviously hand-made form of transportation. Who traveled on it? Will it help us in our journey? In another room a sculpture of the large brown bear (made mostly of dyed mop clippings) stands in the corner. At last, in a video, we encounter our hero, Lenny. Lenny is described as a "man in black" as well as a DIY (do-it-yourself) cowboy-banker. He commands the bicycle boat. His story cleverly overlaps with the bear's. A metaphor for the artist, Lenny puts the puzzle together. He is the mythic hero that helps us makes sense of things. He fits his media, video, which serves to establish a clearer, more linear storyline. Through Lenny's story, Marshall offers a compelling exploration of myth and its relevance today. (‘Jonathan Marshall: The Book of Lenny' continues 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and by appointment. Art Palace, 2109 E. Cesar Chavez, free, (512) 496-0687, www.artpalacegallery.com .) There will be an artist talk Tuesday, November 20 at 8 p.m. |
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 Jonathan Marshall, video still |
'The Book of Lenny' By Salvador Castillo Chapter 1 "The Book of Lenny" In a house-cum-gallery, on the east, Eastside of town ... Finely crafted drawings and sculptures illustrate a bearded fellow, a man in black, and a growling bear guiding a young hero aboard a rickety vessel. *Cough* Star Wars *cough*. A video elucidates the mystical meetings where Lenny, our everyman, receives a Weirding module, lightsaber, and the One Ring -- oh wait, I mean a sextant, a stargazer, and a flag to initiate his journey. A fluent conversation unfolds as the bear snarls nonsense and Lenny whistles a vaguely familiar tune in response. Later at night, the Man in Black suddenly appears and maintains a Cheshire Cat smirk, until he, just as suddenly, disappears. And so we watch Lenny pedal his boat off into the unknown of the horizon. The Star Wars comparison is only a half-rib. It is documented that George Lucas heavily referenced Joseph Campbell's work in his popular space opera, and Campbell's hero-myth formula is also evident in Jonathan Marshall's show, as well as in the monumental narratives used by some of Marshall's contemporaries -- Seth Alverson and Chronicle contributing illustrator Peat Duggins, both of whom have shown at Art Palace, immediately come to mind. Reading the press release for "The Book of Lenny" before the show's opening, descriptions of a postapocalyptic setting suggested a revisiting of Alverson's barbaric setting. Peat Duggins, another artist I accused of riffing on the Skywalker saga, described a colorful set of characters that manifested in drawing, sculpture, and video. Justin Boyd's recent run at the Arthouse Texas Prize featured an installment of a multichaptered project spanning the same three mediums but mining an expansive history from geographic landmarks focused on a more factual odyssey. At the beginning of the year, the Blanton Museum's WorkSpace presented the final installment of an apocalyptic trilogy by Matthew Day Jackson, whose intertwining of autobiography and history helped point to some ideas of social reconciliation. I am willing to bet that none of these artists has experienced anything like the war and poverty of the early 20th century that affected J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, or any of the Jewish immigrants who Americanized their names before creating today's iconic superheroes. So what drives our young artists to address, sometimes directly, historical and current events in the form of elaborate "alternate" worlds employing multiple incarnations? Well, if they grew up on a diet of Hasbro-, LJN-, and Mattel-licensed products as I did, then I have an idea. Unable to tackle a defensive lineman for real, we're Monday-morning quarterbacks who do so playing Madden NFL on the PlayStation. This is a form of play given to us through licensing and merchandising. We create parallel worlds where we have ultimate control, and our reign can be as destructive or benevolent as we wish. In "The Book of Lenny," the boat is very much part of the main installation, but the other sculptures in the exhibit feel less useful. They are situated as relics or props of the video production. It's almost like the "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth" exhibition that visited Houston six years ago. But let's not get too cynical yet. Marshall has chosen the side of good as he has Lenny accept the call, and the rubble in the side gallery appears to be fodder for the construction of the bike boat. The characters are helpful thus far, ushering in the call in the drawings and providing tools to guide Lenny. Colorful laser lines seem to have become prevalent elements in art, and in the gallery they point toward Lenny's horizon. Just as Sam and Frodo crossed the Anduin without the Fellowship, "Lenny" embarks on the next chapter of the trilogy. So you know there's gonna be a box set. |
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 Matt Rebholz |
Matt Rebholz: The Golem By Robert Faires It's fables about the dead that sometimes tell us the most about life. When faced with ghosts, vampires, zombies, or otherwise reanimated corpses - all creatures that exist without whatever essential spark of humanity animates us - we feel more keenly what it is to be truly alive. And we often see reflected in them our lives, forcing us to confront whether our own existence more closely resembles that of the living or the dead. The golem, that soulless being from Jewish folklore shaped from mud to serve man's ends, has been known to act as such a mirror, and he does so once more in this series of images by Matt Rebholz. The graduate student in printmaking at UT-Austin took his inspiration from Gustav Meyrink's 1914 novel, The Golem, in which the man-made creature, in Rebholz's words, "wanders the streets of a corrupt and ruined city, blissfully unaware that he is a malfunctioning meat robot and not a man." He's given each of the 20 prints the number of a chapter, though he admits that as he was making the series, it diverged substantially from the events of the novel to become its own meditation on "consumption, ingestion, and expulsion." Indeed, what one picks from the images at Slugfest is not so much a narrative as a depiction of humanity in which the dead may be living and the living dead. A woman sits naked on the floor of a living room, her back against the sofa, her legs splayed, a TV remote in one hand and a vacant expression on her face. Bathed in the glow from the TV, which casts unnervingly large black shadows across the wall, she might be a corpse, for all the life she displays. In the mob scene of Chapter X, a couple dozen figures march with upraised arms, as if agitated by something we cannot see. Some have angry faces with the bared teeth of vicious beasts, and most have glazed eyes, around which are dark circles and lids, just a step removed from the inky eye sockets of a skeleton. And skeletons appear again and again - one alongside a group of living people, one dressed as a doctor with a living man's arm around his shoulder, a skull hanging above a marionette perched on a horse. Death is a presence that seems at home among us, as if we've already left life behind. The golem, meanwhile, appears to be a pleasant-faced giant, more human than anyone else; in one print, he walks naked down a suburban street, one hand gingerly placed against the roof of a house that he towers over, and in another, he sits cowering under a freeway, seemingly terrified by the toy-sized trucks and sport utility vehicle that speed around and above him. He's an innocent trapped among a race of ravenous monsters, whose appetites, as depicted by Rebholz in a style somewhere between the art of ancient folk tales and contemporary cartoons, are grotesque. Chapter VIII shows us a man forcefully groping a nude woman, and the way his twisted fingers knead her exposed flesh is horrific. There's horror in these images, and for the most part, they don't come from the creature without the soul. Rebholz has crafted a spooky parade of nightmare visions, impressively detailed black-and-white fever dreams in which we devour the world mindlessly. Where is that essential spark of humanity? Have we allowed it to die out? That's a thought more frightening than a thousand scary movies.
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