'Marjorie Moore: Remains'
D Berman Gallery Through Jan. 24

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
January 9, 2009

A lifeless bird is a sorrow all its own. Many creatures in death may move us, but the particular tragedy of the bird is that its nature is to fly, to be in motion and of the air. And in death it is still, profoundly still, and forever fettered to the earth, like any other beast.

This singular sorrow flutters and falls upon your heart many times in viewing Marjorie Moore's current work at D Berman Gallery. Almost every piece is centered on the corpse of a bird or some part thereof, either a rendering by the artist's hand or, more commonly, the thing itself, collected from the wild by Moore and carefully preserved under glass. These bodies seem impossibly fragile, the hollowed legs and talons frailer than eggshell, the wings brittle as a glaze of ice. And the plumage: frayed and faded to a dull, lusterless crisp. If, as Emily Dickinson would have it, hope is the thing with feathers, then these are shells of despair.

And yet Moore has framed them with such care, in displays of such beauty and elegance, as to rescue them from their desiccated state and, if not restore their former splendor, at least pay tribute to it. Most of the tiny skeletons are laid on rich fabric and showered with and surrounded by dozens, even hundreds, of colored, pearllike beads no larger than a bird's eye. A couple are nestled inside the drawers of specially made and decorated standing chests, which you may pull open to see the dead birds lying in great beds of salt, like tree limbs in a snowdrift. Several others rest under Plexiglas boxes atop wooden tables just a couple of feet high. That these displays are so clearly handcrafted and put together with so much apparent feeling makes them seem personal, as if the fallen animal was known truly and well by the maker, as if these were birds with names.

If these exhibits were only memorials to anonymous birds discovered in yards and on the roadside, it would be enough to make this exhibit a little heartbreaking. But in the smaller tables is another element: Below each box and lifeless bird is a drawer with a pull like the perch of a birdhouse, which, when pulled out, reveals an excerpt from a story in The New York Times describing catastrophic deaths in Iraq. Explosions. Suicide bombers. Blood in the streets. Death.

It is the same in box after box, drawer after drawer, accounts of bloodshed and carnage and loss of life. Suddenly, it isn't only the birds that are fragile but ourselves; it isn't just these beautiful, innocent creatures of the air we are mourning but a host of other beautiful innocents whose lives have been ripped away and who lie still, profoundly still, forever fettered to the earth half a world away. We close the drawers, and a weight falls, a deep sorrow settles in, not as the result of some aggressive political statement, some loud condemnation of the current war, but because a connection has been made by Moore and felt by us: life threaded to life, each one so delicate, so vulnerable, so precious. Hers is but a gesture made in appreciation of flight, in memory of life, and it is exquisitely moving.

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One artist's obsession becomes 'The Texas Chair Project'
Damian Priour leads the exhibit of 160 miniature chairs at the Austin Museum of Art

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, January 15, 2009

Consider the chair.

It's an ubiquitous object — something common to just about any human environment, something that comes in many forms. There are armchairs, rocking chairs, thrones, high chairs for infants, wheelchairs, theater seats and swings.

Chairs and their functions have entered our popular expressions. Something that is funny or surprising is said to make you fall off your chair. Something suspenseful keeps you on the edge of your seat. A leader of a department or a committee, an honored professor — all can be a chairman or chairwoman or said to be the possessors of a chair.

Chairs are everywhere.

And through Feb. 8, at the Austin Museum of Art, there are 160 miniature chairs on exhibit. Half are by artist Damian Priour, crafted from his signature materials of Texas fossil-laced limestone and green-blue glass — materials that speak of his deep attachment to the Texas Gulf Coast region of his youth. The 80 others were made by Texas-based artists from steel, auto paint, fiberglass, felt, foamcore, wood, bronze, fabric, pins, plaster, papier mâche, clay and powder-coated cooper, among other materials. Together the 160 chairs form "The Texas Chair Project" — one of the more inventive artists projects Austin has seen and completely the result of one artist's obsession with chairs.

Priour hardly hides his fascination. The home he shares with his wife, Paula, in West Travis County is filled with chairs. Miniature chairs march up the steps to the second floor. Full-sized functional ones ring the dining table. Sculptural chairs — including one made of video monitors and another made of neon tubes — occupy every corner. There's even a simple worn wooden chair Priour bought at auction, a set piece from the 2004 movie "The Alamo" which was filmed just down the way from Priour's ranch. In fact, as your turn off the main road and make your way up the long drive that slices through Priour's 50-plus acre spread, out of the cedar brush pops "The Chairy Tree," a weather-blasted barren oak tree that's been adorned with wooden chairs.

Priour considers his "Chairy Tree" a symbolic gesture: A tree gives wood to make a chair and Priour returned chairs to a tree as a sort of offering.

In essence, his "Texas Chair Project" is a much more complex gesture of giving and receiving.

"I had been thinking about the project for a long time," Priour says. "And it wasn't like the idea came from any thing in particular. It just popped into my head. And when it kept me up at night, I knew it was time for me to just do it."

Specifically, Priour wanted to make 100 small chairs, each one different. Small in and itself would be departure for Priour. For the past several decades, the fifth-generation 58-year-old Texan has built a solid reputation as a creator of typically towering sculpture, usually displayed outside. His large-scale abstract sculptures have been commissioned for public and private art collections in Corpus Christi, Dallas, Tucson, Chicago and Los Angeles among other cities. In Austin, Priour's monumental works adorn the Austin Convention Center, the Austin Public Library and hold forth on the grounds of Laguna Gloria, the Austin Museum of Art's historic location in West Austin. In June, the Galveston Arts Center will open a 30-year retrospective of Priour's work.

Making small things — especially making 100 small things — was a challenge Priour looked forward to.

But that was only the first part of his self-imposed dare.

Priour planned to send his 100 chairs — unannounced — to 100 Texas-based artists whose work he admired. In exchange, he would ask each artist to make a chair of their own — no restrictions other than it had to fit in the 8-by-8-by-8 inch box Priour's chair had arrived in and be sent to him. The artists could keep Priour's chairs.

For six months as he and his assistant David Hesser dutifully made 100 chairs, Priour didn't breath a word to anyone about his project — not an easy task for the considerably social artist, long active on Austin's arts scene and in civic matters. "I didn't lie about what I was doing when people asked me," he says. "I was just very, very vague."

Priour is also understandably guarded about how he developed his master list of artists. "That was difficult, narrowing it down to just 100 people," he says. "It's like trying to choose among your own children. And I think some people got offended once they found out about the project and that I didn't include them." The list is purely Priour's — not the museum's, not a curator's. Priour did, after all, finance this project on his own from the get-go. Only after he told the folks at the Austin Museum of Art about what he was up to did they offer to put the project on exhibit.

And no, Priour doesn't want to talk about how much of his own money he spent to realize his chair dreams. "Thousands and thousands," is all he'll say.

In May 2007, the Austin Museum of Art put Priour's 100 chairs on exhibit for a couple of weeks. Then Priour and Hesser set about packaging and mailing.

Priour sent a chair to famed Port Arthur-born Robert Rauschenberg — arguably one of the greatest artists of the last century — but Rauschenberg politely declined saying he was too busy and returned the chair. (A handful of others did the same.) Priour sent his chairs to artists he had known for years — painters Sydney Yeager and Melissa Miller, sculptors T. Paul Hernandez and David Deming — and many to artists he had never met like rising star Candance Briceño.

"It was a complete surprise, just like getting a Christmas present," says Briceño of finding the box on her doorstep one day last year. "I immediately loved the whole idea of the project."

The creative challenge, however, was another matter. "I probably sat in my studio for about a month trying to fit my aesthetics, my materials to this project," says Briceño, who makes whimsical sculptures of hand-dyed felt and wire that embody the flora and fauna of the Texas landscape. "It was like going into someone else's territory, trying to use someone else's artistic vocabulary, but still trying to make something that had my mark on it. I struggled — enjoyed it, but struggled."

Briceño's chair, with its fantasical colors and capricious forms, unmistakably bears her signature. And it's the first chair she's ever made.

"Artists are so generous and eager to take a challenge," Priour says. "And this project just reconfirms that."

It also confirms how many ways there are to artistically interpret a chair that must fit in a 8-inch cube. Photographer Kate Breakey shot a moody image of a shadow of chair, then divided the 32-inch-square photo into four parts before sending it back. Known for their conceptual antics, the Houston-based collaborative the Art Guys (Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing) reconfigured Priour's original limestone and glass chair. Austin artist Jill Bedgood sent the box back full of sawdust, along with an intricate template that outlined the form of an Adirondack deck chair. Also in the box were Bedgood's instructions on how to create a sawdust imprint on the museum floor.

"Every chair I got back was a total surprise," Priour says.

Of the 100 chairs Priour made, 80 artists responded in kind. Priour held back 10 chairs to sell to collectors to raise money for the project. Eight chairs have gone completely off the radar, disappearing into the hands of artists who never contacted Priour. "But that's part of the project," he says of the missing chairs. "I knew that would happen."

Once the exhibit closes, Priour will gather his new collection of miniature chairs and take them home. And he'll also launch the next phase of his project. Called "The Global Chair Project," it invites all artists to make a chair suitable for collecting and that will fit into an 8-inch-square box. Accepted chairs will be auctioned off one per day online at www.theglobalchairproject.net. Proceeds will go into a foundation to benefit art and environmental causes.

"I can't get away from them — chairs," says Priour.

And neither, it seems, can we.

'The Texas Chair Project'

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays (Thursdays until 8 p.m.), noon to 5 p.m. Sundays through Feb. 8.

Where: Austin Museum of Art, 823 Congress Ave.

How much: $3-$5 ($1 on Tuesdays)

Info: www.amoa.org, 495-9225

How he did it

Artist Damian Priour and his assistant David Hesser spent six months making miniature chairs out of Priour's signature materials of Texas fossil-laced limestone and green-blue glass. Priour chose 100 Texas-based artists and sent them each a chair.

The instructions: Create your own chair. The only restriction: The finished chair had to fit inside the 8-inch-square box Priour used to send his chair.

80 artists returned chairs.

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'A Grand Affair''
Wally Workman Gallery Through Jan. 31

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
January 16, 2009

This time of year, I always resolve to go to more art galleries. Ideally, a viewer has a grasp of a gallery's oeuvre, of all the artists it represents throughout the year. Wally Workman has done us all a favor with her January show, "A Grand Affair," by exhibiting a couple of (or eight) small works by each of 30 artists she represents. It is great to see this sampler of mostly painters, like a mixed chocolate box of visual delights. It gives insight into what shows not to miss as she presents solo shows throughout the upcoming year.

The gallery is focused on art made by überconsistent producers such as Will Klemm, Erin Cone, and Gordon Fowler. Others are respected fixtures of the local scene but have a few more undulations in the limns of their interests, such as Jennifer Balkan, Helmut Barnett, Jan Heaton, Susan Kemner Reed, and Jill Carver. This is to say they paint well, and they like to toss some current events or an experimental piece into their series. Reed exemplified this risky willingness to be "of the times" by painting still lives of various lovely objects on a table but tucking in a newspaper with a politically charged headline. Balkan painted a cute retro robot that happens to be surrounded by maps of Washington, D.C., adding layered meanings to the work.

Also painting robots this year, Rob Harrell seems to be loosening up in a good way, moving a bit closer to the wet and wide confident strokes of Carol Marine's still lifes. I associate Harrell with backlit full-body images of attractive women, and many of those will be featured in his February solo show. However, I love this series of vintage toys; it's nostalgic, precious, and not sexy. His color palette is rich, and even though each square is one centered toy, Harrell is able to vary the backgrounds to create a strong depth of field in his compositions.

New to the gallery this show is Erika Pochybova-Johnson. She brings a neon palette and layered tiny polka dots into the mix. Her very fresh, fun work seems to be influenced by Eastern European miniature painting and has some kinship to Faith Gay's crafty flat-pattered modernism. New to me but not the gallery is Fatima Ronquillo, who paints pale women and girls in a classical style. They are dainty, dreamy, and a bit like antique dolls. They have very feminine, lacy clothes that are soothing and cozy, relaxing to the eyes (perhaps like a dose of laudanum).

This exhibit demonstrates the variety and interesting scope of artists in Workman's stable. I think because she shows lots of paintings of still lifes, landscapes, and figures, she often doesn't get the credit she deserves as a contemporary curator. "A Grand Affair" is a good chance to get up to speed on what's ahead here in '09, and every piece for sale is less than a grand. How's that for responding to the recession?

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Matt Stokes: these are the days
Start your own damn band

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
January 23, 2009

British artist Matt Stokes received his very first commission in the United States from Arthouse in Austin, and he's doing a solo film and audio installation that the visual-arts organization is calling an "anthropological enquiry" based on "extended visits" here by this foreign-born artist "responding to aspects of the city's punk rock subculture." Is the subculture of punk beneath the social mores of Austinites? Would Arthouse describe a drug manufacturer as someone with an interest in chemistry and hydroponic growing systems? Fortunately, looking at his actual writing and images is more exciting than reading Arthouse's oddly formal descriptions of the project.

I'm stoked to go to Stokes' art talk on Saturday, Jan. 24, at 3pm. It's free and open to the public. I received his aggressive flier in the mail and found it charming. "Don't assume that not wearing a swastika makes you any less of a Nazi. We see you." Is this an indictment of all the folks in the greenroom at Room 710 during a Fuckemos show? Stokes repeatedly uses the inclusive "we," which feels correct. He writes: "You can keep your overpriced, chrome-plated, garbage can of a society. We will not participate. ... We'd rather go to Raul's." He must have studied musicology with Jason Austin at Lovejoys. His work appears to be part history lesson, part call to action. "Stasis is the death of art and the staple of boredom." His flier rants briefly on topics such as crime, freedom of expression, commercialization, conformity, and revolutionary art. It's inspirational; I've always wanted to say this in the Chronicle, but I have never had a good reason to. I absolutely hate the slogan "keep Austin weird." For the last four years or so, every time the city of Austin has asked artists for art that "keeps Austin weird," it has made my stomach hurt. The phrase is so damn meaningless. There, I said it, and I feel better already. The punk rock spirit confronts things publicly and is physically cathartic.

I'm glad the fine art world of Austin is investigating our city's sweet punk rock traditions. Last month, I thoroughly enjoyed the show at testsite by Chicago collective Temporary Services. These artists made tribute zines about the Dicks' lyrics, and Tim Kerr photocopied and handed out old Big Boys fliers. I'm excited to see if the punk zeitgeist of Stokes' film and sound installation (from a punk show at the Broken Neck and a recording session at Sweatbox Studio) will be powerful enough to fully transform and energize the gallery space.

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Thirteen months of junk mail = 265 pounds = one sublime artistic response
Annette Lawrence's 'Free Paper' documents consumer culture waste

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, January 29, 2009

Never mind the Internet revolution. Spam hasn't yet wiped out the reams of coupons, catalogs, credit card offers and other unsolicited paper ephemera that lands in our mailboxes.

How much junk mail comes a year?

Artist Annette Lawrence wondered. And so from November 2005 through November 2006, Lawrence collected her junk mail. It totaled 265 pounds.

With it she crafted "Free Paper" the quietly thoughtful installation that is on view at Flatbed Press, courtesy of Austin Green Art, a nonprofit environmental art initiative. The Dallas-based Lawrence — whose work is in the collections of the Blanton Museum of Art and Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, among other institutions — exhibited "Free Paper" last fall in Dallas.

To create "Free Paper," Lawrence carefully cut all her junk mail into 2-inch strips and then neatly stacked and glued the strips together, piling each month's worth of paper into a pyramid that she then mounted on a narrow wooden shelf. Lined up along the gallery wall in chronological order, the stacks look like geological strata, each a different size.

Lawrence finds inspiration in quotidian materials. In her previous work, she's used personal journals and calendars to form delicate constructions. She's spun room-size installations out of ordinary string and stretched huge expanses of brown paper across gallery walls.

In the current exhibit, Lawrence also includes two tree stumps fashioned from mail-order catalogs, the glossy books forming a ringed trunk that's then wrapped in brown packing paper. And there are only 12 months of junk mail strata on view; the Dallas Museum of Art recently purchased the December 2006 stack. Each stack is $10,000. Proceeds will benefit Austin Green Art.

"Free Paper" is Lawrence's comment on the excesses of consumerism, obviously, particularly the unrelenting stream of unsolicited sales pitches that infiltrate our everyday existence. We don't ask for junk mail. Yet the paper it's printed on has value. And still it arrives free. Hence, Lawrence's ironic title "Free Paper" — she's trying to give order and meaning to the senseless quantity of junk mail she receives.

Austin Green Art is hosting "Free Paper" as part of the national "Do Not Mail Campaign." A petition at the exhibit requests Congress take action against unwanted mail by starting a Do Not Mail Registry similar to the Do Not Call Registry started several years ago.

That petition? Yeah, it's on paper.

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'Annette Lawrence: Free Paper'
Flatbed Gallery Through Feb. 6

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
January 30, 2009

It's worth dashing over to Flatbed Gallery to see "Free Paper," the Annette Lawrence solo show presented by Austin Green Art and ForestEthics. In it, this accomplished and nuanced artist addresses a bunch of neat things simultaneously with simple materials, including the passage of time, calendars, edge quality, abstract sculpture, personal environmental impact, collecting, and storing.

The installation is made of hand-torn paper strips that are stacked on shelves. Each 2-inch-wide stack consists of unsolicited junk mail balanced in piles of various sizes. Lawrence presents one pile for each month of the year. One (secret) rule of abstraction is that multiples of anything start to look cool – a rhythm appears and gives it strength. While these chronological archives are made of colorful advertisements, the end color reads as a gray mass. By collecting and combining these disparate pieces, Lawrence has transformed them into a unified and believable new vision of fuzzy towers. The whole group in a line reads to me like the Zapotec ruins of Monte Albán or some ancient ziggurat made with powerful geometry. The systematic 2-inch stacks are so regular and repetitive that the little droopy parts at the ends give them force and an odd tension. The curvature of the Earth on a wide horizon is vaguely implied by the longer ends of paper when they sag at the outskirts of the stack. It's natural to see landscapes in all horizontal shapes.

Many artists, as builders, possess a unique sensitivity to their personal environmental impacts as consumers. Recently I recognized the perilous territory that these green artists enter as well as their bravery. For example, one collects small raw materials with a vision of creating a valuable bigger new thing. This is the beginning. One artist I've met collected bottle caps for a few months but stopped because he realized that his collection could show publicly how much beer he drank. Faith Gay recently talked about "feeling crazy" because she collects bits of things (for additive sculptures) in her pockets, even as she moves through her home. The list of fine artists who are physically addressing environmental issues in their work is growing rapidly. Put Lawrence on the list of prescient locals such as Gay, Virginia Fleck, and Peat Duggins.

Lawrence also made a charming series of corrugated storage boxes for display, each one a negative shape carefully taped into a customized rectangle. These are crafty humorous brown silhouettes of groovy mesalike inner shapes. Precious cartons and expensive crates do help your status in the art world (secret). This is good-looking art with heavy recycling mojo, but the primacy of the craftsmanship is what's paramount. Thanks to Randy Jewart of Austin Green Art for bringing Lawrence's show here. If you like this art show, Google Chris Jordan's photos after you've signed the petition at www.donotmail.org.

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'Leslee Fraser: No Sure Footing'

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, January 30, 2009

Leslee Fraser is a humorously irreverent commentator. The San Antonio-based artist — currently featured in a solo exhibit at Women & Their Work — pulls from the most commonplace commercial realms to twist well-known images into funny but often dark new scenarios.

Specifically Fraser — whose artmaking practice had to change radically when she was diagnosed with chronic reactive arthritis several years ago — collects kitschy pastel ceramic figurines and toys then arranges and modifies them to startling effect. Fraser does her collecting while power walking around inside malls. In effect, shopping has become her mode of artmaking. And yet it's the commercialization — the bland mass reproduction, the numbing sameness — of popular imagery that Fraser's art critiques.

Take, for example, "Precious Little." The tiny staged scene features one of the strangest of the Precious Moments figurines — the mass-produced teardrop-eyed, pastel-hued little statues of children — this one in spacesuit, a helmet in its hands. Fraser has placed this baby astronaut about six inches from a pile of fool's gold. In a darkly humorous way you can't help but feel sorry for the tiny space-traveling tot and what she represents — she's an allegory for our collective starry-eyed dreams of discovering material riches.

Everything in Fraser's mini tableaux is topsy-turvy, ironic, upside-down; the titles of miniature installations, pure double-entendre. In "Forbidden Love" a rosy cute ceramic mother pig nurses a dog while her piglets look on in surprise. In "Cock Fight 2" two rooster figurines, slightly altered with craft clay, pair off, one in patriotic American garb, the other in the robes of a Islamic imam: two titans of political and religious faith as warring animals.

Despite their handmade-and-heartfelt look and despite their commercial origins, these odd scenes unnerve. Maybe it's their miniature scale. Maybe it's the way in which Fraser, with very deft artistic antics, complete subverts the shallow kitsch of pop culture to weave compelling visual commentaries.

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