New Dallas Contemporary

(Image Source)

The Dallas Contemporary is moving location from Swiss in the Deepelma area of Dallas to Glass St. in the design district of Dallas. Many of the contemporary galleries are located in the design district here in Dallas and so this make the Dallas Contemporary location more relevant. Artist James Gilbert will launch the new site with a multi-media installation about the insane amount of safety rules imposed on the public that often times trumps common sense to avoid law suits and other consumer protection actions. From what I have seen of Gilbert's work, I would guess he would take this issue on with a bit of tongue and cheek. The example of James Gilbert's work (above) comes for a great online gallery site Saatchi Gallery out of the UK.

Need More

So, I have looking at this work for a while and it needs more. I think it need something more on that right bottom corner, I just can't quite make out what I need. The background text is 'row your boat,' the purple is a text from a greeting card, and the blue text is a quote about fame from Oprah. These are the three elements I have been working with of late. A poem, a quote from a personal but mundane source, and a famous quote. I just need one more element to make the work finished.

Carey Young

Inventory as installed in Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon, Sept 2007 (source)

For the longest time I have been looking for an artist that is taking on the corporation society mentality head on. Carey Young is that such artist. Young does tend on the side of cleaver art, but I think the work does flow into the art realm of conceptual art. The problem with conceptual art is the danger of falling into 'oh how cleaver,' response and an illustration of an idea rather than art that plays in multiple meanings and interpretations. I think Young is able to overcome much of this problem with the seriousness that she takes on the subject. Young is really talking about the culture of corporate thinking. She is tackling the idea from several angles, some more successful than others, but over all, in interesting investigation. After all, corporations and culture that has reformed our way of thinking in the United States is something some artists should tackle in the same way as the Pop artists looked around and notices all this mass produced stuff, which made them want to respond. Young uses videos to feature a correspondences idea and revolutions (in the context to the business world). Young uses vinyl on walls featuring business buzz words and vinyl numbers on a wall representing Young's inventory price of all the elements monetary value in Young's body.

Greely Myatt

Greely Myatt teaches at the University of Memphis and he is an artist out of Memphis, TN. His whimsy is quite fun and diverse. The Memphis Flyer (image source) and Artforum did a great review of his work. He does humorous works that sometimes don't make work that is marketable. My drawing professor Susan Cheal makes work that is about the display and production of art in a time in place outside of the art market. Artist that play in and out of the market do have a sense of freedom, but these artists are often professors as well. They can somewhat afford to play both roles. Lets face it, artists know when they are making art that can sell and not sell. I have plenty of art projects on the back burner that can't be sold, but I can't afford to do it yet. Sometimes you have to sit on a good idea and workshop an idea into small false starts to make the big project work.

Repeat of Text

I have been revisiting this old work from when I was at UT Dallas. I think I might try to create a few more. Then again, I don't know if this work just illustrates and idea and I don't want a work that has such an easy read. I might try to create a work that the text continues in a sentence that keeps trailing off rather than a work that just repeats an idea. This way, the painting will have more of a mystery and keep the viewer speculating where the sentence might go. I think the mouth movements would make more sense as well, because I can have the mouth say a sentence and the mouth can say more than the text can reveal. I think this time I will try to paint the faces on, or at least screen print them on. Last time I just printed them on transparent sticky paper and then pressed them on the canvas. This made the painting very brittle and easily damaged.

Allora & Calzadilla

The Dallas Museum of Art showed five videos in their video installation Private Universe. One of the videos caught my eye by Allora & Calzadilla. These dynamic duo made a really interesting video of this man traveling a cold war target range on an upside down table with a boat motor. The burned out wreckage completely mirrored the absurdity of the table boat. Allora & Calzadilla are really good at taking an idea and running with it. In one performance piece, they cut a whole in a piano and played it from were the strings are located. I am still unclear how they got the piano to work. They also have done these sculptures that resemble ice formation in which a person is perched in the mix. One of my favorites is this giant sculpture of a hippopotamus with a girl reading on its back.

Robert Walden

This work is a 16in by 16in titled: ontological road map 020305.3 a latex and ink on panel made in 2005. Robert Walden makes these detail maps that seem to reference the reality of sprawl and population explosion. The images are sublime, minimal, complex, and beautiful. I think the lines could use more variations. The lines have a sameness quality that when you look close, you want more thin and thickness. However, this is a minor criticism to an over all, very interesting work. The cities feel invented, but referencing real cities. The attention to the empty space in relation to the complex cluster of lines is a good balance. I wonder where Walden will take this work forward? I ran across Walden's work while browsing Atlanta galleries. Marcia Wood Gallery caught my eye and Walden is one of their artists.

Atlanta Art

In 2001, I spent a three day intensive gallery crawl that took me all over the city. I saw several art galleries that my 2001 work might fit. But I was told by an artist, when I showed my work to her that my work was to 'edgy' for Atlanta. When I look back at my old work, I could hardly call pastel figures and faces I was making 'edgy,' more like dated. But after I had my fill of Atlanta art scene, I came to the conclusion that Atlanta was an extremely conservative art market. As in all art scenes there were pockets of contemporary happenings, but for the most part I was seeing a sea of not very experimental, innovative, or even much variation of a theme. A bright spot was the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, which had this great wall drawing of cartoony figures and text and there was an installation of a cloud built out of cotton that hung over a imaged landscape. I just browsed online an Atlanta art organization of galleries, and I once again found myself disappointed. TEW's emerging artists had some hopefuls as well as Whitespace, but many of the galleries were conservative in their choice of artists. Maybe I am not looking hard enough or in the right places. After all there is a good photography gallery Jaskson Fine Art. But then, as I was writing this article, I ran across more galleries and galleries Gallery Stokes, Get This! Gallery, and Marcia Wood Gallery. Where were these galleries when I visited in 2001. I suddenly have hope for the Atlanta art scene. Just like Santa Fe, New York City or anywhere else, I guess the majority of galleries will be conservative in nature.