The chronicler of recent happenings – the critic – occupies an unfortunate place in the telling of history: immediate enough to feel as if his or her words bear significance; close enough to the events at hand to be both blind to their true scope and obscured from the real story when it is finally told. This is how I felt witnessing Christina Rees and Thomas Feulmer’s show “Modern Ruin” in the WaMu bank building that will soon no longer stand just south of the intersection of Lovers Lane and Greenville Ave. I, like so many who showed up Saturday, was taken up by the great enthusiasm of the event. As we pushed through the crowd – as thick as a frat party – stumbling upon works by a list of artists you couldn’t help but recognize as among Dallas’ current best, there was the palpable sense that this was something. Much of the work was vivid, moving, fresh, and inspired. There was a generational connect, an international flavor, and a refreshing mix of seriousness and whimsy, intelligence and play.

My favorite pieces in the show include works by Michael Corris, Richard Patterson, Margaret Meehan, Noah Simblist, and Cam Schoepp. Michael Corris’ simple, overlooked series of framed text images juxtaposed excerpts from a work about an art critic / art historian with repeated phrases in different typeface. Their shape referenced the tiny certificates that adorn the common office environment, their mundanity made evident by the college-aged woman who was leaning up against the frames, sipping her Corona while I tried to view them, absolutely oblivious to the roll of the frames on the wall as art objects. This, I believe, was part of Corris’ play. The work revealed itself only when read, and in that, it wasn’t so much the sense of the words that made the piece’s meaning, but their presentation. On the left of each frame, an abstracted phrase was repeated in different type face so that it resembled a sample font card. To the right, unfinished statements about an art critic – criticizing the critic, as it were. Without getting too lost in the blooming of meaning made ready by Corris’ potent associations, there was in this work an ironic take on the WaMu show itself: the conceptual act as containing art meaning, while simultaneously reconstructing thought to masquerade as art object.

Richard Patterson’s contribution departed from his usual cross-genre, self-considering paintings. Patterson simply placed two vintage motorcycles in a back office, and in the bank’s break room, he projected two videos – taken from YouTube – one consisting of vintage street photography from 1950s London, the second a demonstration video by a jazz drummer. All these pieces were deposits of sorts, yet deposits that pointed to the absurdity of ideas of ownership, while simultaneously confounding the contemporary bank form as container. Yet the video did much more than that: it culled our assumptions of urbanism, spoke to a longing for urban association, and made strangely present the banality of contemporary urban form. If the franticness of contemporary life is mad and intense, as the drum and street in Patterson’s piece suggest, than life in Dallas is post-madness, that is, disturbingly out-of-sync.

Margaret Meehan’s work was perhaps the most immediately satisfying: blinds pulled from a window and shaped to the form of a bear (snicker, snicker). It was like a Phoenix rising from carpet, an un-natural Andy Goldsworthy, the unnerving remnants of a mad obsession. In the bank’s entryway, Noah Simblist painted a black splotch with white stenciled letters baring in plain English the full-impact of irresponsible lending. This was Berlin Wall-style graffiti, raw and unsettling in its brute honesty. Cam Schoepp strung an irrigation system above the ceiling tiles, causing seven occasions of dripping from ceiling – turning the bank into a decrepit ruin before its time.

But while much of the art was inspired and meaty, the WaMu show possessed a feeling of potency that conveyed the sense that the event itself was what was truly at stake here – that this show realized a new way of articulating what our particular place has to say to the world. Most people who live in Dallas, or even more remotely, in the region called North Texas, had no idea about what happened in that WaMu bank Saturday and Sunday. Some heard of it and raised their eyebrows, recognizing its novelty. A great minority of this city’s inhabitants attended the show. In that broadest context, the WaMu show reveals itself as one of those great quiet moments in the history of a place, an overlooked instance of coalescing, articulating, and deepening of self. It was something so perfectly expressed and so uniquely ours. In our fretting about our significance as place, our doubts about our relevance to the larger conversation, a happening gave form to our anxious breath. It was, as articulated in the powerfully simple metaphor of Cam Schoepp’s ceiling irrigation installation, the drip-dropping of erosion, rainfall making ready the flood plain.

Thomas Feulmer as astronaut, depositing dollar bills into the never-used WaMu bank building on Greenville. (Photo: Peter Simek)