Suspending blue netting and burlap from the walls and ceiling, Eric Eley has created a transitional ocean or aerial landscape. Structurally, the installation was derived from early 1900’s wartime camouflage: this kind of  netting was historically part of a tenting system that disguised ground-based activities from aerial bombers. In Coincident Disruption the relationship has been reversed: the mottled netting obscures the sky from the ground dwellers.

During Eley’s artist talk about his show at the McKinney Ave. Contemporary, he spoke of ..read more

Here are this weekend’s gallery openings and events.

Image: Ludwig Schwarz, Untitled, 2008-2009 (detail). Oil on canvas, 72×72” (Image courtesy of Conduit Gallery)

“Illuminations” by Bruce Brainard at Gremillion & Co. Fine Art – February 16 : 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM; 2251 Vantage Street, Dallas, Tx 75207.

“Good Memories: An Exhibit of Photography by Michael Blackwell and His Students from Creative Arts Center of Dallas” at the Art Gallery in the Point, Center for Arts and Education, on the campus of C.C. ..read more

The moment one crosses the threshold of Brand 10 for the “Town and Country” exhibit, a confounding interior/exterior dilemma ensues: urban street noise ceases and you walk smack into a fence. Skirting the picket fence finds you staring at a man-made tree. Deeper within the space, a love seat, television, and back yard await. Constructing the exhibit as a microcosm of traditional suburban life, the space capitalizes on our domesticity, familiarity, and a creeping sense of displacement.

Upon entering one encounters ..read more

“It is no accident that Eugène Atget’s photographs have been likened to those of a crime scene,” wrote Walter Benjamin. Just such a combination of straight forward depiction and enigmatic narrativity can be seen in Bryan Florentin’s photographs in “Inscrutable Evidence,” at Kirk Hopper Fine Art. The exhibition includes 31 digital pigment prints, most displayed on their own but a few combined with other accessories such as a light stand or an umbrella. Most of the images depict items that ..read more

Virginia Overton’s installation on two floors of The Power Station collects tokens of a couple of specific experiences: a road trip and an elaborate opening-night party. For the artist and the participants, these are memories, while for other visitors, they are simply allusions. The difference between these two perspectives will account for a range of responses to the work.

A now-legendary pickup-truck journey through the artist’s home state of Tennessee is the origin of Chevy Deluxe (2012). This is a sky-blue ..read more

Here are this week’s gallery openings and events.

Image: From ‘Confessors,’ 8mm on Digital Video – 19m – 2010 by Michael Morris, who is opening a video exhibition at Oliver Francis Gallery.

“Sculpture” by Marko Kratohvil in Gallery A of the Cohn Drennan Contemporary Gallery – February 9 : 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM; 1107 Dragon Street, Dallas, Tx 75207.

“Portraits” by Cabe Booth at Ro2 Art at The Belmont – February 9 : 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM; 901 Fort Worth Avenue, Dallas, Tx ..read more

A twelve- by thirty-foot wall of white shirt labels, arranged in a grid and each pinned about one inch above the wall’s surface, is the dramatic opening statement in “Joseph Havel: Plus or Minus.” The woven labels hang with a slight irregularity which registers in their shadows on the wall. Unless you look closely, you won’t see the white text that reads “nothing,” embroidered into the white surface of each label. This move is echoed in another set of works ..read more

Last week, artist Shepard Fairey completed a series of murals in West Dallas and at the site of the Dallas Contemporary, which brought the artist to Dallas for the project. Fairey is perhaps most well known for his iconic “Hope” poster of Barak Obama, which became a calling card for the 2008 presidential campaign and also landed Fairey in a legal battle over copyright with the Associated Press. Fairey is used to legal controversy, not only because he has been ..read more

Los Angeles-based street artist Shepard Fairey is best known in art circles as the man who created the instantly recognizable Andre the Giant “Obey” graphic, and to the wider public as the artist who faced-off with the Associated Press over copyright laws for his use of a photo in this Barak Obama poster.

This week, Fairey’s in Dallas as part of the latest project by the Dallas Contemporary, which has commissioned five new murals from the artist that will be put up on walls around ..read more

I visited two shows last week that, by total coincidence, were each composite self-portraits of the respective artists: Michael Bise at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts in a show called Epilogues, and Michelle Rawlings at Oliver Francis Gallery in one called Empathicalism. The first was a wry, deeply thoughtful and searing look at a private life lived with the constant threat of death; the second was a self-dissecting, self-deprecating mash-up by someone who’s maybe never had anything to be afraid of ..read more

Antonio Murado’s lush, subtle paintings at Holly Johnson Gallery are made with oil on Belgian linen. Their range of pictorial effects is calibrated with a sensitivity almost painful to behold, and it’s possible to spend some time happily getting lost in the details. All seventeen works are from last year. There are three untitled works that depict bursts of floral color—part petal, part stain—scattered over broad swaths of hide-colored background; one transitional work, Black Bear, in which an inky pelt ..read more

Even if you’ve seen them only from photographs, it’s clear that the objects in Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae are stunning works of art. Their complexity practically defies description, and the range of materials is remarkable. Tearing flesh from the bone (2011), for example, is made from wood, metal, plastic, rope, found upholstery coils, goat hooves, metal leafing, pine cones, lobster legs, feathers, and epoxy. Hundley’s project is based on Euripides’ fifth-century B.C. play in which Dionysus, god of wine and fertility ..read more

Thursday’s KERA/Dallas Museum of Art panel discussion on the state of contemporary art in Dallas opened with a slide show highlighting recent and upcoming efforts of the distinguished panelists: Mark Bradford and Mark Manders at the DMA, Shepard Fairey, Rob Pruitt and Aaron Parazette at the Dallas Contemporary, shots of the studio art department in SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, and Elliott Hundley at the Nasher Sculpture Center. With five casual chairs arranged in a semicircle around a coffee table on a tan patterned carpet, the setting was business-casual (among the panel, there were two neckties, out of five possible). The following are a few notes on the discussion.

Moderator Jeff Whittington, senior producer of Think and host of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know on KERA, opened by asking the panelists, who all arrived in Dallas within the past few years, what has changed in town recently. Jeffrey Grove, senior curator of contemporary art at the DMA, observed that people from all over the world have come here. Jeremy Strick, director of the Nasher Sculpture Center, said that Dallas reminded him“of the L.A. I grew up in:  the look, the sense of possibility.” He said that impression was spurred by series of articles written by Christina Rees for Glasstire: “That intense discussion doesn’t necessarily take place in every city.” Michael Corris, chair of studio art at SMU’s Meadows School, said that Dallasites’ “enthusiasm, openness, optimism, and generosity” encouraged him to move here after twenty years in the United Kingdom.

Whittington: Do you have a civic responsibility to the art-making community? Strick: Artists are the essential, most informed, passionate audience for a museum. Peter Doroshenko, executive director of the Dallas Contemporary: We place local artists in a national and international context. Corris: We have the Free Museum of Dallas, which is my office. Our next exhibition will be a group of illustrated pamphlets on racial prejudice, made by Ad Reinhardt, Howard Sparber and others.

Whittington: Jeffrey, what is your curatorial approach? Grove: To expand the parameters, scale, and scope; to recontextualize little-seen works in the permanent collection; to balance this with the big retrospectives; to invite artists like Matt Connors and Fergus Feehily to work with the permanent collection.

Whittington:  Jeremy, you should take credit for the Nasher’s new move into contemporary art. Strick: It’s actually quite selfish: We show things that I want to see, in one of the most beautiful spaces in the world. We don’t have to work hard on selling artists on doing a show there.  Elliott Hundley was just on the phone to his New York dealer, Andrea Rosen, telling her she’d better up her game and get travertine walls.

Whittington: Peter, tell us about the outreach, communication, the new approach at the Dallas Contemporary.  Doroshenko: We’re 100% focused on artist ideas.  It’s about leaving the building, getting outside the building; not everybody will come in our door.

Whittington: You’ve all arrived on the scene in past few years. What are your impressions of where we could see improvement? What is not necessarily working? What could be done?

Corris: Artists here sometime say, “If only there were more of a market…” but I don’t think that’s the issue. We need more interlocutors for [non-market-based] relational, dialogical forms of art, that don’t need a lot of financial resources. We have Bernardo Diaz in residence at the West Dallas Community Center. LaReunion is another example. The Reading Room. Think outside the market.

Strick: There are three pillars of cultural capital: presentation (museums), consumption (collectors), and production (artists). Dallas is doing better with first two than with the third, at nurturing a community of artists. What can we do to make it easier for artists to work here? Art schools are central. Look at what John Baldessari did in L.A., or Michael Craig-Martin did in London. We need more Michel Corrises; we need to attract faculty of an international level. This costs a lot less than some other ideas.

Doroshenko: I agree. It’s about ingenuity and ideas, like the Free Museum. An art career is life-long. It’s sexier to be in the Whitney Biennial at 60 than at 26.

Grove: I agree. Educational institutions are key. There’s more attentiveness & self-criticality here than elsewhere.

Corris: It takes a while to build. Baldessari wasn’t alone at Cal Arts. The city and donors need to understand that small seed gifts are as important as high-profile big-ticket items.

Whittington [to audience]: Every dollar counts, folks. [laughter]

Whittington: What’s on your wish list? Corris: Four or five artists’ residency programs. Strick: For patrons to be as focused on programs as on buildings [applause]. Grove: A profusion of alternative spaces. Doroshenko: Better marketing.

Whittington: What’s the city’s responsibility? [Initial silence] Corris: A vibrant cultural office, concerned with something other than bricks & mortar, other than with a culture of prestige. Doroshenko: How about a cultural tax on hotel bills? A nickel changes everything [applause].

Whittington: Could Dallas become art city like New York, L.A., or London?  Grove: Is that what we want? Everyone there complains. Doroshenko: By the standards of the back-page listings in Artforum, Dallas is happening.

Audience: Why not re-institute the museum school that the DMA used to run? Grove: I’m not familiar with that history. Audience: Go to dallasarthistory.com to find out.

Audience: I went to college in Austin; the scene that you want to happen here exists there.  Corris: I’ve been to Austin and I’m not sure what you mean. There’s nothing there that we can’t do here.

Audience: What are the real icons of this city? Grove: Pollock’s Cathedral; Church’s Icebergs, the Indonesian collections.Audience: “The Stake Hitch!” [Note: Willard Spiegelman wrote about this one in May 2010.]

Audience: As cultural administrators, what’s your greatest problem? Whittington: Let’s change that to “greatest challenge.” Doroshenko: To maintain excellence on a day-in day-out basis. Corris: How to be a research institution while not being distracted by fads and while maintaining enrollment.  Strick: Transforming our public perception from that of a single-donor institution to a public resource.

***

I’d like to add a couple of brief editorial comments here.

First, none of the following institutions were mentioned by name: The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Cowboys Stadium Art Program, the Rachofsky House, the Power Station, any commercial gallery, or any specific piece of public art in Dallas. Is this indicative of something?

Second, here’s my personal vision of “success” in upcoming years: Thomas Hirschhorn at the Nasher, Ryan Trecartin at the Dallas Contemporary, an e-flux symposium at the DMA, and robust local dialogue with all of the above. Challenging, uncompromising, ambitious work has a catalytic effect, encouraging everyone who sees it to a productive response.

Here are this week’s gallery openings.

Image: Liz London, “The Sentimental Journey”, 2012, Mixed Media Collage on Board, 20 x 20 in.

“Seeking Infinity” by Liz London at the Mercantile Coffee House- January 26 : 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM; 1800 N. Main, Dallas, Tx.

“Underground 2012″ by Trayce Cochran, Kevin Obregon, Brandy Collins, Riki Johnson Atkins, Nix Johnson and many, many more at the Southside on Lamar Lofts – January 27 : 7:30 PM – 9:30 PM; 1409 South Lamar St., Dallas, Tx 75215.

“AN EVENING WITH JANE SEYMOUR” at the WISBY-SMITH FINE ART – January 27 : 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM; 500 Crescent Court, Suite 146, Dallas, Tx 75201.

A conversation with the artists of “WINTER PALETTES”; Mark Lesser, Midge Lynn, Carol Nace, Esther Ritz, and Elisabeth Schalij at the Haley-Henman Gallery – January 28 : 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM; 2335 Hardwick Street, Dallas, Tx 75208.

“Not Really There” by Benjamin Terry at RO2 Art Uptown – January 28 : 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM; 3699 McKinney Ave #310, Dallas, TX 75201.

“West Of Imagination” at the Rail Station Studios and Gallery – January 28 : 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM; 1013 15th Place, #101, Plano, Tx 75074.

“AN EVENING WITH JANE SEYMOUR” at the WISBY-SMITH FINE ART – January 28 : 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM; 500 Crescent Court, Suite 146, Dallas, Tx 75201.

Darryl Lauster’s “Of Thee I Sing” shows U.S. history, for all its rumbustious, carnivalesque quality, to be a deadly serious affair. What we might know as the old, weird America is a matter not of antiquarian curiosity, but of urgent political concern. Emphasizing the conflicts over labor, immigration, and national identity that inevitably turn violent, the story here owes more to Howard Zinn than to Ken Burns. The tone can be humorous, as in Scalp (2011) and Periwig (2010), little ..read more

“Fish and Fowl,” Steven Miller’s presentation of acrylic paintings at Conduit Gallery, is part of a characteristically bold program that also includes “Fraught, Simply Fraught with Narrative…”, a gallery of paintings by John Randall Nelson, as well as a video, Edward Ruiz’s Cityscape #1 in the project room.

Steven Miller’s landscapes (all from 2011) have an ingenuous quality; toylike ships, airplanes and trains pass by from right to left, dwarfed by much larger expanses of sea and sky. The extreme contrasts ..read more

Here are the weekend’s openings.

Image: Michele Mikesell, Moving Forward, 2012 (detail). Oil on mounted canvas; 40 x 30 inches.

“Meet The Artists’ Reception” with Dawn Waters Baker and Mark Walden at the Art Gallery in the Point, Center for Arts and Education, on the campus of C.C. Young – January 19 : 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM; 4847 West Lawther Drive, Dallas, Tx 75214.

“First Light” by Paul Fryer at the Kristy Stubbs Gallery – January 19 : 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM; 25 Highland Park ..read more

On view at the Marty Walker Gallery are fifteen of Sarah Williams’s intimately scaled, photorealistic oils on panel (all from 2011), depicting desolate nighttime corners of small-town vernacular landscapes in the artist’s home state of Missouri, places like St. Joseph, Platte City, and Salisbury. Twelve of the smaller ones (one foot square) are hung in a four-by-three grid, and three larger ones, all depicting empty carwashes, are on the gallery’s other walls. The paintings are based on the artist’s own ..read more

This fall, the Universityof Texas Press came out with a new edition of Keith Carter’s book From Uncertain to Blue, redesigned for its 25th anniversary by original designer DJ Stout with Barrett Fry. Carter and his wife traveled in 1986 and 1987 through “one hundred small Texas towns with intriguing names like Diddy Waw Diddy, Elysian Fields, and Poetry,” choosing one image to represent each town for the book. An exhibition at Photographs Do Not Bend includes 35 of these ..read more

Back when Mayor Mike Rawlings was running for the city’s top job, you may remember him mentioning that his daughter was an artist. Specifically, Rawlings brought up his daughter during the mayoral debate on the arts at the Nasher Sculpture Center where Rawlings spoke about the need to attract artists, like his daughter, who studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. That kind of  high-end chatter usually ends up focusing on big civic investments, like the Arts District. But ..read more

The centerpiece of Qiu Anxiong’s exhibition at the Crow Collection, “Animated Narratives,” is a two-part three-channel stop-motion video, The New Book of Mountains and Seas (2006-2007), which refers to an ancient Chinese text that tells of mythological creatures and faraway places. Qiu’s contemporary version of these tales addresses two complementary themes: industrialization’s threat to the global environment, and globalization’s threat to traditional Chinese culture. On the first theme, we see a variety of docile animals and mountainous landscapes, endangered by sinister ..read more

KAWS (Brian Donnelly) belongs to a generation of street artists shaped by the comparative anarchy of pre-Giuliani New York, who have benefited from the radical-chic patronage of Jeffrey Deitch. His work has been included in the canon-defining exhibitions Beautiful Losers and Art in the Streets. Having begun as a youthful graffiti tagger in Jersey City, he has since graduated to the more socially constructive and better-paying vocation of gallery artist, showing at the Los Angeles gallery of former model Honor Fraser ..read more

Rob Pruitt’s first act in the New York art world was cut short when a 1992 exhibition at Leo Castelli was universally deemed to be racially offensive, but after several years in the wilderness, he recovered, becoming a producer of accessible Fluxus-y fun and games like “101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself,” a genuine and popular “Cocaine Buffet,” and “The First Annual Art Awards,” complete with red carpet. At the Dallas Contemporary, Pruitt has two super-sized galleries full of paintings in glitter and acrylic, ..read more

Here are this weekend’s gallery openings.

Image: Sarah Williams, Business 63, 2011, oil on panel, 12 x 24 inches (at Marty Walker Gallery).

“Figurative Works” by Denny Doran and Danny Pedigo at the Charles W. Eisemann Center/ Green Mezzanine Gallery – January 6 : 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM; 2351 Performance Drive, Richardson, Tx 75082.

“Sublimation Simulacrum” by Angel Fernandez and Kit Reisch, and “The Mericle Paintings” by Cande Agular, at the Cohn Drennan Contemporary Gallery – January 7 : 6:00 PM – 8:00 ..read more

Simultaneously intimate and cerebral, Vincent Falsetta’s index cards, mounted in a grid covering two walls of the boutique-sized Reading Room, are a kind of lab notes for the artist as methodical producer. Written with a quill pen in homespun block script, they depict notes and notations ranging from experiments with form and material, to sketches of full-scale works and obscure diagrams, to diaristic observations and mental notes from daily life. (Since real index cards are not of archival quality, these are in fact custom-made simulated index cards made from Strathmore paper.)The several hundred cards on view from 2004 to 2011 are lettered and numbered to correspond with specific panel and canvas paintings from that period. Thanks to this exhibition Falsetta’s paintings, which were simultaneously on view at Conduit and 500x last month, can be seen in a whole different light. Recording what Gerhard Richter called “the daily practice of painting,” the exhibition has elements of George Maciunas’s enlightenment through schematic organization, as much as of On Kawara’s one-foot-in-front-of-the-other determination.