Monthly Archives: January 2014

“The Most Successful Dallas Artist Ever,” D Magazine

David Bates bounces around a storage room crammed with his art at Talley Dunn Gallery. He’s a bit frazzled, for good reason. It’s November, and he has less than three months to prepare for one of the biggest exhibitions of his life, a retrospective that will be mounted simultaneously at the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Read More

“Aquaflora,” featuring Allison Stewart at the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art

An exhibition consisting of the work of six 21st cenutry artists whose work represents a landscape of layered shadows, water, petals, limbs, vines, floating leaves, and biomorphic shapes that can all be found in nature. The colorful abstracts were created by artists Judy Pfaff and Jasmina Danowski, New York, Carlyle Wolfe, Oxford MS, Suzanna Fields, Virginia, Bassmi Ibrahim, Florida, and Allison Stewart, New Orleans.

Read More

“Stephanie Patton: Level at the McNay Museum,” McNay Art Museum

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Stephanie Patton’s art crosses the realms of photography, sculpture, painting, installation, performance, video, audio, and text. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and a Master of Fine Arts in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also studied vocal and comedic performance through the New School, Upright Citizens Brigade, and Gotham Writers’ Workshop, all in New York. Her work is often humorous in nature and frequently investigates aspects of human emotion.

Read More

“Gene Koss’s New Work,” New Orleans Art Review

LIKEABLE. GENE KOSS’S work is likeable. And I like looking at his work. Seeing how earlier themes continue to evolve, what new variations on the theme of, for example, Disc Drawings, have been developed, what new huge piece has taken form, and what new ideas have been added too the artist’s repertoire, as some idea are revisited and renewed, while others are new. This new exhibition at the Arthur Roger Gallery is no exception. Especially interesting is to see the new large work that the artist has conceived, Line Fence in this exhibit. Working with cast glass as his primary medium, which he often combines with various and sundry other materials and found objects, Koss’s work challenges whatever reservations one may have, with respect to a medium conventionally associated with utilitarian objects, about the viability of glass as a material for conceptual art. Combine Koss’s wit, expressed in titles evoking amusing associations that offer multiple paths for approaching the work, with the artist’s use of glass in ways unexpected by those unacquainted with its potential, and the confident craftsmanship of the mature artist produces work that represents a confluence of formal strength, humorous associations, and syntheses of multiple historical antecedents.

Read More

James Drake: Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness

Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness, James Drake’s eleventh exhibition with the gallery, features a collection of the artist’s “red” drawings as well as a grouping of glass sculpture. The pastel drawings continue to reveal the renowned artist’s method and deliberation. The subjects, always personal, are often flecked with faint notations and markings, on paper consumed by the process, sometimes pieced together with exposed tape.

Read More

Holton Rower: Viscous Resin Extruding From The Trunk

This second exhibition with New York-based artist Holton Rower includes his remarkable “Pour Paintings” along with a unique body of work titled “Focus paintings.” Holton Rower, who has been referred to as a “chemist and sculptor of paint,” is renowned for the incredible color combinations he achieves which can be stunningly psychedelic and hypnotic.

Read More

“Reflections on Water,” New Orleans Art Review

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: IMMACULATE surfaces, varied lines and shapes, contrasts and harmonies of color, rhythms and textures evoking an elusive sense of the familiar, of mystery, wonder, and delight in the interplay between precision and ambiguity, abstract patterns, designs, and suggestions of the representational with the possibility of evolving into the beautiful, the sublime, and the merely interesting that, as photography, challenges Benjamin’s lament of the destruction of aura ‘in the age of mechanical reproduction’. At first the exhibit seems a visual extravaganza without any apparent unifying theme, a polysemous conflation of works by different artists, even though the title clearly states that these are photographs from Edward Burtynsky’s Water Series. Slowly one focuses on individual photographs, responding to each on its own terms, and only then developing some understanding of visual and conceptual interrelationships within and among through shared associations and significant differences as the overwhelming initial reaction (if they were not contained within the solid black frames they might fly away) evolves into a sense of coherence.

Read More