Stephanie Patton’s Private Practice show continues her exploration of psychic and physical healing in padded white vinyl wall hangings, fanciful soft sculptures that evoke the convolutions of the brain or even padded cells — or maybe what might have happened had a bedding company hired Salvador Dali as a designer.
Meant to instruct in the art of attentiveness, a mandala is a visual aid used in Hindu and Buddhist meditation. In classical form, the design contains four “gates” that guard a central circle. An honest rhetorical question then: do make-your-own-mandala websites and Urban Outfitters’ mandala bedspreads undermine the significance of this mystical emblem? This isn’t to scoff at the mandala’s new pop-Zen identity, but to witness the mandala moment while trends, and the technologies that are their silent backdrop, become increasingly antithetical to its symbolism and utility is bizarre.
Born in Chattanooga, Tenn., Ted Kincaid grew up in Dallas from the third grade on. And the pattern was always the same. “I was the kid who got in trouble for drawing all the time,” says Kincaid, 47. “I would turn in papers in elementary school with drawing all over them. And somewhere in the middle of it was my homework.”
“Jesús Moroles: 30 Years of Sculpture” Exhibit at the Nave Museum in Victoria, Texas – March 21st – May 5th.
“Standing Vase with Five Flowers” by James Surls on Poydras Street near St. Charles Avenue. The Texas sculpture star’s surrealistic still-life design fits beautifully on the narrow Poydras Street median. Notice that Surls has provided each copper-green flower petal with an eye to watch the traffic crawl by. “Standing Vase with Five Flowers” is a whimsical companion for Surls’ somewhat more sinister sculpture “Me Life, Diamond and Flower,” a few blocks uptown on Camp Street outside of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
“Jesús Moroles: 30 Years of Sculpture” Exhibit at the Nave Museum in Victoria, Texas – March 21st – May 5th.
As a child growing up in East Texas, James Surls spent a lot of time making things. He didn’t call it art; it was just stuff he made because he was passionate about it. As an adult, he’s been called “one of the most important sculptors working in America today,” recognition he’s proud of but embraces with a bit of humility.
Ida Kohlmeyer’s love for her native New Orleans and in some instances her Jewishness comes out in her abstract expressionist art. The New Orleans Museum of Art is honoring her memory with “Ida Kohlmeyer: 100th Anniversary Highlights.” The exhibit features significant pieces of hers from NOMA’s permanent collection in an exhibition running through April 14.
Troy Dugas’s exhibition “The Shape of Relics” at Arthur Roger Gallery featured in “12 Must See Painting Shows: March 2013,” by Steven Zevitas, Publisher, New American Paintings
Lesley Dill’s interdisciplinary practice combines sculpture, literature and, more recently, opera. She works with text, with the material of words, the way others carve rock. We had the pleasure of attending a Buddhist retreat together at Poets’ House in Tribeca during June 2012. We bonded over our mutual love for silent walking, and devotion. Since then, we have been meeting monthly to converse about deep practice, dreaming up future performative collaborations, which can only be described as gift giving. Dill has been on the road for the past six months with several major exhibition projects. I catch her as she returns from her show, Poetic Visions: Sister Gertrude Morgan & Shimmer at the Halsey Institute in Charleston, South Carolina. She is about to receive a lifetime achievement award in printmaking from the Southern Graphics Conference International, where she will also launch a new collaborative book, I Had A Blueprint of History.